The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.