Detective Noir Crime Quotes

I like two men, two guns that kind of thing, I don't do subtle. ~ C.S. Boag

It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood. ~ Ross Macdonald

There is always a unique atmosphere in the car when you drive through the City with a dead body in the back. ~ Steen Langstrup

The room buzzes around us but we're fixed on each other, engaged in a battle of who can deprecate me more. She obviously doesn't believe such a man can exist and keeps at it, prodding and goading me like a fisherman harpooning an already beached whale. ~ John Bowie

Lies are so suburban...But murder is nice and clean. ~ Carole Morin

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

I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum ~ Dennis Lehane

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps. ~ Andrew Vachss

A woman could do a lot of crazy things for a pair of fine-looking dimples. ~ Amy Andrews

I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it. ~ Sara Sheridan

I cadged a complimentary green matchbook with a gold bird icon from the Bell canning jar. Later we'd use the matches to light our spliffs. My fingertips tapped the stem to the gizmo that dinged a bell. Nobody came out. Wrong signal, so I did two bell rings. No response prompted me to tap out a series of bell rings. ~ Ed Lynskey

Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity. ~ Christopher G. Moore

When you're reading a good noir, the shocks and twists have a way of feeling deja vu-like, as if you saw them coming, but hoped the characters would take a left turn ... not answer the phone, not sleep with that woman, not sell drugs to those cops ... but knew they would. It would have been wrong if they didn't, and the real surprise can be that you care about someone you know is in for hell. You relate to them, even when their hell is so much bigger than your own. But we're all going to die, and we all make mistakes.
The best noir stories make you forget plot entirely by giving you characters that feel so well-realised you can't look away as they fall. ~ Ed Brubaker

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Dastardly devious, cleverly conceived, and just a whole lot of fun to read, DEATH PERCEPTION is Lee Allen Howard on fire and at his finest. Rife with winsome weirdness, it's like the mutant stepchild of Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King, mixing a truly unique paranormal coming-of-age story with a quirky cast of offbeat noir characters into a novel that's simply unforgettable ... and hilariously original. A supernatural crime story, blazing with creative intrigue ... don't miss it. ~ Michael Arnzen

It's only crazy if we fail. ~ Henry Mosquera

Ah ha!' the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. 'The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first! ~ Clare Havens

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. ~ Raymond Chandler

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story. ~ Catherynne M Valente

The struggle doesn't last long; it's too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it's easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeer's collar.
Tereshko is trembling with his anger. 'Now him again!' he protests, as though at an injustice. 'All they do is die and then get up and walk around again! What'sa matter, you guys using spitballs for slugs? No, don't kick at him, that'll never do it - I think the guy has nine lives!' ("Jane Brown's Body") ~ Cornell Woolrich

The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet.

Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Four, fourteen, forty - there seemed no end to them, no bottom. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guard-rail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now, endless miles above him; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is! See him down there?" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him, like avenging thunder from on high. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight.

Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining.

Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs suddenly ended, he'd ~ Cornell Woolrich

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly.

I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear.

'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.'

'Wh-where are talking from?'

'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.'

The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass ~ Cornell Woolrich

Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm. ~ Tom Vater

After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber. ~ Brian Azzarello

There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Don't make a career out of underestimating me." - Claire de Haven ~ James Ellroy

The hotel was guest-friendly with hourly rates and had enough room to swing a cat, if it were a small cat and you wanted to swing it. ~ James A. Newman

His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I hit it. I hit it often. ~ Carroll John Daly

That crap about doing something with your life are luxury problems. People like us have to play by a different rules.
#ShadowofSadd #Books ~ Steen Langstrup

You ever choke a man out with his own shirt?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"A yes or no one. ~ Todd Morr

I open the toilet door and step out, my internal fire re-stoked, ready to face my demons, fight if need be and win. I'm raging, focused like a jungle warrior after his second bowl of tiger-cock soup. ~ John Bowie

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. ~ Raymond Chandler

You just hang in there, boy, hang in with that apprenticeship of yours, do you hear me? You are lucky they would even take someone like you. You're a child of the slums. A ragtag. On top of that, you're a whining piece of shit. Nobody will ever do anything for you. Do you understand what I'm saying? They'll let you starve to death, no problem. Nobody is going to cry on your grave.
Poul-Erik's Mother
The Informer by Steen Langstrup ~ Steen Langstrup

Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing. ~ Barry Graham

That pistol I gave you is a piece of crap. You can't hit anything with it, not at that distance."
Staring at her with tears in his blinking eyes, he says, "I did."
Conversation between Alis K and Willy
The Informer ~ Steen Langstrup

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. ~ Raymond Chandler

For my money, noir boils down to bleak humanism – or, to put it more plainly: shit options, bad decisions, and dire
consequences. The difference between Greek tragedy and noir ain't the height of the fall, but the reason: those who fall in Greek tragedy do so because they're destined to; those who fall in noir choose to their damn selves.

In short, free will's a bitch.
But regardless of whose definition you go with, you'll notice something's lacking: namely, any mention of genre. That's because for as much as noir's assumed to be a subset of crime fiction, it's more vibe than subgenre. And, as many an enterprising modern writer seems intent on proving, that vibe is one that plays just as well with fantasy and science fiction as it does with crime. ~ Chris Holm