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Police Quotes

“My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.”

“Corporations are legal fictions created by the State to shield executives from liability… It’s like if I had a little hand-puppet, and I went to rob a bank, and the hand-puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money, and then the hand-puppet grabbed the money and ran out, and then I got caught and I handed the hand-puppet over the police and then the police tried the hand-puppet, put the hand-puppet in jail, and I get to keep all the money.”

“Villalobos had always been eager to work in law enforcement. When he was in high school, he assembled a group of boys from all grade levels and invited them to his house every Wednesday. Villalobos’ club revolved around hunting down fugitives on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He led weekly research presentations that narrowed the list down to felons who were suspected to be within fifty miles of their vicinity. Villalobos held exams for his club members, testing their knowledge on how to react if they caught a criminal. He also trained them to identify what the criminals looked like with certain disguises and how to predict their next crimes and behaviors. All the boys were into it. And they trusted their leader. The amateur intelligence squad never caught any top criminals but inadvertently located the whereabouts of several robbers and proudly shared their intel with their local police station.”

“In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure. In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts. ("Introduction")”