114 Crime Novels Quotes
Following is our list of crime novels quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about mystery novels.
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Famous Crime Novels Quotes
I'm sort of fascinated by the whole espionage crime thing. — Aaron Eckhart
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers — Jacques Barzun
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. — Raymond Chandler
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. — Agatha Christie
Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special. — Carl Hiaasen
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. — John Irving
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. — Demetri Martin
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions. — Agatha Christie
Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil. — Marquis De Sade
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity. — Tacitus
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. — Aldous Huxley
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie). — Connie Willis
The Postman Always RingsTwice. — James Cagney
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. — Italo Calvino
Short Crime Novels Quotes
- What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits. — Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
- There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. — Albert Camus
- All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. — Milan Kundera
- Crime when it succeeds is called virtue. — Seneca The Elder
Crime Fiction Quotes
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English. — Camilla Lackberg
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
I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library - I'm a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction - so I'll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I'll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast. — Anthony Geary
A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonists taste in music, or were told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for. — Peter Temple
The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for. — Michael Connelly
People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries. — Denise Mina
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid. — James Ellroy
Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good. — Ken Bruen
Mystery Novels Quotes
After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought. — Jeff Greenfield
Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred. — Sherman Alexie
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
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog. — Vladimir Nabokov
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot. — Patricia Highsmith
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. — Ayn Rand
Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere. — Andrea Barrett
One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective.... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero. — Carolyn Wheat
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away — Anne Tyler
Suspense Novels Quotes
Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page. — Sidney Sheldon
Be the hero of your own story. — Joe Rogan
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book. — Elizabeth Hand
Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is one of the best chase-and-escape novels you’ll read this year-or any other year. The pace never lets up. — Nelson Demille
You are the Hero of your own Story. — Joseph Campbell
In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict. — Jeffery Deaver
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there. — Sergio Aragones
Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. — Scott Turow
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present. — Lisa Gardner
Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott. — Lisa Gardner
Detective Fiction Quotes
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. — Raymond Chandler
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. — S. S. Van Dine
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. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again. — Joseph Wambaugh
I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. — Raymond Chandler
I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution. — John Fowles
Fiction Novels Quotes
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. — Orson Scott Card
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message. — Jerry B. Jenkins
People Writing About Crime Novels
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Agatha Christie |
376 | 2192 |
 Aaron Eckhart |
59 | 215 |
 Jacques Barzun |
108 | 495 |
 Raymond Chandler |
219 | 1871 |
 Carl Hiaasen |
68 | 185 |
 John Irving |
275 | 818 |
More Crime Novels Quotes
It's what's in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy. — Agatha Christie
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
The crime novel has always been my favourite genre. — Sara Paretsky
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
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family. — John Banville
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
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
I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature. — James Lee Burke
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
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 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
R.G. Belsky's thought-provoking thriller, The Kennedy Connection, introduces us to a smart, witty, and human hero whose quest to find answers about two crimes - one famous, one all but unnoticed - is loaded with tension and full of unexpected twists and turns. I loved The Kennedy Connection, and can't wait for the next Gil Malloy novel. — Jan Burke
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
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
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
There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels. — Denise Mina
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
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
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
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
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist. — Paul Auster
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
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
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
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there. — Aleksandar Hemon
My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time. — Brian Hodge
Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is such an important novel in terms of suspense and setting a perfect scene for crime — Alanna Knight
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. — Steig Larsson
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
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
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