Emma Healey Quotes

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.

What would you have if you didn't have a murder in a mystery? You'd have something for the lower-level readers. When you get up into the upper levels, there's nothing that will engage you or compel you or get your emotions churning like a murder. It's the ultimate stakes.

I am more of a suspense writer. A mystery writer solves mysteries. I am a 'high suspense' writer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

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.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?

I would love to write a mystery - a romantic, funny mystery.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

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 'Scream' series is unique in that it's an ongoing murder mystery, even though it's a different killer, so if you know who that killer is, then half of the fun of the movie is gone.

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

Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.

I've been in an Agatha Christie called 'The Sittaford Mystery,' which I enjoyed, but 'The Pale Horse' has a real sense of intrigue and the jigsaw pieces fitting together.

One of the things that I love about crime novels is that you can turn the volume all the way up. If I can make somebody blow their subway stop, I win.

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.

I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.

I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.