Quotes & Sayings About Detective Stories

But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days
you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn't, what the hell? It's not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it. — Rob Sheffield

I once started a detective story to make money-but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse! — Mary McCarthy

I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle. — Sergei Lukyanenko

Why did so many teenagers fall for Stanley Horowitz's tricks?"
"These were impressionable teenagers," Nick explained. "Many of them were devoted fans of romantic Vampyre stories. They over-romanticized what it means to be a Vampyre, and that gave Stanley a way to manipulate them."
"I've read Twilight," Tamara said. "My daughter is a huge fan. Is she in any danger?"
"The danger arises from wanting to belong to the in crowd so badly, you lose sight of what's real and what's fantasy."
"Surely today's teenagers know that vampires are fantasy," Tamara said.
"Possibly. But remember, Vampyres are not romantic. Vampyres are dead. They are walking reminders of tragedy. Loving one is necrophilia. And wanting to be one is the first step on the road to catastrophe. — Abramelin Keldor

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism. — V.S. Pritchett

The final two issues of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin collaboration, Detective Comics #475 and #476, are now esteemed alongside the greatest Batman stories ever created and would provide the seed for Tim Burton's 1989 feature film. In — Glen Weldon

She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers - awful, as usual - their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading. — Stella Gibbons

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art. — W. H. Auden

Initially, I began writing myself into my favorite shows. I was a detective on 77 Sunset Strip, the missing Cartwright sibling they never talked about on Bonanza, and the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. before there was a Girl from U.N.C.L.E., not to mention an active participant in the serialized stories on The Mickey Mouse Club. — Marie Ferrarella

Both Tom and I adore detective stories. Isn't that so, Tom?" [Lady Brace]
"Right!" agreed her husband ... "But they've got to be proper detective stories. They've got to present a tricky, highly sophisticated problem, which you're given fair opportunity to solve."
"And," amplified Virginia, "no saying they're psychological studies when the author can't write for beans."
"Correct!" her husband agreed again. "Couldn't care less when you're supposed to get all excited as to whether the innocent man will be hanged or the innocent heroine will be seduced. Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for? The thing is the mystery. It's not worth reading if the mystery is simple or easy or no mystery at all. — Carter Dickson

The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead. — Stephen Leacock

It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. — G.K. Chesterton

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Lady Sylvia McCordle: Mr Weissman
Tell us about the film you're going to make.
Morris Weissman: Oh, sure. It's called "Charlie Chan In London". It's a detective story.
Mabel Nesbitt: Set in London?
Morris Weissman: Well, not really. Most of it takes place at a shooting party in a country house. Sort of like this one, actually. Murder in the middle of the night, a lot of guests for the weekend, everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing.
Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it?
Morris Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you.
Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it. — Julian Fellowes

The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals. — Natsuo Kirino

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds. — Philip Guedalla

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself. — Nic Pizzolatto

I don't think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story. — Mary Lavin

I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story. — Stephen Hopkins

I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Boredom has been used as a technique, it is a device. In Zen, boredom is used as a device: you are bored to death, and you are not allowed to escape. You are not to go outside, you are not to entertain yourself, you are not to do, you are not to talk, you are not to read novels and detective stories. No thrill. No possibility to escape anywhere. — Rajneesh

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days. — Albert Brooks

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. — Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional
to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. — Kate Summerscale

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight. — Dashiell Hammett

I love the rabbit hole. I spend a lot of time looking at images, Google mapping, etc. I also love to read court transcripts, FBI files, stuff like that. You go through vast, boring stretches, but the voices are always so fascinating and slowly a story begins to emerge. It's very much like playing detective. — Zachary Lazar

His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like God.
("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories. — Jeffery Deaver

I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible
well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones
and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.) — Anna Quindlen

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories. — Agatha Christie

The perplexity of life arises from their being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call it's triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. — G.K. Chesterton

The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man. — Weston La Barre

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories. — Ruth Rendell

I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories. — Agatha Christie

To me, detective stories are a great solace, a sort of mental knitting, where it doesn't matter if you drop a stitch."

