Peter Straub Quotes

I believe the question now is: who murdered my mother?

I have to know the killer, the victim and the motive when I begin. Then I start to create the characters and see how the novel takes shape based on what these people are like.

People just like a good crime story; they want to know who did it.

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

Come here immediately and see if you can find the murderer of the President.

Who the hell do you think did it, Martians?

What would you have if you didn't have a murder in a mystery? You'd have something for the lower-level readers. When you get up into the upper levels, there's nothing that will engage you or compel you or get your emotions churning like a murder. It's the ultimate stakes.

While 'Visitation Street' has the markings of a traditional whodunnit mystery - starting with a missing girl, intrigue and many suspicious characters - Pochoda shows her hand early on by fingering a culprit. The book turns, then, into a 'whydunnit.'

In a mystery, the sleuth must be believably involved and emotionally invested in solving the crime.

If you think someone committed a crime, you should turn them in to whomever you perceive authority to be.

I love the whole mystery-detective genre - I love all of that.

I joke that, 'Give us forty-two minutes, and we'll get your bad guy for you.'

I always make a point of keeping the most pleasant-sounding name for the murderer. As he or she is bound to come to an unpleasant end, it seems the very least the author can do.

Murder mysteries are puzzles that are fun to resolve.

'Big Little Lies' is the story of a school trivia night that goes horrifically wrong, when one parent ends up dead, possibly murdered. I have never attended a school trivia night where a parent ended up dead. In fact, I've never been to a school trivia night at all.

We all know that somebody did it, but how did they find the answer?

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

If you were the only suspect in a senseless bloodbath, would you be standing the the horror section?

Well, first, I didn't kill Dr. King.

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

I'm sure they're investigating everyone who was in the area.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

'Castle' isn't really affected emotionally by murder. He's thrilled about, 'Oh, my God, I wonder how this happened?'

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.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.