Crime Literature Quotes

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

Since 1966, hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two.

If Elmore Leonard met Jim Thompson down a dark alley at midnight they might emerge a week later with thick beards, bloodshot eyes and the manuscript for THE BIG O.

Chinatown is tremendously interesting... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

I read a lot of true crime growing up - 'The Stranger Beside Me' by Ann Rule about Ted Bundy.

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

George V. Higgins's 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' (1970) added an extra literary layer to the con novel; James Crumley's 'The Last Good Kiss' (1978) influenced countless writers and will be remembered forever for its opening line, quoted often in obituaries of the author.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

A lot of novels use crime as a stepping stone to talk about greater issues. So I just think of myself as a writer.

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.

Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.

Alafair Burke is one of the finest young crime writers working today.

There are 195 crime books published in Sweden every year. You could cut that to 100 and keep the good ones.

The book grew out of the introduction I did for Brady's Gates of Janus. I knew that the writing in that introduction had a better than average chance of being read by people involved in Brady's life - parents of victims, police, Brady himself.

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

Joseph Wambaugh did not invent the police novel, but no one had seen anything like 'The New Centurions' when it was published in 1971. Here was a working, living, breathing cop with a decade of experience on the beat.

My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose. That's a lot of ground to cover, so I might as well begin.

Lisbeth Salander is one of the most compelling heroines of 21st century crime literature, and I am thrilled to see readers have welcomed her return.

Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.

I suppose most crime writing is urban. There's not a lot... certainly not in Australia, people don't often set books in the countryside.