Mark Billingham Quotes

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.

When you see Robert Englund in a movie, you think he is the bad guy, but if I'm not the bad guy, and I'm supposed to just kind of fool the audience, it makes it a lot easier for whichever actor is the bad guy. So I find myself doing a lot of those, I think they're called red herring characters, faking out the audience.

The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

With a thriller, you're going to have your red herrings, as different suspects are thrown up as possible culprits. You can only explore that for so long - if you do that more than a few times, it starts to get a little redundant.

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

A mystery is a whodunit. You know what happened, but not how or who's behind it. A thriller, or a suspense, is a howdunit. You know what happened, and you usually know who did it, but you keep reading because you want to know how they pulled it off.

I really hate those books where the murderer turns out to be somebody you never heard of who pops up in the last chapter.

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

I believe thrillers work if the story is good. It is not easy to make a thriller because the audience is making their own story in their minds as they watch the film. You have to break that expectation and still make them like the film.

It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

When a crime writer thinks up a delicious twist, it is a great moment. Time to relax and take the rest of the day off. I do think that it can be overdone, however.

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.

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.

The challenge in any kind of storytelling, as far as I know, it is, you're looking for the moment that is completely unexpected, but at the same time, you think to yourself, 'Of course, that's the only way it could have gone.' It has to feel like it's the truth of it.

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.