The Moviegoer

"You know Ralph. He likes to act mysterious. Ralph Simpson, boy detective. It's kind of cute."

"Was Ralph doing some kind of detective work at the Blackwell place?"

"So he said. I don't always buy a hundred per cent of what Ralph says. He goes to a lot of movies and sometimes he gets them mixed up with the things he does himself." She added, with an indulgent glance at the paperbacks on the dressing table: "I do the same thing with stories sometimes. It makes life more exciting."--Ross Macdonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Knopf 1963, 109-110)