Catherine Aird Quotes

Your amateur’s not cluttered up with academic prejudice, Miss Holroyd,” Richard Tindall was fond of saying. “He hasn’t read every single thing that has ever been written on the subject. The amateur sees a problem in its simplest form and it doesn’t occur to him that it’s insoluble.

In detective work you thought in much the same way as you would pick your way across a swamp, testing for firm ground each time you took a step forward.

Heads are useful ... And should be kept.

Really,’ she exclaimed, stumping into the kitchen and plonking herself down on the nearest chair, ‘this place is getting worse than Nightmare Abbey. Whatever next?’

A grammatical purist might have wondered why Miss Bentley hadn't said ‘whoever’ rather than ‘whatever’ but the former headteacher belonged to the Superintendent Leeyes school of taking bad news as a personal affront rather than as an occasion for sympathy for the victim.

Since the coat has absolutely no intrinsic value, Inspector, I must regretfully conclude that the choice lies between an outbreak of gesture politics or the damage being the work of a mind deranged.’

Sloan tried another tack. ‘And which would you think the more likely?’

‘Malice or madness? I’ve no idea at all, Inspector.

We know hardly anything about anything.

I never touch nothing with writing on it.

WHO HAS HIS BIRTH DAY, HAS HIS BURIALL TOO; AS WE INTO THE WORLD COME, OUT WE GOE.

What condition?’

‘He's got a bad heart as well as the leg injuries he got in the war which put him in his wheelchair.’

‘Ah.’ If there was one thing which every policeman knew it was that families were bad for every medical condition, but especially for heart ones. Legs were less important.