Noir Detective Quotes

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'

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

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

When wearing a trench coat, you're allowed to act like Humphrey Bogart when he was detective Sam Spade.

I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

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 learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

I'm working on something that's not yet novel-shaped but is something of a film-noir-flavored 'Alice in Wonderland.' It will also very likely be a single volume story and not the start of a series.

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

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.

'The Big Sleep' is an unsentimental, surrealist excitement in which most of the men in Hollywood's underworld are murdered and most of the women go for an honest but not unwilling private sleuth (Humphrey Bogart).

I've read a thousand private-eye novels.

The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.

'Double Indemnity' is one of my all time favorites. That's my favorite.

A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.

Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.

Dorothy B. Hughes - there's a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I've read her novel 'In a Lonely Place' about eight or nine times.

Walter Mosley was not the first black crime writer, nor was he the first to fuse genre conventions with larger social concerns. But when 'Devil in a Blue Dress' introduced the Los Angeles-based private detective Easy Rawlins nearly 20 years ago, it was clear the author set out to stretch the boundaries of the mystery and thriller framework.