David Grann Quotes

I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

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.

Crime shows are really popular, in general, but usually, at the end of every episode, you have to let go of the people that you've invested in and then, the next week, get somebody else.

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

For whatever reason, I am just very attracted to mystery stories, solving mysteries. I was a huge fan of 'The Jinx.' That's such a satisfying show because it's all... I don't want to give it away to anybody, but it's really amazing.

The British were doing crime stories first, but the British thing is a very different thing. There, the stories are about restoring a break in the fabric of society. The American thing has never been worrying about breaks in the fabric of society, but about people doing their job, whether it's police procedurals or criminals or whatever.

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 think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary!

I didn't grow up watching detective shows. I've never even seen an episode of 'CSI.'

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

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 love cop shows and crime books and thrillers, and before I die I'm gonna play a cop.

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

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

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.

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.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

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

On television and in the movies, crimes are always solved. Nothing is left uncertain. By the end, the viewer knows whodunit. In real life, on the other hand, many murders remain unsolved, and even some that are 'solved' to the satisfaction of the police and prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to result in a conviction.

Yes. I did more research than I ever wanted to and saw some things I wish I didn't. I went on ride-alongs, spent time with Homicide, Cold Case, and SVU detectives, hung out in subways learning how to spot pervs and pick-pockets, viewed an autopsy, went to a police firing range, and witnessed court cases and I read, read, read.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

Believe me, although I really like the show, the reality of Philly Homicide is nothing like CBS's 'Cold Case.'

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