Noir 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.

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

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.

[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.

The Postman Always Rings Twice that's a book that I think every writer should read - that has to do with technique. But it's also a novel narrated by a guy who has decided by page 11 that he's fallen in love with a woman, and they're going to murder her husband so they can be together. There's nothing remotely likeable about him, but James M. Cain brings you so far into his head that, at a certain point, you have that uncomfortable but also thrilling sensation of seeing things exactly as he sees it.

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.

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.

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

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.