Mystery Fiction Quotes

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

I've loved thrillers and spy stories since I was a kid. It's probably not a bad rule of thumb to write the kinds of stories you love to read.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

I grew up reading crime fiction mysteries, true crime - a lot of true crime - and it is traditionally a male dominated field from the outside, but from the inside what we know, those of us who read it, is that women buy the most crime fiction, they are by far the biggest readers of true crime, and there's a voracious appetite among women for these stories, and I know I feel it - since I was quite small I wanted to go to those dark places.

I've always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. I was in fifth grade or something and very proud of being in the adult fiction aisles. I tore through 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles.'

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the great writer of horror stories, perhaps the greatest - I will say the greatest

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.

A lot of the major players in the 1960s were the same as the 1940s and 1950s - Hitchen's 'Sleep with Slander.' Armstong's 'Lemon in the Basket,' which is a fusion of the political assassination thriller and a family drama. And Hughes's 'The Expendable Man.'

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

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

Indeed, mysteries lead readers through an endless variety of subjects and settings; yet sometimes devotees of detection seek to be transported though another dimension as well: time.

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

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.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

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.

I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.

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

In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.

Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes, and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil as readily as heat ... and that Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist.

Judging by the volume of titles published each year, mystery readers are restless in their pursuit of literary escape. They might travel to far-flung places or stick close to home with their favorite hobbies. They can solve the world's greatest conspiracies or root for a lone wolf grappling with personal problems mundane and bleak.

I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.