Detection Quotes

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“You know my methods. Apply them.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League

“Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Die Teufelskralle

“It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes

“Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Lockwood gave a sudden exclamation; when I looked at him, his eyes were shining. 'On second thoughts, we can scrap my last suggestion,' he said. 'Stuff the mingling. Who wants to do that? Boring. George - this library. Where is it?”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Whispering Skull

“The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [...] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.”
― T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932

“It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.

Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don't you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an' suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit -- not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death

“The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons / The Adventure of the Crooked Man

“Miss Climpson," said Lord Peter, "is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity, Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers' money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death

“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.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“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.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“The wave quality of light is the same as that of the electron. The wave determines the probable location of the photon of light when it is detected. The wave character of light is not vibrating stuff like a wave of water but rather a wavelike function encoding information about where you'll find the photon of light once it is detected. Until it reaches the detector plate, like the electron, it is seemingly passing through both slits simultaneously, making its mind up about its location only once it is observed [...].
It's this act of observation that is such a strange feature of quantum physics. Until I ask the detector to pick up where the electron is, the particle should be thought of as probabilistically distributed over space, with a probability described by a mathematical function that has wavelike characteristics. The effect of the two slits on this mathematical wave function alters it in such a way that the electron is forbidden from being located at some points on the detector plate. But when the particle is observed, the die is cast, probabilities disappear, and the particle must decide on a location.”
― Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

“You have attempted to tinge detection with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid." - Holmes to Watson, The Sign of Four”
― Arthur Conan Doyle , Stephen Fry - introductions

“It took less than a year from first detection of COVID-19 for it to rampage through the White House staff and the President of the USA.”
― Steven Magee

“It had all come to me at Paddington station, the extraordinary moment that all of them must have felt--Poirot, Holmes, Wimsey, Marple, Morse--but which their authors had never fully explained. What was it like, for them? A slow process, like constructing a jigsaw? Or did it come in a rush, one last turn in a toy kaleidoscope when all the colours and shapes tumbled and twisted into each other, forming a recognizable image? That was what had happened to me. The truth had been there. But it had taken a final nudge for me to see it, all of it.”
― Anthony Horowitz

“Serikali mara nyingi hutegemea ujasusi wa ndani na nje kufanya maamuzi mazito na sahihi ya kuendesha nchi.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Ionizing smoke detectors unnaturally raise the background radiation levels in the human environment.”
― Steven Magee, Electrical Forensics

“Life is like the internet ... a scam”
― Oseyiza Oogbodo, The Good Life

“What you cannot detect with a horoscope, you can detect with a telescope”
― Dr.P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Robert considered the information Miss Harrington had gathered for him in the village. He suspected she was far better at getting people to talk to her than he would ever be--even if the information was disgorged in a particularly fragmented and feminine way. In his role as local magistrate, Robert had the power to affect people's lives. Such a position made his tenants and the villagers more afraid of him, and wary of giving offense.
He would have to rely on Miss Harrington's haphazard methods of detection and use his more ordered male mind to unravel the tangle of information and make sense of it.”
― Catherine Lloyd, Death Comes to the Village

“The manner of a fool,' said Mr. Blackwood, 'when it masks the mental processes of a wise man, is an advantage of great worth to a detective.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder