Private Detective Sayings

#1. Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.

Robert Galbraith

#2. Mars and Venus are at it again. This time, Hephaestus is standing by with a private detective, a photographer, and a lawyer.

Mason Cooley

#3. The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.
(Letter, April 19, 1951)

Raymond Chandler

#4. Nolly Wolfstan, private detective, had the teeth of a god and a face so unfortunate that it argued convincingly against the existence of a benign deity.

Dean Koontz

#5. No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection."
"But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there.

Douglas Adams

#6. I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.

Errol Morris

#7. There was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe
the only lady private detective in Botwana
brewed tea. And three mugs
one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need?

Alexander McCall Smith

#8. You're a cop aren't you?
A private detective.
Isn't that the same thing?
The cops guarantee order. All I do is uncover disorder.

Manuel Vazquez Montalban

#9. No visible scars. Hair dark brown, some gray. Eyes brown. Height six feet, one half inch. Weight about one ninety. Name Philip Marlowe. Occupation private detective.

Raymond Chandler

#10. I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous.

Douglas Adams

#11. I've actually published two compilations, if only barely. Hire a private detective and possibly you'll be able to locate them. One was called 'Violent Screen,' and the other 'Now Playing at the Valencia.' Bantam and Simon and Schuster.

Stephen Hunter

#12. This is the last time I ever get a private detective off the internet.

Sophie Kinsella

#13. I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.

Shirley Jackson

#14. Why, he's Hercule Poirot! You know who I mean - the private detective. They say he's done the most wonderful things - just like detectives do in books.

Agatha Christie

#15. Even as I was writing 'Empire State,' I knew there were more adventures for the main character, private detective Rad Bradley, to have. I also knew that the world was far larger than what I'd presented in book one.

Adam Christopher

#16. Eli Hofstadter, Private Detective and Investigative services. I find

Callie Hart

#17. Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.

B.V. Lawson

#18. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

B.V. Lawson

#19. P.I. Cassie Cruise--You don't have to like her, but you damn well better respect her

S.L. Ellis

#20. It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be
these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain
battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.

C.S. Woolley

#21. Tailing someone is like maintaining a relationship: you keep at it until they give you the slip, or until they confirm everything you suspect them of.

Mark Crutchfield

#22. My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear ("Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!") signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there'd be real hell to pay.

Ed Lynskey

#23. Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat.

Ed Lynskey

#24. Ever since he could remember, he'd people-watched to pass time. When he was younger, everyone told him it was rude. He hadn't stopped; merely perfected his technique.

Laura Oliva

#25. He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.

B.V. Lawson

#26. A woman could do a lot of crazy things for a pair of fine-looking dimples.

Amy Andrews

#27. MacMillian steepled his fingers on the head of his cane. Anticipation rose in his chest. Lena and Cyrus Alan might have an advantage over him when it came to hunting ghosts, but this was where he excelled. This part of the game was all about patterns. He saw patterns. Always had.

Laura Oliva

#28. From Chapter 1:
The main rub was the lack of RnR and I burned out. Three years and three stripes later, I ejected from the MP Corps, vowing I'd never do police or criminal investigative work again. Instead, I returned home when I should've learned better.

Ed Lynskey

#29. Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.

Andrew Vachss

#30. What was she doing here? Private detectives were for insecure housewives, parents of troubled teens, bent old ladies who'd forgotten where they parked. She was none of the above. She was a sane, stable, capable adult. Yet here she was.
Desperate times, and all that.

Laura Oliva

#31. There was nothing like the cold, heavy steel of a gun, the soft moan of an appreciative woman or the sharp burn of a good single malt to make a man grateful to be alive. Tonight, with his gun gone and his sex life a wasteland, Dash had to settle for whiskey.

Amy Andrews

#32. Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.

Murder in the Dog Park

Jill Yesko

#33. Well, strap my ass to a flagpole and hoist it skyward' an all to familiar voice declared.

Keri Arthur

#34. Blood always excites me.

Jonathan Latimer

#35. Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

Otto Penzler

#36. Our job involves looking at things that people usually can't see.

Fuminori Nakamura

#37. You do know I'm not psychic, right?'
Dash looked down at her. 'Joy...you do know that normal people don't see ghosts, right?

Amy Andrews