Alan Bradley Quotes

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

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

Although we might think of Holmes as the Ur-sleuth, the seminal inspiration for many writers comes not from the chronicles of Baker Street but from the intricately plotted novels of Charles Dickens and his colleague Wilkie Collins, who in works like 'Bleak House' and 'The Moonstone' established the modern, character-driven mystery novel.

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.

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

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.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

It's heretical, I know, but I've never really been able to get on with Agatha Christie. She is, of course, a giant of the genre, but I never feel that she cared a great deal about the characters. Consequently, neither do I.

My books are not generic. You know when you're reading a Joy Fielding book.

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.

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

I would love to write a mystery - a romantic, funny mystery.

I love mysteries, and I read them every night before I go to bed.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

I was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

The funny thing is, though I write mysteries, it is the one genre in adult fiction I never read. I read Nancy Drew, of course, when I was a kid, but I think the real appeal is as a writer because I'm drawn to puzzly, complicated plots.

It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

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.

We all grew up aware of Agatha Christie; there is no writer more prolific than her in England.

I love the whole mystery-detective genre - I love all of that.