A Quote by Rex Stout

To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy. — © Rex Stout
To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.
I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.
Nicky Egan has the finesse of Bonnie Raitt merged with the primal force of Janis Joplin. It is a rare combination. Her passion is a joy to behold - and her talent is undeniable. She belongs in any conversation about great contemporary female soul singers. If you're up for a revelatory evening, then put her high on your list.
It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
Daring is doing. Daring is asking something outrageous despite your chances of failure and rejection. Daring is going out on a limb by believing in something that no one else understands, and if all fails, daring is trying again.
I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle.
Im a finesse pitcher without the finesse.
It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. ...It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).
Finesse is catching the baseball on the edge of your glove when you're turning two, making the one-handed grabs and shoestring tackles by running across the field in football. And finesse is what I bring to fighting.
When I read 'The Master', I felt that I had read a true classic. It's so rare nowadays that you have that feeling: it was a privilege to read it.
I'm a finesse pitcher without the finesse.
Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.
I see more now. As far as concepts, I know where teammates are going, linemen are going. I can read defensive fronts. I can read the body language of linebackers. I study film to see who's a bull rusher and who's a finesse rusher. I think I've learned.
The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.
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