Private Eye Quotes

“My friend and business partner, Gerald Peyton was 12 minutes late to the funeral. I’d reminded him it started at 2 p.m. “Yeah, yeah, Frank,” he said. “I’ll be there. Just be sure you make it.” Well, here I sat on my thumbs, and he was the no-show. He stopped at a bar and got sloshed, I thought.”
― Ed Lynskey, Death Car

“Gerald and Chet left town for the Peyton family reunion held this August below Tappahannock on the Northern Neck. Gerald invited me to go along, but I thanked my best friend and business partner. Shutting down things was bad for our bottom line. So, I stayed put and minded the office.”
― Ed Lynskey, Bent Halo

“Follow my lead, Miss Rook," Jackaby said, rapping on the ornately trimmed door to 1206 Campbell Street. Were my employer a standard private investigator, those might have been simple instructions, but in the time I've been his assistant, I've found very little about Jackaby to be standard. Following his lead tends to call for a somewhat flexible relationship with reality.”
― William Ritter, Beastly Bones

“Damals war der Ruf des Detektivs William A. Pinkerton und seines Auskunftsbüros sehr bedeutend. Der Mann war durch eine Reihe von Wechselfällen aus Armut zu hohem Ansehen in seinem sonderbaren und für manche Leute widerwärtigen Beruf emporgestiegen, aber für alle, die solche an sich unglücklichen Dienste benötigen, war seine wohlbekannte und patriotische Rolle im Bürgerkrieg und um Abraham Lincolns Person eine Empfehlung. Er oder vielmehr seine Organisation hatte diesen während der ganzen Dauer seiner stürmischen Amtszeit im Regierungspalast geschützt. Seine Firma hatte Niederlassungen in Philadelphia, Washington und New York, um nur die bedeutendsten Orte zu nennen.”
― Theodore Dreiser, The Financier

“Audio of interview - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=...

"No I haven't been in a ceremony but I've seen the marks on them, I've seen the terror they're in and I've seen how they were before such events happened and how they are when they speak about it, how consistent they are in other things they say, so that there has been no reason from a psychological point of view to doubt their capacity to give good evidence, but its the police who need to find the proper corroboration."

- Dr Valerie Sinason, Clinic for Dissociative Studies, London - talks about Private Eye magazine's suggestion that she "invented" the story published in the Express and that no abuse existed”
― Valerie Sinason

“Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat.”
― Ed Lynskey, The Zinc Zoo

“If you want to be a private eye, you have to get used to such things as hideous depression and abject despair.”
― Arthur Byron Cover, The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists

“He was too young to deserve a weight of the world sign like the one he expelled.”
― Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins

“Oh ho, the private eyeball! Poor, prosaic, wretched eyeball. Alas, alack, woe and whoa! Harder and faster they chain him to the stone of stereotype—more and more he cannot earn his daily bread without conforming to the curious standards so stringently set out for him. Once upon a time he had to talk from out of the side of stiff-lipped mouth in accents clipped and surly, and there was the bleak but sheer necessity of constant sexual acrobatics with each and every lady who entered within earshot of the case, no matter how casually. And if by chance the case were not a “caper,” it was no damned case at all. There was the day he had to punch all people in the belly with the natural follow-through of one perfect, accurate, and final punch to the chin (for some reason called the button, as you may recall), but that was before the advent of judo. After judo (after World War II, that is), our hero merely had to straighten his palm and smite the nape of his vis-à-vis, who would immediately fall prone or supine but obligingly comatose.”
― Henry Kane, Death of a Flack

“And as for returning to work as a reporter—something she’d given considerable thought to before taking over her father’s inquiry agency—the Sydney newspapers had dismissed most of their women reporters home once the men started to return from the war, or else confined them to the social pages, or covering the Easter Show, which was a bit too steep a downgrade for Billie after she’d chased Nazi activity across Europe, built a good portfolio of published articles, and worked alongside the likes of Lee Miller and Clare Hollingworth.

No, she wouldn’t last in that kind of work. It was an imperfect world, and her chosen profession was decidedly imperfect, but for now she had a hint of that spark again, that sense of doing something that mattered to someone.”
― Tara Moss, The War Widow

“Frank, have you seen today’s obits?” Gerald asked.
“Never look at them,” I replied. “I only read the comics, sports, and horoscopes.”
“Can’t you see I’m being serious?”
“Who bit the dust, then?”
― Ed Lynskey, Iceman

“If you are having private thoughts and ask an intimate friend to listen to them in privacy or on a date will that be considered too intimi-dating? And if the thoughts are proved to be untrue, but your friend still insists on believing in them anyway, would that be considered a cons-piracy?”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, One Hundred One World Accounts in One Hundred One Word Count

“You can tell he never even considered the possibility of something like this happening to him. He's as out of his element hiring an investigator to snoop on his wife as he would be auditioning for a Russian ballet.”
― Caspar Vega, The Pink Beetle

“They were going to die slower and harder than any son of a bitch had ever died before, and while they died I'd laugh my god-damn head off!”
― Mickey Spillane, My Gun Is Quick

“Misfits, con artists, evildoers all had business cards. It was enough to make any man a bona fide misanthrope.”
― Christopher G. Moore, Pattaya 24/7

“Why did I throw in with him? I suppose we Irish had a mule-headed loyalty baked into our DNA. I could rely on one bedrock truth. Gerald had my back, no matter how lopsided the odds turned. No truer measure of friendship existed to my way of thinking.”
― Ed Lynskey, Death Car