Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.