Kerry Greenwood Quotes

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

When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.

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

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

...and then a murder mystery will occur.

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

Who the hell do you think did it, Martians?

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.

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.

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

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.

When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.

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

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

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.

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

I've always really liked murder mysteries and thrillers, and great to be able to be actually part of one.

Do you not want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently.

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

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

When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.

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

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.