Dave Barry Quotes

I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

I'm jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time-you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.

Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years.

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

I'd been a thriller reader all my life.

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

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

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

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

I love Hammett, never liked Chandler - I'm one of the few.

I'd always wanted to write crime fiction. I loved Nancy Drew.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.

A is for Alibi, my first book, was published in 1982. As it happened the next couple of books took place in June and August of that year. Without meaning to I painted myself into a corner. The other issue was the aging process. I did not want my main character to age one year for every book so I slowed the whole process down. This way I could get through all 26 letters of the alphabet without making her 109 years old in 2015. I might end the series in either 1990 or on New Years Eve 1989.

Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.

I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

I hate academic mysteries. As soon as I come across the word 'don' and it's not someone's first name, I close the book.

There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.

I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.

I don't believe that murders can be "solved." I think that this is the big lie of the mystery novel, that you should close the book and feel that the world is back in order and everything's all right. I want the reader to know that the world is not all right, and maybe we ought to do something about it.

Summer is my favorite time to read mysteries.

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

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.

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