Crime Writers Quotes

I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

What crime writers are doing connects deeper into a cultural hunger. Crime is important. When you open up a book that has a body that's dead, that matters. It matters more than a certain level of suburban angst; it really does.

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

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.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

My preferred genre of reading is crime thrillers - books by Harlan Coben, Jo Nesbo, David Baldacci, James Patterson, Ashwin Sanghi and a few others - and I write crime thrillers.

If Raymond Chandler came from the South, his name would be Ace Atkins.

Ottawa is a hot spot of Canadian crime writing, with perhaps the greatest concentration of active, involved, published crime writers anywhere.

The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

Some of the writers I've praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.

If you want to start reading Swedish crime fiction, you have to start with Sjowall and Wahloo.

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

Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

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

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

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.

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.

Britain proves to be an ideal setting for many a medieval-minded crime novelist, regardless of century.

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.