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571f7d7
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The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
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detective
mystery
crime
novel
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Arthur Conan Doyle; Corrections And Editor Edgar W. Smith; Illustrators |
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58b864a
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"You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?" It will not." If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me." I, also M. Ratchett." What's wrong with my proposition?" Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said."
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murder
fiction
express
orient
hercule
poirot
detective
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Agatha Christie |
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fe91aca
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At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.
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murder
fiction
express
orient
hercule
poirot
detective
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Agatha Christie |
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6a80bec
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They wouldn't tell Scipio how much of the counterfeit cash was left since, as Riccio put it, 'You're a detective now, after all.
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counterfeit
detective
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Cornelia Funke |
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dbfbba6
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Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.
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love
reconciliation
detective
noir
mystery
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Michael Chabon |
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7f38acf
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...Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us - deader'n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame. The experts are matching 'em up now. I guess he wishes he'd stayed and talked to us.
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detective
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Dashiell Hammett |
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18bae26
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He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.
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dashiel-hammett
detective
detective-fiction
detective-noir
detective-novel
detective-novels
detective-stories
ernest-hemingway
f-scott-fitzgerald
sartre
francois-truffaut
hart-crane
jean-paul-sartre
mystery-and-crime-drama
mystery-suspense
mystery-thriller
raymond-chandler
truffaut
crime-thriller
crime-fiction
noir
noir-fiction
detectives
mystery
crime
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Barry N. Malzberg |
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fcd6a4c
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The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.
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detective
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Ben Aaronovitch |
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2eb647c
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He walked back to St George's-in-the-East, which in his mind he had now reduced to a number of surfaces against which the murderer might have leaned in sorrow, desperation or even, perhaps, joy. For this reason it was worth examining the blackened stones in detail, although he realised that the marks upon them had been deposited by many generations of men and women. It was now a matter of received knowledge in the police force that no human being could rest or move in any area without leaving some trace of his or her identity; but if the walls of the Wapping church were to be analysed by emission spectroscopy, how many partial or residual spectra might be detected? And he had an image of a mob screaming to be set free as he guided his steps towards the tower which rose above the houses cluttered around Red Maiden Lane, Crab Court and Rope Walk.
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clues
detective
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Peter Ackroyd |
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32b8373
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Generally he knew by instinct the likely length of an investigation, but on this occasion he did not: as he fought to get his breath he suddenly saw himself as others must see him, and he was struck by the impossibility of his task. The event of the boy's death was not simple because it was not unique and if he traced it backwards, running the time slowly in the opposite direction (but did it have a direction?), it became no clearer. The chain of causality might extend as far back as the boy's birth, in a particular place and on a particular date, or even further into the darkness beyond that. And what of the murderer, for what sequence of events had drawn him to wander by this old church? All these events were random and yet connected, part of a pattern so large that it remained inexplicable. He might, then, have to invent a past from the evidence available - and, in that case, would not the future also be an invention? It was as if he were staring at one of those puzzle drawings in which foreground and background create entirely different images: you could not look at such a thing for long.
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murder
detective
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Peter Ackroyd |
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30b6212
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It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience.
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murder
investigation
detective
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Peter Ackroyd |
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ebf9999
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"Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. "
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extraordinary
detective
noir
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James Ellroy |
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1731fd2
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XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense.
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roman-numerals
villans
holmes
puzzles
mary-russell
pastiche
detective
mystery
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Laurie R. King |
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9da47f1
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But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom.
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inspector-banks
peter-robinson
strange-affair
human-trafficking
missing
suspense-thriller
murder-mystery
detective
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Peter Robinson |
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afd284e
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- No estoy dispuesto a hablar, Eddie. ?Por que iba a hacerlo? Dejo la pistola sobre el escritorio y la golpeo con la mano abierta. - Esto -dijo-. Y yo podria hacer que le resultara provechoso. - Ya, eso suena mejor. No meta la pistola en este asunto. Yo siempre estoy dispuesto a escuchar el sonido del dinero.
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dinero
pistola
detective
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Raymond Chandler |