Patti Smith Quotes

I'm really into the detective drama genre.

Occasionally, I have written about stories related to crime, but I have never attempted a traditional detective story. So I want to write a true detective story.

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

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

I read a lot of detective novels.

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.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

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

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

Murder mysteries are puzzles that are fun to resolve.

If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.

More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.

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

The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.

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

There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff.

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.

I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.

You need a crime, a detective, and the solution.

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