Tim Pratt Quotes

Reading my way all the way through Sherlock Holmes gave me a lifelong love for crime and detective fiction.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

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

I did a great deal of research to write 'The Irish Duke.' Since all the people in this Lords of the Realm series are real historical characters, everything had to be authentic. I researched Woburn Abbey, where my heroine lived, and everything about Barons Court in Ireland, which was the ancestral home of Abercorn.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.

With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction - mysteries, fantasy, and adventure - as eccentric or merely antiquarian.

I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

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.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

I have favorite authors from a lifetime of reading, so there are some I'll automatically read every time they have a new novel. Included in them: Robert Goddard, Jeffery Deaver, Sophie Kinsella, Katherine Neville, Greg Isle, Laurie King, Lee Child, Lisa Tucker, Susan Howatch, Paul Auster. Barry Eisler, David Hewson, Tracy Chevalier.

For almost every novel I've written, I've read the daily newspaper of the time almost as if it were my current subscription. For 'Two Moons,' which was set in 1877, I think I read just about every day of the 'Washington Evening Star' for that year. For 'Henry and Clara,' I read the 'Albany Evening Journal' of the time.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

We all grew up aware of Agatha Christie; there is no writer more prolific than her in England.

On a normal novel, I would like to get 2,000 to 2,500 words done in a day; I average 10,000 words a week, and then there's a day for planning. With the historical ones, it's a lot harder because you have to stop and double-check facts.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police.

Indeed, mysteries lead readers through an endless variety of subjects and settings; yet sometimes devotees of detection seek to be transported though another dimension as well: time.

Britain proves to be an ideal setting for many a medieval-minded crime novelist, regardless of century.