Crime Novel Quotes & Sayings

All I've really ever done is write since I was 17, so I don't know anything about anything. For me to do a novel, I have to talk to people who know things. And what keeps me in suspense is that I am a crime aficionado. — Lisa Gardner

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores. — Jo Nesbo

Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger. — John Waters

Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps. — William Monahan

Dastardly devious, cleverly conceived, and just a whole lot of fun to read, DEATH PERCEPTION is Lee Allen Howard on fire and at his finest. Rife with winsome weirdness, it's like the mutant stepchild of Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King, mixing a truly unique paranormal coming-of-age story with a quirky cast of offbeat noir characters into a novel that's simply unforgettable ... and hilariously original. A supernatural crime story, blazing with creative intrigue ... don't miss it. — Michael Arnzen

...even if all they did was look at each other, it rattled her entire being because there was no thought or person or barrier between them. Not a single one. They were both thoroughly absorbed in every moment they spent together. It was terrifying. Like being swept away by a powerful wind, where your body rendered all its control to another force that could ignite as well as destroy you. — Anam Iqbal

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world. — Carl Hiaasen

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift. — Megan Abbott

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children. — Emma Donoghue

The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern. — Ian Rankin

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time. — Sara Sheridan

It's getting a little chilly in here! Why don't we sit by the fireplace and I'll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys! — Angel Ramon Medina

In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball. — Ed Lynskey

Henri-Georges Clouzot's cool, clammy, twisty 1955 thriller Diabolique is an almost perfect movie about a very nearly perfect murder, a film in which the artist's methods and the killers' are ideally matched, equal in cunning and in ruthlessness. The screenplay, adapted by Clouzot and three other writers from a novel by the crack French crime-fiction team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, is a fantastically elaborate piece of contrivance, but the scrupulous realism of the direction makes the unnatural tale somehow feel entirely likely. — Terrence Rafferty

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

Surprised huh, thought you had me back in prison didn't you? To answer your question what keeps me alive is my drive, my drive to kill you! I have nothing, but hate for you and your family. It will be my pleasure taking you out. I don't care about power, plutonium or even being rich. None of that matters to me. I only care about taking you out. Even if I die I want to be the one who is called the killer of Angel Medina! There's no where for you to go. Now we will truly see who is better! Come on put up you hands and prepare for your final battle of your life! - Orlando from Framed: The Second Book of the Thousand Years War — Angel Ramon Medina

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. — James Crumley

I will only write the novel, if I can solve the crime — Andrew Hixson

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel. — Garry Disher

My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read ... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion. — Ann Cleeves

A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude. — S. S. Van Dine

Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic. — Elliott Colla

Sqwaak!" from Fletcher, the environmental crime fighting parrot in The Big Belch graphic novel by Kay Wood. — Kay Wood

When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives. — Richard House

My goal from the outset was to write a novel that perfectly balanced crime and romance. It's not unusual to see detectives or legal personnel fall for each other in literature, but it often stops before it gets exciting. I really hit hard with the romance and erotica; sex is a natural part of any relationship and hence something I didn't want to shy away from. — C.R. Lemons

His body sang with electric energy at their closeness. He'd been physical with many girls in the past, but he'd never felt anything quite like this. They were barely touching and yet every sense in his body was raging like the surface of a storming sea. — Anam Iqbal

Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.

Murder in the Dog Park — Jill Yesko

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character. — Elizabeth George

Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad. — Rebecca McNutt

Chief Johnson has full faith on us. Which means if I can complete this task and hunt down the murderer, not only does the chief won't feel any uncertainty on Anthony and I, but the spirits of the victims can move on. It sounds silly to believe that the undead is still around, but it is the truth. And since I have a good heart, I must use it. — Simi Sunny

I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here. — Peter Temple

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader. — Michael Koryta

I don't mind my friends calling me "Thornes," but the fact of people calling me "Prickly Thornes" draws the line. — Simi Sunny

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point. — Alastair Reynolds

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does. — Sharon Bolton

So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer."
"Me? How?"
"The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read."
"Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them."
She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said. "I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at."
"That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops."
"Oh, nuts. — Raymond Chandler

