Quote of the Day

...you're much more likely to get people's cooperation if you take them into your confidence.

Inspector Wilkins

The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy (p. 156)

by James Anderson

Quote of the Day

IW: And, Jack, as soon as it's light, you and Cockerill take a look round outside.

JL: What for, sir?

IW: Oh. Well, footprints chiefly, I suppose. But anything out of the ordinary. Detect, man, detect!

Inspector Wilkins, Jack Leather

The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy (p. 125)

by James Anderson

Quote of the Day

...first, my lord, I'd like to have a word with the rest of your guests and particularly with Mr. and Mrs. Peabody. It won't serve any really useful purpose, but I find it makes people feel better if they talk to the officer in charge of the case. Perhaps I can cheer them up a bit--convince them we're on the ball, as they put it. But then, Americans are always supposed to think English policemen are wonderful anyway aren't they.

Inspector Wilkins

The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy (p. 123)

by James Anderson

Quote It! Saturday

Of course, this blog is devoted to quotes...but there is an awesome meme over at Freda's Voice called Quote It! and I can't resist joining up every Saturday. Here's the scoop from Freda:

Welcome to Quote It! Please feel free to grab the button and create your own post. Add as many quotes as you wish, from whomever you wish. It can even be lyrics to a song. Just tell us who it is. Anonymous is welcome too.

So, here's today's quote with a link-up to Freda's Voice:

...don't expect me to solve anything. I'm not sanguine, not sanguine at all.

Inspector Wilkins

The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy (p 122)

by James Anderson

Quotes of the Week

Yow. I've really fallen down on the job this week. Blame it on the holidays. Here's my catch-up post for the laste several days:


Tuesday's Quote (Nov 23):


After a trying day at the office it is always a mistake to start an argument before you've had at least one drink.


She Shall Have Murder (p. 27)
by Delano Ames




Wednesday's Quote (Nov 24):


An amateur detective can only afford to behave like a gentleman in his spare time.


Dagobert Brown
She Shall Have Murder (p. 176)
by Delano Ames




Thursday's Quote (Nov 25):


D: They're good enough children and they have at least one virtue.
C: Indeed they have not, not one. It is a great disappointment.
D: They are none of them suffering from the distressing delusion that they are express trains.
C: That is something to be thankful for, certainly. But no positive good replaces the train. The virtue is negative.
MC: So many virtues are.


Dr. Davie; Dr. Courtney; Mrs. Courtney
Death's Bright Dart (pp. 15-6)
by V. C. Clinton-Baddeley




Friday's Quote (Nov 26):


Your mind seems to jump around in the most unregulated way, Jane.


Dagobert Brown
She Shall Have Murder (p. 178)
by Delano Ames

Quote of the Day

We are nameless. In each hand we hold a story. Between them, between the right story and what's left, our hearts are the wedge. You know this is true.

The Last Legends of Earth (p. 8)

by A. A. Alatansio

Quote of the Day

Mourning is not forgetting....It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But process is like all human births--painful, long, and dangerous.

The Tiger in Smoke (pp. 41-2)

by Margery Allingham

Quote It! Saturday

Of course, this blog is devoted to quotes...but there is an awesome meme over at Freda's Voice called Quote It! and I couldn't resist joining up every Saturday. Here's the scoop:

Welcome to Quote It! Please feel free to grab the button and create your own post. Add as many quotes as you wish, from whomever you wish. It can even be lyrics to a song. Just tell us who it is. Anonymous is welcome too. So, here's today's quote with a link-up to Freda's Voice:

It was a cordiality based, apparently, on complete non-comprehension cemented by a deep mutual respect for the utterly unknown. No two men saw less eye-to-eye and the result was unexpected harmony, as if a dog and a fish had mysteriously became friends and were proud of the other's dissimilarity to himself.

The Tiger in Smoke (p. 41)

by Margery Allingham

Quote of the Day

I am perfectly capable of being shocking without Margaret's assistance.

Emily Aston

And Only to Deceive (p. 8)

by Tasha Alexander

Quote of the Day

AC: I suppose what other people think matters?
GB: Of course it matters. It becomes the truth. What everybody thinks is the truth.

Albert Campion, Gina Brande
Flowers for the Judge (p. 135)
by Margery Allingham


[And can I just say that is one bizarre cover? I couldn't resist putting it up, though.]

