Eleanor Catton Quotes

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

I confess to loving a good murder mystery - anything by Scott Turow or John Grisham. Maybe it's a holdover from my days as a criminal prosecutor in Seattle.

After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.

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.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.

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

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.

Even in a manuscript form, 'The Girl on the Train' sort of leapt off the pages as a contemporary suspense drama-slash-thriller. It has all the mechanics of a thriller, but at the heart of it was a great character study.

I've always really liked murder mysteries and thrillers, and great to be able to be actually part of one.

I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

I admit," I said, "that a second murder in a book often cheers things up." - Hastings

...and then a murder mystery will occur.

Where there's a will there's a detective story.

With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.

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

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 thing with 'The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo' is that is it's like an Agatha Christie plot, and an investigating journalist is also a classic character.

It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

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.

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

For escape, I love popcorn thrillers that you can read in a weekend, like 'Sharp Objects' and 'The Woman in Cabin 10.'

I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.