Noirboiled Notes

With my luck, I’d be the one to eat the hearty meal while the warden’s private line stayed as quiet as the grave.           Don ...

some women can sing and some can paint and some can dance and some can be faithful           Don Tracy           Last Year’s Sno...

Married people always kill one another. Sometimes it takes them fifty years.           Lawrence Block           A Stab in the Dark       ...

When a man has his head cut off, he’s never bothered again with sinus trouble.           Don Tracy           Last Year’s Snow ...

I was a machine, and my arm was the arm of the machine, and the gun was a part of the machine. And when the machine ’s finger contracted t...

He got hold of a gun. His first killing followed automatically.           James Hadley Chase           No Orchids for Miss Blandish       ...

I’ll remember what you said when I’m half way to heaven on a roller coaster.           Don Tracy           Last Year’s Snow     ...

Marvelous. I ’ve just committed my first venal sin and it feels marvelous.           P. J. Wolfson           Is My Flesh of Brass?     ...

A man named Barney Manton. A man who believed in hitting and hitting hard, because if you hit hard enough, you always got something, if o...

no man has ever been trapped except through his emotions           Donald E. Westlake           The Mercenaries           1960

Who wants to go to heaven in the rain on an empty stomach, soaking newspapers thrown over you without a dime in your pocket?        ...

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.           Ross Macdonald           The Instant Enemy           1968

A favor’s no good unless you pay for it.           Lawrence Block           A Stab in the Dark           1981

for too many years the only exercise I had got was bending my elbow           Lawrence Block           Time to Murder and Create          ...

There was nothing of the cheap moll in this set-up. She was not just paint and powder. You could scratch this dame and still find her good...

You have a couple of hours of fun. And then you have a lot of hell.           Don Tracy           Last Year’s Snow           1937...

spread-eagled on the bed like a steamrollered Arthur Dimmesdale           Donald E. Westlake           What ’s So Funny?           2007

Don’t ever get a girl that’s gotta get in by ten o’clock. Eleven, yes, but not ten.           P. J. Wolfson           Is My Flesh ...

You take a guy who writes a book. Can you say why he can write a book while you can’t? Or another Joe can paint your picture so it looks j...

she thinks you’re a grown man; either go down and do it, or go up and tell her that she’s wrong           Charles Williams           Agro...

An ounce of caution is worth a pound of plasma.           Donald E. Westlake           The Mercenaries           1960

That was the moment his mouth opened, his throat closed, his eyes bulged, his heart contracted, and his hands began to shake like fringe o...

Out of food, out of liquor, even out of coffee.           Lionel White           The Snatchers           1953

“In the room the women come and go Talking of Michael Angelo.” Does that suggest anything to you, sir? Yeah—it suggests to...

He coiled a forearm far back of his own shoulder, swung rabidly with it, caught the bodyguard flat-handed on the side of the face w...

It is is not necessary to know what a person is a afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.           Lawrence Block         ...

This was his Sunday choke. It would have squirted sap from a tree.           Cornell Woolrich           Strangler’s Serenade           195...

Spoilers follow:   I feel like a broken record, or maybe a corrupted MP3 file, waiting for the great series that I know is coming but is n...

So rarely is the truth the simplest possible answer.           Donald E. Westlake           “Party Animal”           19...

Three books into the Matthew Scudder series, I suspect that there may be some self-fulfilling prophecy at work in my reactions thus far: I...

I hope I break even today; I could use the cash.           Donald E. Westlake           “Horse Laugh”           1986

In  Time to Murder and Create , the second Matthew Scudder novel, a dead man leaves Scudder payment to find his killer, and our hero pur...

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds— if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.           Tom Stoppard           Rosencrantz ...