Quotes & Sayings About Crime Novels

In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it. — Sara Sheridan

Everywhere on our planet one hand greases another. Often it's done with a bloated face, wearing a serpent's smile.
M.Sullivan — Mike Sullivan

I came, I saw, I concurred... — Darren E. Laws

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

You will never finish your novels if you don't take it one word at a time — Terrence LeRoy Baker

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

Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them. — Tom Greer

The sliver of sun turned water crystals among the coal-colored clouds into the halo of a sundog. — B.V. Lawson

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels. — Megan Abbott

If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot. — Mark Billingham

With so many people lulled into believing everything they found on the Web, he expected computer shrines to pop up in homes soon. Worship the new Oracle of Dell-phi. — B.V. Lawson

He launched into the color-tsunami of Prokofiev's fourth piano sonata. It soon carried him onto a distant shore where the only thing broken was the silence. — B.V. Lawson

Steve had just met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Until now his engagement to Christine had never been a concern. — Stephen Douglass

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct. — Stieg Larsson

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: 'No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.' My husband is a writer of crime novels. His name is William Gordon. And so I had to accommodate to his style because that's what he writes. So we decided we'd give it a try. Well, we almost divorced. — Isabel Allende

The reader is the final arbiter. — Sam Reaves

The M.E. dissected pieces of a corpse to tell a story, while Drayco tried to bring them back from the dead, jagged piece by jagged piece. — B.V. Lawson

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences. — Jesse Kellerman

I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels. — Kate Mosse

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along - and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn't have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn't listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes. — Stieg Larsson

I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels. — Maj Sjowall

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. — Jo Nesbo

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

I go where I want to go, I do what I want to do, and I am beholden to no one. — Mark M. DeRobertis

Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then ... justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads. — Stefan Petrucha

I'm very bad at violence in real life. I can't stand it. And I'm so fed up with crime novels that have too much violence. I can't really do it. It's unnecessary. — David Lagercrantz

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each. — Sophie Hannah

Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books — C.J. Box

He was one of the few men who didn't aspire to be alpha as long as he was in on the hunt. — B.V. Lawson

I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God. — Sara Paretsky

The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club. — Mark Billingham

Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone. — James Sallis

It brings me peace to know that it all began with crime fiction as a child, and that it is there, after a thousand detours, that I have landed again. As a child I found peace in crime novels, and it is with them that I find peace today. There has been some turbulence along the way, but I wouldn't have avoided any of it. I wouldn't have reached the place I have without all of it happening. — Sara Blaedel

I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care. — Mark Billingham

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

He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight. — B.V. Lawson

I needed to know, Jesse. I needed to get inside his head. To find this son of a bitch, I need to get inside his head. - Stephanie Carovella — Nina D'Angelo

I just can't imagine my life without Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. I can spin off of that and talk about Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy. I could talk about other novels, but for me it's Dostoevsky. His sheer size and grandeur, his sacramentality, his ecclesiology, and his sense of the human predicament are as powerful as it gets. Can't imagine not reading the Russians. — Gordon T. Smith

My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear ("Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!") signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there'd be real hell to pay. — Ed Lynskey

Like everywhere else in the world, the book stores of Britain are struggling with being pushed out of the market by online booksellers. The most popular book store chain in the UK is Waterstones. They are closing locations and cutting back as they lost business, but they aren't losing business as fast and as hard as the book stores in the US. There is one reason for this: sales. If you go into a book store in the UK, you will be greeted by tables covered with bestsellers and crime novels and other popular books, stacked high with signs saying "3 for £10". Take heed, American booksellers: people buy more things when you lower the price sometimes. People love a special offer. — Alana Muir

Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge. — B.V. Lawson

I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now. — Jeffrey Rasley

I'm very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn't necessary. If that's all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you're in the wrong job. — Michael Robotham

Both men were pictures of the kind of grief that cauterizes open wounds in memory and turns them into black scars. — B.V. Lawson

A few were journalists and one a novelist, who wanted to get it right. (Rhyme welcomed his presence; he himself was the subject of a series of novels based on cases he'd run and had written the author on several occasions about misrepresentations of real crime scene work. "Must you sensationalize?") — Jeffery Deaver

He was a Super Politician, defender of untruths, injustice and the American power-play. — B.V. Lawson

