Adrian McKinty 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.

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.

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

I admit," I said, "that a second murder in a book often cheers things up." - Hastings

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

Vera Caspary wrote thrillers - but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered - the psycho thriller.

When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

I respond to authenticity and originality, and I've been a fan of Don Winslow's ever since 'The Power Of The Dog.'

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

What was always interesting about Thomas Harris' books is they were a wonderful hybridization of a crime thriller and a horror movie.

I don't think I'd seen anything like 'The Killing.'

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.

I've always really liked murder mysteries and thrillers, and great to be able to be actually part of one.

Having set its tonal template, Vertigo Crime laid low for a few months before starting in earnest at the beginning of 2010.

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

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

If Elmore Leonard met Jim Thompson down a dark alley at midnight they might emerge a week later with thick beards, bloodshot eyes and the manuscript for THE BIG O.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

...and then a murder mystery will occur.

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'