BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: MYSTERIES & MYSTERY WRITERS

THE PRIVATE DETECTIVE IN FICTION

"The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who
acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being in life as we know it such man would not be a private detective. The things which happen to him might still happen to him, but they would happen as a result of a peculiar set of chances. By making him a private detective, you skip the necessity for justifying his adventures."


Raymond Chandler in a long letter about Philip Marlowe to D.J. Ibberson (19 april 1951)
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A SENTENCE TO FORGET

"No real lover of the standard between world-wars detective novel can resist a line lik like this from Blind Drifts: 'Guard the door please, Mr. Wilklias! Mr. McKenzie's murderer , Mrs. Edmonds' asasailant, the man whose hands the unlucky Seaver was as putty, is now in this room..'

Jon L. Breen, discussing the writer Clyde B. Clason, who
created a character named Thocritus Lucius Westborough

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WILD BILL DONOVAN & SHERLOCK HOLMES

William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan "...looked up as I entered his office and said, 'Doctor Moriarty! He's the man I want 

     'Do I look as evil a character as Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories,' I asked.

Stanley P. Lovell. "Cloak and Dagger Behind the Scenes" in The Saturday Evening Post (March 3, 1962), p.3

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AGATHA CHRISTIE AT HER KITCHEN SINK

'...some of my best plots come to me at the sink."

          Agatha Christie,
          Standing at her kitchen sink,
          Wd think & write down what occured, her
          Thoughts,not on dishes, but on murder.
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A FICTIONAL CHINESE-AMERICAN DETECTIVE NOT NAMED CHARLIE CHAN

"James Lee Wong, known simply as Mr. Wong, is a fictional Chinese-American detective created by Hugh Wiley (1884–1968). Mr. Wong appeared in twenty magazine stories and a film series of six, the first five of which starred English actor Boris Karloff as Wong, the last with Chinese-American actor Keye Luke in the role, the first Asian lead.

    "In his story "No Witnesses", Wiley describes Mr. Wong as six feet tall, educated at Yale University and "with the face of a foreign devil-a Yankee".[ In the stories he is an agent of the United States Treasury Department and lives in San Francisco."

Wikipedia

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THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM PRIVATE EYE

“In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company’s motto, “We Never Sleep,” was inscribed under a large, unblinking, Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term “private eye.””


Quote from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
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LOCARD'S EXCHANGE PRINCIPLE
"Put simply, Locard's exchange principle is "with contact between two items, there will be an exchange." Twentieth-century forensic scientist Dr. Edmond Locard came up with this idea after observing that criminals will almost always bring something into the crime scene with them and leave something behind, providing valuable evidence to investigators."

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/561752/killer-words-every-true-crime-buff-should-know
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"It is a truth universal acknowledged that a mystery
writer must know how to kill people."

                  K.H. Page
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THE FINEST FORM OF FICTION

“There is no finer form of fiction than the mystery. It has structure, a story line and a sense of place and pace. It is the one genre where the reader and the writer are pitted against each other. Readers don’t want to guess the ending, but they don’t want to be so baffled that annoys them. Reading mysteries is a way for people to deal with the crime they see in their newspapers, or television or in their daily lives, in a safe impersonal way.”

Sue Grafton in Writer’s Digest, January1991
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CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVER

(from the Vincenne, Indiana Sun-Commercial)

John Laue, 410 Ramsey Road, told police Monday the
Fort Sackville Real Estate warehouse on State Street was
Broken into Saturday night. A jar of pickles was opened.’

The New Yorker (May 18, 1987)
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MASTERS OF SUSPENSE

This morning I compute 
On a small screen
A few vertigious words
In which I appear,
To make my presence known,
Creating a momentary bond
Between my readers 

& myself. Dead persons
Who have no shoes
Need not apply:
Even celluoid ghosts ,
Haunts & nuncles
Fading in & out,
Will never know

What they are missing.
You, on the other hand,
My innocent reader,
Trapped by curiosity
Or the simple refusal
To give up what may be
A life-losing proposition

Or sheer waste of time,
Are wondering:
How is all of this 
Going to turn out?
Hitchcock in Psycho
Makes a quick appearance,
Like the word scissors,

& then disappears.


Louis Phillips







https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/561752/killer-words-every-true-crime-buff-should-know














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