Elif Batuman Quotes

Where there's a will there's a detective story.

Some of the best movies made about crime are those where the crime solver can get inside the head of the serial killer, and those are the techniques we use in C.S.I.

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

A mystery is a whodunit. You know what happened, but not how or who's behind it. A thriller, or a suspense, is a howdunit. You know what happened, and you usually know who did it, but you keep reading because you want to know how they pulled it off.

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.

I was always obsessed with crime, crime shows, anything to do with unsolved cold cases.

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 had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

Murder mysteries are puzzles that are fun to resolve.

I'm interested in people who are very close to the people who commit crimes.

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

I didn't grow up watching detective shows. I've never even seen an episode of 'CSI.'

What would you have if you didn't have a murder in a mystery? You'd have something for the lower-level readers. When you get up into the upper levels, there's nothing that will engage you or compel you or get your emotions churning like a murder. It's the ultimate stakes.

A working detective has no hope of understanding what even experts who devote their lives to the study of criminal psychology can't figure out.

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

Forensics I've always found absolutely fascinating. Anything to do with clues. And checking things out and solving.

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.

Crime fiction is a way of satisfying that nosy need to know.

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.

'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.