I was with him throughout the whole process: writing the books, finishing them and then the horrible disappointment when nobody was interested. You have no idea what it’s like, Susan, being rejected, those letters that turn up in the post with six or seven lines dismissing the work of a whole year.
In just about every other book I can think of, we’re chasing on the heels of our heroes – the spies, the soldiers, the romantics, the adventurers. But we stand shoulder to shoulder with the detective.
He had entered a veritable miasma of evil, and harm, in the worst possible way, was to come to us all too soon.
As Leo had said to me, none of us knew what our crime was, but reading the book was certainly a punishment. The.
Agnes Carmichael, who turns out to be the killer, hasn’t spoken a word – hardly surprising, as she’s a deaf mute.
But that’s how it is when you’re a kid, isn’t it? You have all these dreams and, unless you’re lucky, they never amount to anything.
Alex felt the bullets pass over his shoulder and heard a scream as one of the other guards was hit. Well, that made one less anyway!
When you are in his sort of business – now my business – you are not defined by who you are but who you are not.
Give him his due: this is a man who has always faced his fears square on, whether they be a deadly swamp adder, a hideous poison that might drive you to insanity or a hell-hound set loose on the moors. Holmes has done many things that are, frankly, baffling – but he has never run away.
Fangio had once said: ‘You should never think of a car as a piece of metal. It’s a living being with a heart that beats. It can feel happy or sad. It all depends on how you treat it.
I’m not going to get any.
I prefer to use my name from your world.′ he said. ‘I’m just Matt’.
Robert Pinkerton used to say that a lie was like a dead coyote. The longer you leave it, the more it smells.
And what of the vicar? The word sat at the top of the page, underlined. That would suggest some sort of operation involving religion, but frankly, church was the last place you would expect to find anyone from Scorpia.
Swear words in books have always struck me as lazy and over-familiar. But the ‘c’ word is more than that. It’s used by sour, frustrated men, nearly always about women. It’s a word full of misogyny – crudely offensive.
In fact, Fraser had often heard the detective remark that there was no such thing as a coincidence. There was a chapter in The Landscape of Criminal Investigation where he had expressed the belief that everything in life had a pattern and that a coincidence was simply the moment when that pattern became briefly visible.
I want to be buried in a cardboard coffin.
When your business is death, the only death you should never consider is your own.
Fraser had the immediate thought that his was a man whom it would be easy to dislike. He did not just arouse antipathy; he almost seemed to cultivate it.
From my experience, law firms are always quiet places. Maybe it’s because they make words so expensive that they tend to use them sparingly among themselves.