[From a letter to George Lyttelton] — Rupert Hart-Davis

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game. — Rex Stout

In detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have — Dorothy L. Sayers

Because noir isn't really a new thing at all. It's just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that's all. He's no less idealistic - there're good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. — Catherynne M Valente

A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE IT IS VERY DIFFICULT to classify The Man Who Was Thursday. It is possible to say that it is a gripping adventure story of murderous criminals and brilliant policemen; but it was to be expected that the author of the Father Brown stories should tell a detective story like no-one else. On this level, therefore, The Man Who Was Thursday succeeds superbly; if nothing else, it is a magnificent tour-de-force of suspense-writing. However, — G.K. Chesterton

I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning. — Raymond Chandler

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society's economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The "ideological superstructure" of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. — Ludwig Von Mises

I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils. — Stephen King

This seems to have taken me a long way from detective stories, but explains, perhaps, why I have got more interest in my victims than my criminals. The more passionately alive the victim, the more glorious indignation I have on his behalf, and am full of a delighted triumph when I have delivered a near-victim out of the valley of the shadow of death. Returning — Agatha Christie

From what I've read of detective stories, inspectors always do want to drag the pond first. — A.A. Milne

I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980]. — Christopher Bollen

There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living - cook books and detective stories. — Rex Stout

Strange sounds, voices - A child's laughter heard through their mother's bedroom door. - The stories told at family gatherings. -Their mother's sometimes odd behaviour. - Twins Jahlil and Jahmeer, with the help of their uncle, a Philadelphia Detective, and a few friends, decide to find out what went on in the upstairs apartment where their mother lived as a young child. They are determined to discover the mystery behind The House On Galloway Rd that has continually traumatized their mother. — Adele Frances

That's just where I must part company with you, Inspector," said the Vicar with a gentle smile. "I'm rather a voracious reader of mystery stories, and it's always struck me that the detective in fiction is inclined to underrate the value of intuition. — John Bude

Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter. — Agatha Christie

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen - to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all. — Anna Lyndsey

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting! — Marie Windsor

Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns. — Sergio Aragones

I've always thought hard-boiled detective novels an American art form. At their best, they're more than who-dun-its or thrillers, they're vehicles for a writer's observations about culture, politics, philosophy, music, history and a time or a place. Or life, it's ownself. When you read James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett or James Lee Burke, their stories are always about far more than good guys chasing bad guys. That's the kind of book I wanted to write. Still do. — Jim Nesbitt

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside. — Stieg Larsson

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin. — Matthew Pearl

If we were all as wise as we should be, we would have no stories to tell — Freeman Wills Croft

Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories. — Elizabeth Savage

A three-pint problem — Melvyn Small

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle. — Christopher Bollen

Detective stories are mostly bunkum ... But they amuse people ... And they're useful sometimes. — Agatha Christie

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life. — Carl Jung

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) — W. H. Auden

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted. — Cyril Connolly

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature. — Stieg Larsson

We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes. — Adam Ross

In detective stories ... I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but ... there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild. — Bertrand Russell

Where there's a will there's a detective story. — Carolyn Wells

It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers,the people, the common man,prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling bad things than in selling good things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely. — Ludwig Von Mises

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average
or only slightly above average
detective story does ... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way. — Raymond Chandler

Like all really nice people, you have a weakness for detective stories, and feel that there are not enough of them. So, after all that you have done for me, the least that I can do for you is to write you one. — A.A. Milne

Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist? — C.S. Lewis

Man lives such a dull and drab life that he wants some sensation. Those who are a little wiser, they read scientific fiction or detective stories. Those who are not so wise, they read spiritual fiction. — Osho

Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving. — Gertrude Stein

Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. — George Orwell

It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of "Baywatch." So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of "Baywatch" for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. Look, I don't give you grief over where you get your ideas from. — Neil Gaiman

I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history. — Elizabeth Kostova

It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.
Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party. — Umberto Eco

I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are. — Rex Stout

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone. — Jonathan Lethem

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [ ... ] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible. — T. S. Eliot

Don't wanna ever take your shoes off in coconut land. Never know when you're gonna have to run. — Dianne Harman