The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the...
The fear of today, he said, always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a posi...
The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face.‘What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?’‘There are ladies present.
Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that bri...
She went out slowly. The way she did it hadn’t been learned at business college.
She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded.
She had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blond, that hasn't enough life in it to be ginger, and isn't clean enough to be grey.
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
Police business, he said almost gently, is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we...
No trial, no sensational headlines, no mud-slinging just to sell newspapers without the slightest regard for truth or fair play or for the feelings of innocent people.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at...
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.
I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
I did it for you. I took in a pint of bourbon with me. She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare...
Her hand was small and had shape, not the usual bony garden tool you see on women nowadays.
He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job.She brightened up very suddenly. Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married.I guess he forgot, I s...
He looked up rather sadly. So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their...
He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.
Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act
Got any good ideas, soldier? Lots of them. Somebody gunned Geiger. Somebody got gunned by Geiger, who ran away. Or it was two other fellows. Or Geiger was running a cult and made blood sacrifices in f...