Detective Fiction Quotes

Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all.

Reading my way all the way through Sherlock Holmes gave me a lifelong love for crime and detective fiction.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

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.

It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.

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.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.