British Crime Quotes

#1. Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.

Mark Billingham

#2. British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography.

Lee Child

#3. Have you ever been in jail, mate? Whatever you did in your life, nothing can be compared to a single day in jail.

Stefania Mattana

#4. The police still found this earlier omission in my statement hard to understand, but they weren't the ones who had been the victim of the Wests, how could they have understood?

Stephen Richards

#5. Mr Benz, the parapet of an Italian bridge doesn't look like the proper place for you, said Chase.

Stefania Mattana

#6. As a child, I was attractive to paedophiles. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was 13 years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there, but I had got over that episode in my life.

Stephen Richards

#7. I always thought of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a 'jinx' and I was 'jinxed', or so I thought!

Stephen Richards

#8. In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

John Le Carre

#9. The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.

Bill Bryson

#10. Chase stooped to inspect it. Angelo handed him a latex glove, which took Chase three attempts to pull on before tearing it. He had never had a good relationship with latex. He tried two more, tearing each one of those too.

Stefania Mattana

#11. Please don't complicate the investigation by offering an explanation that might actually be true.
--Marjorie Branell-Markson

Jennifer A. Girardin

#12. Rose West was starting 10 life sentences with no prospect of ever being released, Fred West had gone to hell, I had got my life back and the media circus had moved on to the next big scoop.

Stephen Richards

#13. All what stuck in my mind was what the judge had said, and that was during the assault there must have been some passive co-operation on my part. Added to the fact that the Wests had only been fined £25 each for each of the charges against them, a total of £100 was all that I was worth.

Stephen Richards

#14. The wheel turns for all, caro Chase. It's the karma effect, Giulia cried, aping Ilenia. She could have never imagined that her words would become prophetic so soon.

Stefania Mattana

#15. Lawyers aren't the most popular people, Miss Allen ... - Murder in Hand

Celia Conrad

#16. I hate unbreakable alibis--they are usually the first to crack.
--Hugo Anstead

Jennifer A. Girardin

#17. Paoletta turned to him with a dark face.
You'd better watch out, Chase. He's passed over to the evil side.

Stefania Mattana

#18. I had forgotten the fact that I had been raped, something no one would understand, how could anyone forget something as traumatic as being raped?

Stephen Richards

#19. Once you'd been with Freddie, you wouldn't go anywhere else.' (How true this was to prove.) This incessant bragging by Fred West was at best, annoying and at worst, sickening. According to him, he was God's gift to women.

Stephen Richards

#20. It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl's boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.

Stefania Mattana

#21. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

Stephen Richards

#22. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.

Tim Pat Coogan

#23. All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#24. Death by misadventure sounds like a hopeful possibility.
--Marjorie Branell-Markson

Jennifer A. Girardin

#25. Moriston House is really quite beautiful. No wonder everyone wants to be murdered here.
--Roberta "Bobbie" Aldridge

Jennifer A. Girardin

#26. Chase rushed after her in pursuit. The woman lost one of her high-heeled shoes and Chase took advantage of her lack of balance to tackle her. They crashed to the ground.
"Why are you running from the ball, Cinderella?" he asked.

Stefania Mattana

#27. I rely on my iPad for on-the-go entertainment. I stock it with TV shows, like 'Parks and Recreation' and the British version of 'The Office.' I'm reading a Charles Manson biography on it too, since I'm weirdly into true crime.

Phoebe Tonkin

#28. Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

Elliott Colla

#29. Just calm down and think, sir. Think. Where is your wife?

Stefania Mattana

#30. There was a brown substance inside and Chase had no doubt: it was heroin. Only a tiny amount, but very pure. - Cutting Right to the Chase Vol.2

Stefania Mattana

#31. That high pitch scream emitted by Rose made me wince! Her ear bursting howls would stun me into silence as much as it silenced the eldest child in their home, eight-year-old Anna-Marie.

Stephen Richards

#32. At 31 years of age, Fred West was a big man trapped in a little man's body. He thought himself to be a gynecologist and Warren Beatty look-a-like all rolled into one ... the surgeon and the stud.

Stephen Richards

#33. The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.

Antony Beevor

#34. I left the court feeling sure that Rose West would never walk free again. That thought made me happy.

Stephen Richards

#35. I knew I hadn't been the most innocent of victims, but I didn't deserve this. DC Smith stood and grinned at me as he thanked me and left the room, leaving me to cry and to ponder on his not very adept handling of the situation.

Stephen Richards