Ian Rankin Quotes

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

For me the Anita series is built like a mystery series, which means that as much as possible each book stands alone, so you have a mystery to solve from the beginning to the end of the book.

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.

If Sherlock Holmes can survive the Reichenbach Falls, then surely we have not seen the last of Detective Sergeant John Munch.

We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

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.

I've read about eight or ten of the original novels, and one of them is where Maigret's in bed for the entire story! His wife is running around and solving the case!

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

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

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

I'd love to do a Columbo-type detective character in a series.

They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.

I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

My whole reputation and creative thought as a novelist is really wrapped around Harry Bosch, so he's near and dear.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

I will live in TV Land watching 'Columbo.' I also like my 'Forensic Files,' all of that true crime.

I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

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.

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

I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.