Sarah Weinman Quotes

I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.

I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.

I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.

I learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

I've read a thousand private-eye novels.

It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

Dorothy B. Hughes - there's a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I've read her novel 'In a Lonely Place' about eight or nine times.

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography.

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.

The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.

Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course.

Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.