The following is from the short story "Stan the Killer," by the writer Georges Simenon, from his collection Maigret's Pipe, published in the United States in 1977 (by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich); the stories were first published in France in the 1940s. The passage is from a conversation between Simenon's Paris-based detective/Inspector of Police Jules Maigret, and his boss:
"Have you a plan?"
"You know, Chief, that I gave up having ideas a long time ago. I just go about sniffing. Some people think I'm waiting for inspiration, but they're wrong. What I'm waiting for is the significant fact which never fails to emerge. The important thing is to be there when it happens and to take advantage of it."
Here, too, is a brief section from the 2020 novel/mystery Snow, by John Banville (Hanover Square Press); the novel takes place largely in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1957. Of Detective Inspector St. John Strafford, the novel's main character, Banville writes:
...His strongest drive was curiosity, the simple wish to know, to be let in on what was hidden from others. Everything to him had the aspect of a cipher. Life was a mundane mystery, the clues to the solving of which were strewn all about, concealed or, far more fascinatingly, hidden in plain view, for all to see but for him alone to recognize.
The dullest object could, for him, flare into sudden significance, could throb in the sudden awareness of itself. There were clues, and he was their detector.
