Crime Novel Quotes

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

Early in his writing career Michael Lincoln expected he would look up from his word processor, out through his window and be able to take in the flat calm of the Pacific Ocean, or the choppy Atlantic. The North Sea, even, maybe the Thames river. Some body of water, surely. He glanced up from the first draft of his third crime novel and beheld the magnificent vista of Garrand's Scrap Yard in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. ~ GB Hope

And as for returning to work as a reporter - something she'd given considerable thought to before taking over her father's inquiry agency - the Sydney newspapers had dismissed most of their women reporters home once the men started to return from the war, or else confined them to the social pages, or covering the Easter Show, which was a bit too steep a downgrade for Billie after she'd chased Nazi activity across Europe, built a good portfolio of published articles, and worked alongside the likes of Lee Miller and Clare Hollingworth.

No, she wouldn't last in that kind of work. It was an imperfect world, and her chosen profession was decidedly imperfect, but for now she had a hint of that spark again, that sense of doing something that mattered to someone. ~ Tara Moss

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

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

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

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

For her, from the Tiber down, there, there beyond the crumbling castles, and after the blond vineyards, there was, on the hills and mountains, and in the brief plains of Italy, a kind of great fertile womb, two swollen Eustachian tubes, streaked with an abundance of granules, the granular and greasy, the happy caviar of the race. From time to time, from the great Ovary ripened follicles opened, like pomegranate seeds: and red grains, mad with amorous certitude, descended upon the city, to encounter the male afflatus, the vitalizing impulse, that spermatic aura of which the ovarists of the eighteenth century wrote their fantastic treatise. ~ Carlo Emilio Gadda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some colleagues, a tiny bit envious of his intuitions, a few priests, more acquainted with the many evils of our time, some subalterns, clerks, and his superiors too, insisted he read strange books: from which he drew all those words that mean nothing, or almost nothing, but which serve better than other to dazzle the naïve, the ignorant. ~ Carlo Emilio Gadda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races. ~ Mary McCarthy

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years - the years during which young men enter their criminal prime - the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime. ~ Steven D. Levitt

It doesn't bother you, that everyone believes different things?" "Why should it?" he asked. "We all believe the same thing really, we simply give it different names. Hardly a crime." Lila ~ V.E Schwab

Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The ~ Frans De Waal

What could there be in this document written by a young girl in 1917? ~ Peter J. Tanous

You're not beautiful," he said. "Your profile said beautiful. You kind of overreached on that one. ~ Diane Dunning

Is poverty of spirit the chief amongst virtues, that Jesus gives it prime place in his teachings? Is it even a virtue at all? Surely not. Manliness of spirit, honesty of spirit, fullness of rightful purpose, these are virtues; poverty of spirit is a crime. ~ Charles Bradlaugh

Lyra marveled at the effect hope could have. ~ Philip Pullman

When I write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there is nobody in between. But when I write a screenplay, it must be a compromise because there are so many elements which are outside the writer's province. ~ Leigh Brackett

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today. ~ Hal Holbrook

Your mama finds you like that, she's going to pitch a fit."
"The only way she'd find out is if you told her I'd come out here with you, and then she'd be too angry at you to yell at me."
"Guess we're partners in crime, then. ~ Jodi Picoult

In rural areas the majority of the victims of violent crime know their assailants (indeed, are probably married to them); in cities, the killer and the mugger come out of the anonymous dark, their faces unrecognized, their motives obscure. ~ Jonathan Raban

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 ~ Epictetus

And the more I thought of what had happened, the wilder and darker it grew. I reviewed the whole extraordinary sequence of events as I rattled on through the silent gas-lit streets. There was the original problem: that at least was pretty clear now. The death of Captain Morstan, the sending of the pearls, the advertisement, the letter, - we had had light upon all those events. They had only led us, however, to a deeper and far more tragic mystery. The Indian treasure, the curious plan found among Morstan's baggage, the strange scene at Major Sholto's death, the rediscovery of the treasure immediately followed by the murder of the discoverer, the very singular accompaniments to the crime, the footsteps, the remarkable weapons, the words upon the card, corresponding with those upon Captain Morstan's chart, - here was indeed a labyrinth in which a man less singularly endowed than my fellow-lodger might well despair of ever finding the clue. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I know he's an assassin and I'm just his bizarre hacker partner in crime, but he is . . . different. More than a friend. In fact, if we weren't in the situation we were in, I'd call him my best friend. No one else ever takes care to make sure that I'm comfortable like he does. It's small things that tell me he's thinking of me and my quirks even when I'm not in my own head. No one, not even my brother Daniel, is so attuned to my needs. ~ Jessica Clare

