detective Quotes

“I was wearing my powder-blue suit... I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

“Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights...”

“About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door.”

“The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming down to Las Olindas that evening to talk to him. That was how smart I was.”

“That’s what happens when you’re a detective. The people around you get hurt. And you hurt people, without meaning to. You have to keep secrets you’re not sure you should.”

“We’ll have time to do a little sleuthing before closing time. Let’s go!”

“It should not surprise us to find in the one man the perfection of two such lines of activity if we remember that the daily press was already beginning to transform itself and to become what it is to-day- the gazette of crime.”

Bill looked at him eagerly. “I say, are you being the complete detective?” “Well, I wanted a new profession,” smiled the other. “What fun! I mean,” he corrected himself apologetically, “one oughtn’t to say that, when there’s a man dead in the house, and one’s host—” He broke off a little uncertainly, and then rounded off his period by saying again, “By Jove, what a rum show it is. Good Lord!”

“Of course it’s very hampering being a detective, when you don’t know anything about detecting, and when nobody knows that you’re doing detection, and you can’t have people up to cross-examine them, and you have neither the energy nor the means to make proper inquiries; and, in short, when you’re doing the whole thing in a thoroughly amateur, haphazard way.”