Home > Author > Rennie Airth
1 " There was something about the story she told us...that didn't seem right to him. He didn't buy the idea they'd been lovers. He reckoned it was something else. It's the sort of thing he used to pick up on, when I worked with him. You know as well as I do, sir, in a case like this you collect all sorts of facts, but only a few really matter, and Mr Madden had a gift for spotting them. Not that he always knew why: often it was just something he felt - a sort of instinct, I suppose - though he would have said it was simply a matter of paying attention. That's what he used to tell me. "
― Rennie Airth
2 " Everything's changing now. It's all patrol cars and fewer feet on the beat. I hope they know what they're doing. "
3 " Generally speaking, psychiatry is concerned with the treatment of neuroses, with patients who are aware of their illness and wish to be cured. Dr. Franz Weiss "
― Rennie Airth , The Blood-Dimmed Tide (John Madden, #2)
4 " The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned W. B. Yeats ‘The Second Coming "
5 " when he had still thought his experiences might have some value – that his life might amount to something – and which were gathering dust in a desk drawer. "
― Rennie Airth , The Reckoning (John Madden, #4)
6 " The route had been renamed after the war, Sergeant Booth had told them in the taxi. Now it was known as the Road of Remembrance. To Billy, recalling Alf Dawkins with his crutches and his nervous tick, begging for half-crowns, it seemed more a case of how quickly people forgot. "
7 " They’ve become war surplus; I’m told you can buy them at any of these markets that have sprung up. The one in Ash’s room had been torn open and there was a dressing missing.’ ‘A dressing?’ ‘A bandage and so forth. They found the empty packet it had been in. I wondered if he’d been injured. "
― Rennie Airth , The Dead of Winter (John Madden, #3)
8 " In spite of his policeman’s conditioning, he clung to the belief he’d grown up with: that people, by and large, behaved according to how they were treated. "
9 " Generally speaking, psychiatry is concerned with the treatment of neuroses, with patients who are aware of their illness and wish to be cured. But where the darkness of the soul is complete, where all sense of right and wrong is lacking, even the most sophisticated clinical approaches have proved ineffectual. To put the question in simple terms, it seems that criminals of this type are born to be what they become, that their condition is organic and beyond the power of any analyst to treat or decipher. "
10 " His specific brief was to cultivate contacts in the Nazi party. It’s something we’ve been slow to get on to. Like others, we’ve tended to dismiss them as rabble. Now it looks as though they may form part of the next government. Or, God forbid, end up running it. "
11 " Increasingly solitary, he saw his life as all that was left to him: a tattered sail that might bear the wind but would bring him to no haven. "
― Rennie Airth , River of Darkness (John Madden, #1)
