A Leak In The Safe

When we first opened our store we thought it was necessary to make people aware of our name and who we were, so we advertised every month in a local publication. Since we didn’t have too many events to publicize back then, I’d stick in a quote about murder and mystery in the little ad, and, since I’m an inveterate quote recorder, there was no shortage of material. The ads actually built up a small following, but with more signings and less money spent on advertising, the quotes became quickly expendable.

I read inchoately, I read emotionally. I read for story, I read for milieu. I read because reading crime novels gave me both a tidy sense of resolution and a sense that the ramifications of violent events would go on forever.

– James Ellroy

Truth will come to light, murder cannot be hid long.

– William Shakespeare

What do most major writers have in common? A fascination with crime.

– Joyce Carol Oates

I find homicides quite stimulating.

– Ellery Queen

"That’s why mystery writers are, on the whole, such mild-mannered individuals," Peggy said smiling. "They don’t have to take an axe to the people they hate, they kill them with a pen. Or a word processor."

– Barbara Michaels

Murder was for the newspapers! For the dry, old court records, for history, for anything but not for her!

How could anybody to whom you’d given six ties (and hung over the counter for a long time choosing the designs) be a murderer.

– Mignon G. Eberhart

Steering her Toyota through the crowded local roads, puffing on a cigarette and listening to the radio, she could not have known that just three days before, her son had murdered a young prostitute in the backseat of the car she was now driving.

– Lisa Beth Pulitzer and Joan Swirsky

They really shouldn’t have stopped. After all they had a body in the trunk!

– Fred Rosen

When Patrolman Safina rushed up the back stairs at the station house to report to the Ninth Detective Squad that a dead body had been found in the trunk of a rented car, the immediate reaction was largely annoyance. "Another one?" somebody said.

– Dick Schaap

Again and again, Christa lifted the rock and slammed it into Colleen’s skull until the asphalt split the hard bone into two pieces. "Stop Christa! That’s enough!" Tadaryl called.

"No, I want to see brains."

– Patricia Springer

Each ant emerged from the skull bearing an infinitesimal portion of brain.

– Donald Westlake

"You’ve never really hurt anybody before yesterday, have you?" asked Deputy Thompson.

"Oh, yeah," Cindy replied casually. "I’ve hurt lots of people. I’ve stabbed people, I’ve shot people. I’ve tried to run people down, I’ve beaten people…"

"Ever kill anybody before?"

"No, and I’ve tried so many times."

– Joan Merriam

There is a degree of prettiness which merges to sheer beauty; and Leicester, who had adopted the jargon of his day, had once called her "divine" without eliciting either gratification or amusement from the object of his praise. All the attributes of divinity which a faultless skin, big grave eyes, and a supple body can give to a woman, she had. Her hair was brown, with a fleet glint of gold in it, and a poet might rhapsodize upon her hands.

– Edgar Wallace

Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,

Soft dimpled hands, white neck and creamy breast,

All things on which the dazzled senses rest

Til the fond, fixed eyes forget they stare.

– Keats

Her dark beauty was speaking to me in a language of its own; a strange language, yet one so intelligible that I struggled in vain to disregard it.

But in saying it I had to turn my head aside, for the strangest, maddest impulses were bubbling up in my brain in response to those half-shut eyes.

– Sax Rohmer

Why don’tcha

Make love to Tampa, darlin’

And let’s jump the town

– Tampa Red

It may be that Amy’s butterfly affairs can be traced to childhood and young adult years, which are still hazy and perplexing to police and other investigators who have peered into her life and examined the complex personality quirks and failings that created the dangerously devious woman she became.

– Clifford Lindecker

Young women who are walking in the straight road don’t dress as Lucy dressed.

– Mrs. J. H. Riddell

She wore a tight green sweater which she filled with blatant lushness.

I had read enough fiction to know there was only one plot when a woman invited a man to her apartment and received him in a robe.

The sharp point of a purple fingernail removed a fleck of tobacco from a purple lip.

She gave me a furtive glance and expelled smoke through her nostrils.

– Bruno Fischer

She was breathing fast, and the housecoat had gaped to afford a wonderful view of some provocative feminine architecture.

– Kevin North

The tall redhead, smiling with her intoxicating hint of special comradeship through a foot or so of smoke-hazed air, seemed to offer him more than he could quite dream of.

"You’re running with the pack now," she told him. "You have no human friends."

– Jack Williamson

She had this trick of talking without opening her mouth, keeping her lips puckered up, waiting to be kissed, and she wrinkled her nose and I could see the tiny freckles on the bridge, and her skin was marble cool in all this heat.

– Robert Bloch

Altogether she was a very attractive girl and a most disturbing apparition for an old gentleman of forty who is trying to forget his marriage.

Her face seemed to be falling apart as women’s faces do when they are past their first youth and have been on a jag for a week.

– John Welcome

Roxy Ricks didn’t really believe that her friend Stephanie Martin had murdered Chris Hatton. But something inside of her knew that Stephanie had cut off Chris Hatton’s hands.

– Suzy Spencer  

I saw Patti Smith last night, thirty years after I saw her for the first time. I’ve seen her many, many times in between and Thursday she put on yet another legendary show. She is a true goddess and I dedicate this cut-up to her…

Numerous accounts survive of weird meetings, known as Sabbats, where the witches feasted, took drugs, danced wildly, copulated and cursed their enemies.