In the second grade, I would just get bored and a joke would pop into my head and I would have to say it. It was almost like I had some brilliant novel in my head that I had to get down, and I would interrupt class all the time and get in trouble. ~ Anthony Jeselnik

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels. ~ Janette Turner Hospital

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door, are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony ... ~ Ray Bradbury

To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long. ~ Louise Brown

Such crimes has superstition caused. ~ Lucretius

I know you, Ruth Ann Carver. I know you better than you know yourself. You think you do things right. You think you're a paragon of right living. This is a self-told lie, one bolstered by your coddling parents and grandparents. ~ Carolyn Lee Adams

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I've had some tremendous adventures, good and bad. It's part of the novel, and a novel isn't interesting if it doesn't have some good and bad. And you don't know what good is if bad hasn't been a part of your life. ~ Lynn Johnston

A sermon without Christ as its beginning, middle, and end is a mistake in conception, a crime in execution. ~ Charles Spurgeon

We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod liver oil. And jogging. I want to drive around in a Terminator, not the heroine in an E. M. Forster novel. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

You need a civil society ... Bushfires can achieve the change from society to community. Bushfires can. Floods can. Ghastly crimes and disasters can. Places can change ... but it takes blood, sweat and tears. ~ Bob Maguire

Crime is a social problem, and education is the only real deterrent. Look at all of us in prison; we were all truants and dropouts, a failure of the educational system. Look at your truancy problem, and you're looking at your future prisoners. Put the money there. ~ Wilbert Rideau

Nobody in this world was born to be the same as anyone else. Turning people into robots, especially children, is a crime against nature itself. ~ Jenna Miscavige Hill

Most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another. ~ Marlena De Blasi

Finally, we must admit, out loud, that it was because of race that we didn't care much what happened to "those people" and imagined the worst possible things about them. The fact that our lack of care and concern may have been, at times, unintentional or unconscious does not mitigate our crime-if we refuse, when given the chance, to make amends. ~ Michelle Alexander

I'm so much happier now that I'm dead. Technically missing. Soon to be presumed dead. Gone. And my lazy lying shitting oblivious husband will go to prison for my murder. Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder. Let the punishment fit the crime. ~ Gillian Flynn

That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read. ~ Adrian Tomine

Houses are like books: so many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still. ~ Milorad Pavic

None of us ever do," said Mrs. Allan with a sigh. "But then, Anne, you know what Lowell says, 'Not failure but low aim is crime.' We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it's grand and great. Hold fast to your ideals, Anne. ~ L.M. Montgomery

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it. ~ Jonathan Coe

She might have been there for you in the aftermath, but I was there when everything came crashing down. ~ Megan Duke

An immersive murder mystery wrapped in an emotionally astute look at the burden of a town's moral history." -- Kirkus Reviews ~ Richard Snodgrass

Here, what do you know of madness and despair?'

'There are no such things. All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. ~ Joseph Conrad

Suddenly, he missed her, their shared history. The way they remained tuned to each other across a room full of people. He's look up and see her green eyes glance at him. Yes. I know. Us. They'd known there was nothing novel about it as far as the world was concerned; they'd known it was only love, which the world had seen billions of times before. Or rather Cheryl had known. He'd never considered it. Having fallen in love with her he'd realised love was what he's been waiting for. The question of what he [i]wanted[/i] out of life had been answered. Whereas Cheryl had space left over. It was one of the differences between them. It was what kept him striving towards her. ~ Glen Duncan

I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel. ~ Kate O'Mara

I never get writer's block. My secret ... I have purring cats in surround sound while I write ... best white noise on the planet. R.Rose when asked how she deals with writer's block. ~ R. Rose