Ned Beauman Quotes

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

Crime fiction is a way of satisfying that nosy need to know.

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.

I love crime series.

For me, I really like the human drama embedded in a crime story, and I like the way European films do that.

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.

San Francisco would be a good location for a murder mystery.

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

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.

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

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 read a lot of detective novels.

Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.

The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

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

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.

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

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.

It's always fun to talk about a novel.

The detective genre is not easy because you've got to get to a conclusion that is unexpected.