False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.

Maybe I'm just gonna kill you," says Mike, peeved at being predictable. "You ever think of that?"

"No, Mike. Because if you wanted me dead, then four or five of your guys would be in the hospital and I'd have a flesh wound. Maybe.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay...