The proprietor of the website Quote Investigator presents some fascinating literary detective work, exploring and often exploding the common attributions of familiar quotations through the use of Google Books and other online tools, along with the standard quotation references. The introduction describes both the process of his research and the common pitfalls: everything must be double-checked, often in hard copy. He also identifies several “mechanisms of error,” the ways in which mistaken attributions happen. One example of the latter is similarity of name. The only references to Edgar Allan Poe in this book concern a line frequently attributed to him but actually from the contemporary songwriter Poe (“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart, of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants”).
Another quotation with a crime-fiction connection exemplifies the scope of the author’s research. The epigraph of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is credited to Honoré de Balzac: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” O’Toole quotes the original French of the source passage in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), followed by English-language translations from 1896 and 1900 editions of the novel. A half-dozen English variations of the saying, from a 1915 business periodical to a 1976 financial columnist, show the development of the version cited by Puzo. The conclusion: that Balzac’s original nuanced observation “has been dramatically simplified, and no single person can be credited with the construction of the modern concise and forceful version.”
Other interesting discussions include whether Ernest Hemingway actually wrote that six-word short story (“For Sale, baby shoes, never worn”), how a statement by Anne Rice about Kafka came to be attributed to Kafka, and how a statement by a member of the Doors (Ray Manzarek, not Jim Morrison) somehow got credited to William Blake or Aldous Huxley. But did anybody ever really think Napoleon said, “Able was I ere I saw Elba”?
There’s not much here directly concerned with crime fiction, though the index includes Raymond Chandler (“I think my favorite weapon is a twenty-dollar bill”). On the website, however, pickings are better, discussing quotes attributed to Agatha Christie (“An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have./The older she gets the more interested he is in her”), Arthur Conan Doyle (“Elementary, my dear Watson”), Alfred Hitchcock (“All actors are cattle”), Margaret Millar (“Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses”), and James M. Cain (“They haven’t done anything to my books./They’re still right there on the shelf./They’re fine”), among many others.
(An irony worth noting: this excellent scholarly work, published by an Amazon imprint, along with the appropriate praise gets a startling volume of negative reviews on Amazon’s website. It was offered free to Prime members as a Kindle First item, and some of the takers, who obviously didn’t know what sort of book they were getting, and perhaps expecting a traditional quotation reference, weren’t interested in the research processes and pronounced the whole enterprise boring.)
