A. S. Byatt Quotes

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.

I know nothing about mysteries. I don't take to them.

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.

Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.

I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.

I've been in an Agatha Christie called 'The Sittaford Mystery,' which I enjoyed, but 'The Pale Horse' has a real sense of intrigue and the jigsaw pieces fitting together.

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

Any good movie is filled with secrets.

Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.

I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

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 would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences.

A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.