Hakan Nesser Quotes

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

Kickback is a police thriller which I wrote. I'm very proud of it. I did it in two parts for France because when I wrote it, there wasn't the audience demand for crime stuff that there is now.

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

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.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crime that you don't tend to look at.

I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.

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 want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

Being a journalist is good if you want to write books: it teaches you to get beyond the blank screen. My books have been described as froth, but there's scope to be witty and ironic about everything in life.

If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.

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.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

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.

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.