Ian Rankin Quotes

I spent years only ever reading horror and then trying to write horror - and deep down, a horror writer is still what I'd love to be. But it wasn't until I started writing crime that things began to work for me.

I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.

I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.

There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.

I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

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

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.

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'.

Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities.

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

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

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

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

A lot of science fiction is very accessible and very readable, but a lot of people are justifiably put off by the covers of spaceships - though that never put me off.

Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

I love crime fiction, and I'm proud to be part of it, but I'm not without criticism for my own genre.

Very little other than Elmore Leonard's crime writing inspiring me on my Batman run.