Justine Larbalestier Quotes

How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

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

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

Reading my way all the way through Sherlock Holmes gave me a lifelong love for crime and detective fiction.

I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.

I've been in an Agatha Christie called 'The Sittaford Mystery,' which I enjoyed, but 'The Pale Horse' has a real sense of intrigue and the jigsaw pieces fitting together.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

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.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

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.

The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.

When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

I was reading Agatha Christie as a little boy.

I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.

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.

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.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).