detective

you were attacked by cement monkeys?

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

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.

Terrible accident; body parts was everywhere_-fingers, toes, wings, beaks. Ambulance people tried to scoop him all up, but apparently it ain__ so easy as you might think__elling a chicken from a Chinaman, I mean. Anyways, they got his weight off his driver__ license, picked up a hundred and thirty pounds of pieces and buried __m. Now his wife come every year 'bout this time to pay her respects. We don't serve chicken while she's here. Hope you ain't got a taste for it.

The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.

There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.

that was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.

about Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.

Jean smirked, and delicately swirled the mic in his hands, careful not to make a sound. __ui. C__st normal. C'est pas spécial. I will give you something worthy of Holmes._ Jean set down the mic and proceeded toward the couple. As he approached them, he fiddled with his mustache for a moment, and then pulled it sharply. He winced at the sensation. __ have it,_ he declared confidently. __ou sir, are a thief.

Simon's brain tried to comprehend the situation. 'Was an international supermodel really holding Doc Gutson, leader of the infamous Bloodworth Gang, captive?

Just making the cement now, only takes five minutes.""I did it in four once," Pauly whispered boastfully to Johnny, "but if I'm honest, I was never completely happy that it set properly.""Who was it for?""Big Joe the Hammer.""Oh, yeah," Johnny nodded. "Didn't I hear he was spotted in Vegas a few weeks back?"Pauly nodded morosely."Yeah, like I said, I didn't think it had set properly.

Ah ha!" the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. "The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first!

Don't wanna ever take your shoes off in coconut land. Never know when you're gonna have to run.

I guess you__e going for the hard-ass Texas Ranger thing today_ ~ Laney Briggs

It was quite elementary,' returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand.

She had an ass that could make any man sin."~ Gunner Wilson

I only swing for one girl. But if she's into a certain kind of kink, who am I to deny her such pleasantries?"~ Luke Wagner

You look at me as if I were a conjuror,' Holmes remarked, with a laugh.