Quote of the Day

I am not one of those intellectual sleuths, I am afraid. My mind does not work like an adding machine, taking the facts neatly one by one and doing the work as it goes along. I am more like the bloke with the sack and spiked sticks. I collect all the odds and ends I can see and turn out the bag at the lunch hour.

Albert Campion about self
The Case of the Late Pig (p. 33)
by Margery Allingham

Quotes of Today & Yesterday

Here I am...behind again. So, I've got quotes for both Monday and Tuesday.

Monday's Quote:

I had always wondered why people want to be rich and famous. If you could be rich and anonymous, that would be fun. It takes time and effort to be famous, and if they offer you fame without the money, don't take it. It's a scam.

never have your dog stuffed (and other things I've learned) [p. 169]

by Alan Alda

Tuesday's Quote:

I never faint. Fainting is the result of affectation or too-tight stays. I will succumb to neither.

And Only to Deceive (p.3)

by Tasha Alexander

Quote of the Day

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I'm willing to let them change me, something happens between us that's more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works too.

never have your dog stuffed (and other things I've learned) [p. 37]

by Alan Alda

Quote It! Saturday

Of course, this blog is devoted to quotes...but I recently discovered this Saturday meme over at Freda's Voice called Quote It! Here's the scoop:

Welcome to Quote It! Please feel free to grab the button and create your own post. Add as many quotes as you wish, from whom ever you wish. It can even be lyrics to a song. Just tell us who it is. Anonymous welcome too. So, here's today's quote with a link up to Freda's Voice:



It is about as easy to describe Whippet as it is to describe water or a sound in the night. Vagueness is not so much his characteristic as his entity. I don't know what he looks like, except that presumably he has a face, since it would be an omission I should have been certain to observe.

The Case of the Late Pig (p. 9)
by Margery Allingham

Quote of the Day

My father was a little disappointed that I would put so much effort into my obsession and not his. "If I had aked you to work that hard, you wouldn't have done it," he said. Well, sure. Other people's obsessions are boring.

never have your dog stuffed (and other things I've learned) [p. 37]

by Alan Alda

Quote of the Day

Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.

Maurice Treherne
The Abbot's Ghost
by Louisa May Alcott

Quote of the Day

"There'll have been a reason," murmured Sloan. That was one thing experience had taught him. There was a reason behind most human actions. Not necessarily sound, of course, but a reason all the same.

The Stately Home Murder (p. 55)
by Catherine Aird

Quote of the Day

"It is a truth universally acknowledged," said the doctor dryly, "that a middle-aged woman in possession of a fortune will attract people anxious to part her from it.

Some Die Eloquent

by Catherine Aird

Quote of the Day

Faces were deceptive things. Until you considered them all impartially as masks you couldn't really be said to be a policeman. Then you knew you had first to get behind the mask....

A Late Phoenix (p. 28)

by Catherine Aird

Quote of the Day

Things should be let alone with, that's what I say. I don't hold with disturbing things that have always been the way they are and I don't mind who knows it.

Farebrother
Last Respects (p. 55)
by Catherine Aird

Quote It! Saturday

Of course, this blog is devoted to quotes...but I just discovered a Saturday meme over at Freda's Voice called Quote It! So, here's today's quote with a link up to Freda's Voice:




Horace [was] never averse to a little bit of gossip with anyone--he collected sundry information in the same way that some men collected postage stamps.

Last Respects (p. 37)
by Catherine Aird

Quote of the Day

I needed this one for Halloween....

Horror in those days had been something weird and strange. Now she was older she knew that horror was merely something familiar gone sadly wrong...that was where true horror lay.

Last Respects (p. 20)
by Catherine Aird

Quote of the Day

...fishermen never hurried. It was a universal truth. You couldn't catch fish if you hurried. The fish didn't like it; they stopped feeding at once. Like primitive man, fish equated hurry with danger and either kept their heads down or made off. In Horace Boller's considered opinion civilised man had a lot to learn about hurrying.

Last Respects (p. 1)
by Catherine Aird

Quote(s) of the Day(s)

Two for one today....

Tuesday's Quote:

...all good policemen were by nature connoisseurs of the unusual, not to say the improbable.

A Going Concern (p. 101)

by Catherine Aird

Wednesday's Quote:

While farmers lunch early and clergy at exactly one-fifteen, policmen on duty lunch not at all.

Henrietta Who? (p. 90)

by Catherine Aird