Elise Broach Quotes

I love mysteries, and I read them every night before I go to bed.

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.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

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

I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

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.

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

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.

Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

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

I'm really into the detective drama 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.

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

In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

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 read a lot of detective novels.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

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.

A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.

The first time I read a crime novel - I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book - it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn't used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked.

Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre.