David Lagercrantz Quotes

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.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

The nice thing about your police procedural as opposed to your classic murder mystery is that in a murder mystery you don't know who did it. Whereas in a police procedural you know, you know everything often and you're watching the police home in.

I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

You need a crime, a detective, and the solution.

You can't beat a cop drama. That's what everybody seems to want to watch.

I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.

Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.

I'm not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.

That's why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.

I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.

How can quality crime fiction not be produced with available subject matters as the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the creation of organized police forces, the dawn of forensic science, and the rise and fall of Romanticism?

For me, I really like the human drama embedded in a crime story, and I like the way European films do that.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

They say that the average lifespan of an SVU detective is 4 years. People can't do it longer than that because it's so difficult.

I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.

I'm asked unendingly to become involved in series involving true crime and as it so happens the Netflix series that I'm working on is about a true crime.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.