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11. — Sophie Hannah

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay. — Christopher McQuarrie

A diamond wedding ring, you say?"
I studied his face. Was he putting me on? He looked earnest. "As any guy would expect, a diamond is what she's after," I said. "Did you hold out hope you'd get by for anything less? — Ed Lynskey

After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber. — Brian Azzarello

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened. — Ali Smith

Get a load of this, Frank." Gerald Peyton's pause set off his pronouncement. "She is expecting to get a wedding ring."
"That's understandable," I said, unsure how he could afford a ring on what our firm cleared. Diamond rings - more sold in December than in any other month of the year - went for a cool grand per karat. Weeks ago, I'd priced them - again - for my domestic situation. "What seems to be the problem?"
"That's a big leap for me to make."
"I expect you'll make it with room to spare. — Ed Lynskey

He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched. — Richard K. Morgan

Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy — Sheeja Jose

I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes — Lauren Bradshaw

This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned. — Mark Zero

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. — Zadie Smith

A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo's scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his statue of David. Think of a great and enduring novel like Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment. Think of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Shakespeare's Henry V. Think of a beautifully designed building, like the masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You can't point to any one single item that makes the whole thing work; it's the entire work - all the pieces working together to create an overall effect - that leads to enduring greatness. — John C. Maxwell

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you? — David Lagercrantz

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music. — James Ellroy

It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting. — Mark Billingham

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now. — Allan Massie

Do we really mean it when we say 'in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part or do we add a silent clause, 'unless you shame me or disappoint me?' What is the cost of unconditional love and how capable are we of giving that? — Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers. — James Ellroy

Don't Shoot is a work of moral philosophy that reads like a crime novel - Immanuel Kant meets Joseph Wambaugh. It's a fascinating, inspiring, and wonderfully well written story of one man's quest to solve a problem no one thought could be solved: the scourge of inner city gang violence This is a vitally important work that has the potential to usher in a new era in policing. — John Seabrook

I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience. — Ian Rankin

Just because it's got a gun doesn't make it a crime novel, and just because there's a horse doesn't make it a western. — Daniel Woodrell

Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that. — Ed Lynskey

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan. — Val McDermid

Just when you thought the mafia novel was dead, Tod Goldberg breathes new life into it. Gangsterland, the best mafia novel in years, is a dark, funny, and smart page-turning crime story. It's also a moving, thoughtful meditation on ethics, religion, family, and a culture that eats itself. I loved this book. — Sara Gran

I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once. — Noah Baumbach

The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice. — Michael Connelly

Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm. — Tom Vater

Quote taken from Chapter 1:
That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham. — Ed Lynskey

Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo

How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies? — Todd Morr

I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?' — Sophie Hannah

I do like Captain Beefheart (Trout Mask Replica is a misunderstood masterpiece!) and I do have two kids but I've never written a prize winning novel called Oh, Bollocks! — Jon Edgell

I let my gaze travel out the picture window. Unlike at my old doublewide trailer perched on the fringe of a played out quarry, here I owned a real yard with real grass that screamed for mowing each Monday a.m. I sat at the kitchen table, cooling off from just having finished this week's job. Yes, here in 2005, I was a full-fledged suburbanite, but I'd been called worse. — Ed Lynskey

Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote over five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. Source: Wikipedia — Daniel Defoe

Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is such an important novel in terms of suspense and setting a perfect scene for crime — Alanna Knight

It's an unusual way to write a crime novel, to have these lingering, fairly large story points, but it's something I knew I had to do if I wanted to write a sequel ... but, you know, people still have to read and enjoy this book, or it's a moot point. — Tod Goldberg

My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time. — Brian Hodge

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. — David Hewson

His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles. — Stephen King

Read my book and you shall know thee — Oscar Sanders

The first teacher, the first kiss, and the first crime. I've always been hindered by my dislike for repetition. The first time you do anything, it's creative, but from then on it's just work. — Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction. — John Scalzi

Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat. — Ed Lynskey

In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way. — Adrian McKinty

Regress towards progress - Dr Wannamaker — Lauren Bradshaw

I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end. — John Gordon Sinclair

Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face. — Randolph Randy Camp

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities. — Val McDermid