The witch-cult, therefore, may have been a creed of social rebellion based upon orgiastic revels, drug abuse and the deliberate adoption of heretical symbols, with the witches’ Sabbat as a kind of medieval hippie festival.

And if the hippie movement was mystical, its holiest rite was the love-in, its sacrament the LSD tab, and its high priests the young musicians who provided the soundtrack to the era.

"Stoners" the most common term applied to these improvised Satanists, is, in youth parlance just a loose term for an unmotivated kid who likes rock music and marijuana. However to self-styled experts on Satanism, stoners are an amorphous cult dedicated to the service of Satan himself.

– Gavin Braddeley

The coven was composed almost entirely of young hippie types (for lack of a better description) who were seeking, through the use of hallucinogens, a release into a religious world.

They belonged to a group of local youths called the Knights of the Black Circle, which dabbled in Satanism, and whose gatherings included such social activities as drug use, blood drinking and animal sacrifice, and listening to the music of such heavy metal groups as AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest.

These events served as a cathartic release for the participants, with religious-like use of symbols and costumes by the performers, wild and hypnotic music, widespread use of hallucinogens and orgiastic dancing.

Another young man reported to police that he had seen a group of hippies dancing wildly around a parked car, on the hood of which were the carcasses of five skinned dogs.

He claimed that gangs of nihilistic adolescents, calling themselves "stoners" are engaged in satanic worship, cemetery desecrations and blood sacrifice.

Members of stoner gangs are quite adept at writing backwards and using the Runic, Theban, Hebrew, Pafsing, Malchim and Celestial alphabets. That is why much of their graffiti is not recognizable to the untrained eye.

They might be able to write backward and in Etruscan, but the so-called stoners often seem to have difficulty writing forward, in English.

The prevalent use of drugs among them is merely one manifestation of this restlessness and dissatisfaction.

The violently anti-social proclivities of these elements and their typically mystical sense of perception, which is aided by their frequent use of hallucinogenic drugs, is likely to lead to a spiraling pattern of barbarity.

Hallucinogens tend to fragment experience for the user, and in many cases are dissociative even after use. They therefore facilitate the breakdown of social values that possibly existed only as an inclination in the mind of the person before use.

Instead of asking why deviants want to do things that are disapproved of, we might better ask why conventional people do not follow through on deviant impulses they have.

– Arthur Lyons

When I was in Los Angeles and smoking pot, I was thrown into trances by radio programs produced by "wizards" who used fantastic imagery and spellbinding language.

I started out as a snob, became intrigued, went off-beat, and from then on I started blowing weed. Life became a weird trip. I was a freaked out snob.

Narcotics are an integral part of the hippie scene. I believe that marijuana started the whole pipedream that is part of the unreality that permeates the hippie cult.

The demon-possessed, freaknik religion is damaging the minds and damning the souls of American youths.

Don’t mistake weirdness for wisdom.

Don’t mistake lewdness for love.

If being a square means not taking drugs, not dressing in kooky clothes, not selling your body to the highest bidder nor running away from the responsibilities and problems of life, then I pray, God give us more squares!

– David Wilkerson 

The following was created by cobbling together passages from The Lion and the Lamb by E. Phillips Oppenheim.

The girl swung herself around on the couch, threw a smoked out cigarette to the hearth, pressed back her hair and sat up.

David passed her a box, and she lit one with a little murmur of satisfaction.

"The last thing I remember that night was you in your blue pajamas."

David, surprisingly overpowered by the thought of Belle with her amazing personality, her perfume, her flamboyant charms, at close quarters was suddenly terrified.

"I am here to destroy you after a fashion of my own."

"Aren’t you getting a little creepy?" he ventured.

"The whole thing is absurd," she drawled. "Life itself seems absurd since I was pitched into the middle of these ridiculous people.

She looked across at him, an anxious light in her eyes, but a defiant smile curving her lips.

"You still seem restless, David. Doesn’t my visit please you? Your room is so hot. Do you mind if I throw open my furs?"

"Of course not," he assented. "Let me help you."

She loosened the fastenings. A breath of that curious perfume stole up to him and again he felt that faint shiver which he had previously resented. She smiled – the fine sensuous lips of a Venus, slowly parting, as she bent over one refractory clasp.

"Now I am more comfortable," she confided, one hand resting upon his shoulder. "Do you want me to tell you – everything?"

She stood there, her hands at her sides, her furs thrown back, her scarlet frock a line of flame in the room, looking across at him.

"I am coming to you," she said. "It is for you to say the rest."

"Why?" he asked quickly.

She looked at him and smiled – a smile of reminiscence. Then she knocked the ash from her cigarette.

"Ah, well," she murmured. "There might be many reasons."

I hate that overwhelming perfume she uses, he thought, and I hate that covert insolence all the time underlying her manner. She is in her wrong place over here. She should be a sultana in some Eastern country. The most fascinating thing in life is still the flashing of lurid colours on to the grim canvas of the sullen night, the hysteria of passion, men grabbing for one another’s throats, the stab of pain, the whistling bullet.