I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish. — Ken Bruen

The morning drizzle tightened the District's notorious braided-knot commute into a noose of traffic. - Scott Drayco — B.V. Lawson

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad. — David Lagercrantz

I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences. — Stieg Larsson

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family. — John Banville

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life. — Donald Ray Pollock

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving. — Peter Temple

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

Turning the pages of crime novels it occurs to me to ask how it's possible to write so much without saying the word "pain," "life," or "anxiety." I reject this stupid dehumanization. The behaving without motive. The horrific shutting out of what is most vital or important. — Alejandra Pizarnik

The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity. — Alafair Burke

Blood doesn't speak of its owner. — Mita Jain

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank. — Linwood Barclay

In many respects I have gone out of my way to avoid the usual approach adopted in crime novels. I have used some techniques that are normally outlawed - the presentation of Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, is based exclusively on the personal case study made by Lisbeth Salander. — Stieg Larsson

There is interest in a crime-based reality show. With my novels, we are now editing the second book in a series about a defense lawyer whose name is Samantha Brinkman. And I am reviewing speaking engagement opportunities. — Marcia Clark

What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill. — Rampo Edogawa

Cursed greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused.
Virgil — Debby Grahl

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!' — Eleanor Catton

My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

The blight of office cubes housing lawyers and lobbyists had popped up like chokeweeds in the manicured lawn of the family homestead. — B.V. Lawson

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 wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis. — Harlan Coben

If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is ... ' then name a really brilliant crime writer. — Sophie Hannah

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book's plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea. — Michael Ondaatje

And, pointing a trembling finger at Bonetti-Alderighi, with an expression of indignation and a quasi-castrato voice, he launched into the climax:
Ah, so you, Mr. Commissioner, actually believed such a groundless accusation? Ah, I feel so insulted and humiliated! You're accusing me of an act - no, indeed, a crime that, if true, would warrant a severe punishment! As if I were a common idiot or gambler! That journalist must be possessed to think of such a thing!
End of climax. The inspector inwardly congratulated himself. He had managed to utter a statement using only titles of novels by Dostoyevsky. Had the comissioner noticed? Of course not! The man was ignorant as a goat! — Andrea Camilleri

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

A lot of novels use crime as a stepping stone to talk about greater issues. So I just think of myself as a writer. — Karin Slaughter

There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels. — Denise Mina

A news junkie, I read, daily, the 'Times/Sunday Times,' the 'Guardian/Observer,' 'Mail,' and the 'Argus' - both to keep up with crime in Brighton, where I set my novels, and because I think it is vital to support local papers - they provide a unique accountability for councils, emergency services and so much else, and are dangerously undervalued. — Peter James

We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it. — Robert Magarian

Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign. — B.V. Lawson

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

Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand. — Michael Robotham

I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry. — Jo Nesbo

The smell of beer surrounded him in a cloud as if he'd been doused in Eau de Frat Boy cologne. — B.V. Lawson

She was a tornado in a skirt. — B.V. Lawson

Angel you may have lucked out this time, but just remember I'm going to be on your ass until I get my revenge. I promise you this will not be the last time you will see me! You're a dead man Medina, maybe not now but soon! - Orlando to Angel under the crumbling furnace in the hotel. — Angel Ramon Medina

Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow. — Sophie Hannah

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

She knew with chilling and absolute certainty she was next. — Alexa Grace

We just have to sort through the junk. You know, like organising a jumbled box of beads. All we have to do is put each piece in its proper place, and we'll be able to see what we have. — Janice Peacock

40 Words for Sorrow is brilliant-one of the finest crime novels I've ever read. Giles Blunt writes with uncommon grace, style and compassion and he plots like a demon. This book has it all-unforgettable characters, beautiful language, throat-constricting suspense. — Jonathan Kellerman

[I]n adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship. But stories are vital. Stories never fail us, because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. [Contemporary writers, however,] take up their stories as with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. — Philip Pullman

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak. — Sophie Hannah

In the crime novels, a PI is either an ex-cop or has some cop buddies who owed him a favor and who happily provided him with the department's files, while carrying on about how it could cost them their job. I had no cop buddies. I tried to avoid them as much as possible. — Ilona Andrews

I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted. — Denise Mina