{"quotes":[{"text":"Detective Inspector Eccles sighed. He may ordinarily have met his sigh with the question of why the newly appointed Superintendent Dickinson was turning up to this late hour crime scene, he may also ordinarily question why his superior officer was dressed as Julius Caesar, in full tunic and green leafy wreath, yet ever since the new and youngest-ever-appointed superintendent had arrived at the Met it had been all too clear he was an officer who didn’t quite do things by the eBook.","author":"Tom Conrad","tags":["comedy","crime-scenes","detectives","ebooks","humour","murder","pomposity"],"id":8202,"author_id":"Tom+Conrad"},{"text":"We women have intuition,' Barby said loftily. 'I wouldn't expect you to understand. I can't imagine why there aren't more women detectives.","author":"John Blaine","tags":["1949","detectives","intuition","private-investigator","women-detectives"],"id":37908,"author_id":"John+Blaine"},{"text":"After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer in the back of the refrigerator...","author":"Robert B. Parker","tags":["beer","detectives","food","spenser"],"id":51212,"author_id":"Robert+B.+Parker"},{"text":"Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.","author":"Kate Summerscale","tags":["absolution","crime","detective-stories","detectives","investigations","mysteries"],"id":51451,"author_id":"Kate+Summerscale"},{"text":"Her hair was pulled back so severely, it would have won approval from the Spanish Inquisition as a method of torture.","author":"Will Thomas","tags":["detectives","humour","mystery"],"id":70858,"author_id":"Will+Thomas"},{"text":"Danger is the snack food of a true sleuth.","author":"Mac Barnett","tags":["danger","detectives","middle-grade","proverbs","quips","sayings","sleuths","snack-foods","snacks"],"id":76549,"author_id":"Mac+Barnett"},{"text":"The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird...","author":"Jasper Fforde","tags":["antiterrorism","art","crime","detectives","literary","military","police","restricted","specialized","time-travel","unusual","weird"],"id":85917,"author_id":"Jasper+Fforde"},{"text":"Jensen looked concerned.'I'm reluctant to delay, but would a later appointment be better?' He glanced over at Vanelli and got an answering 'I told you so' look that I personally wanted to scrape off Vanelli's face with a blowtorch.","author":"Katherine Bayless","tags":["detectives","mystery","supernatural-romance"],"id":97583,"author_id":"Katherine+Bayless"},{"text":"Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.).","author":"Alan Sokal","tags":["argument","biology","chemistry","cogency","critical","definition","detectives","empirical","experiment","fallibilism","historians","investigation","knowledge","life","methodology","natural-science","observation","physics","practice","science","testing","worldview"],"id":100628,"author_id":"Alan+Sokal"},{"text":"What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of 'The Purloined Letter' successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.","author":"Vincent Buranelli","tags":["detectives","literature"],"id":108892,"author_id":"Vincent+Buranelli"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":38,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}