James Patterson Quotes

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.

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

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

The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.

Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

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

Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.

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.

John Grisham is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

I'm not a massive reader, to be honest. I try and fill my time with other things. But I remember getting halfway through a book once. It was 'The Client' by John Grisham, which was quite interesting.

Although we might think of Holmes as the Ur-sleuth, the seminal inspiration for many writers comes not from the chronicles of Baker Street but from the intricately plotted novels of Charles Dickens and his colleague Wilkie Collins, who in works like 'Bleak House' and 'The Moonstone' established the modern, character-driven mystery novel.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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 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

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

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.

I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

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.

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.

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.