Crime Writing Quotes

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.

I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.

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.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

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

I spent 10 years as a marketing manager. I've found my experience in the financial world invaluable background for writing about white-collar crimes.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

I'm always accused of being a crime novelist, but I'm not really.

My novels are never directly based on a true crime incident, but I want to get the details right. I want to know how homicide detectives think, what a SWAT team might do to prepare.

I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.

I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.

I'm proud to be a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the questions I'm trying to raise.

There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.

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.

How can quality crime fiction not be produced with available subject matters as the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the creation of organized police forces, the dawn of forensic science, and the rise and fall of Romanticism?

I was a late bloomer. I was 38 when my first book was out and 43 when my first crime novel was out. I had a story that could only be told as a crime story. I think the genre is good; it deals with the fundamental questions of life and death. The problem is there are too many bad crime stories.

There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

'In Cold Blood' is not a thriller at all, really. It is, however, the first work of its kind: a true crime book that reads like fiction.

The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative and allows me to write the other things I want to write about.