Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.
Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.
Crime fiction is a way of satisfying that nosy need to know.
I'd always wanted to write crime fiction. I loved Nancy Drew.
With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.
Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.
Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.
I had done 12 little romance books, and I decided I wanted to move into crime fiction.
I not only read Raymond Chandler but read all the crime fiction classics. I was hooked.
There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.
If you want to start reading Swedish crime fiction, you have to start with Sjowall and Wahloo.
I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.
I think there's a concept that crime fiction is or was male-dominated, but it really never has been.
I love crime fiction, and I'm proud to be part of it, but I'm not without criticism for my own genre.
There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.
Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.
My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.
I'm most interested in people who've lived life in the extreme, which is what draws me to crime fiction.
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
It wasn't a decision to become a writer. I wanted to become a writer of crime fiction. I was very specific.
I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.
I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.
The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.
People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.
For me, crime fiction was an opportunity to sneak up on readers with social issues, something they won't go out of their way to seek.
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.
I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
If you think the shifting tectonics of world history might make for a juicy crime fiction backdrop, the last decade or so has proved you right.
Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.
The great thing about America is I always come back with more books and more tip-offs of who to read. It's a country in love with crime fiction.
I've always been drawn to the extremes of human behavior, and crime fiction is a great way to explore the lives and stories of fascinating people.
Traditionally in crime fiction, women exist as a bedroom convenience or to screw up in order that the plot may progress. I wanted no part of that.
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.
The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent.
I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.
I've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.
When I'm working, I always read stuff that's as far away from what I'm working on as possible, so I'll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.
Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.
When I began to write, I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or L.A. seemed to have stronger identities.
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.
Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.
When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
After I started writing crime fiction, I said to myself, 'I may be limited, but the genre's not. There's no reason to change genres if I'm happy writing what I write.' And I am.
I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.
When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. I was not interested in reading 'The Glass Key' or 'The Maltese Falcon' - stuff that was 40 or 50 years old.
We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.
This next to never happens, but if I had time to sit on a beach and read, I wouldn't read a cozy. But I've read cozies. That's how I got interested in crime fiction: because my mother was a soft-boiled reader.
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.