Top 76 Quotes About Crime Novels
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.
Megan Abbott
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.
Denise Mina
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.
Kate Mosse
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.
Tom Greer
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. She knew with chilling and absolute certainty she was next.
Alexa Grace
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time.
Brian Hodge
#44. 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
#45. The sliver of sun turned water crystals among the coal-colored clouds into the halo of a sundog.
B.V. Lawson
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Cursed greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused.
Virgil
Debby Grahl
#51. The smell of beer surrounded him in a cloud as if he'd been doused in Eau de Frat Boy cologne.
B.V. Lawson
#52. 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
#53. He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.
B.V. Lawson
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Blood doesn't speak of its owner.
Mita Jain
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The morning drizzle tightened the District's notorious braided-knot commute into a noose of traffic. - Scott Drayco
B.V. Lawson
#62. 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
#63. Both men were pictures of the kind of grief that cauterizes open wounds in memory and turns them into black scars.
B.V. Lawson
#64. 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
#65. He was a Super Politician, defender of untruths, injustice and the American power-play.
B.V. Lawson
#66. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.
B.V. Lawson
#67. 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
#68. I go where I want to go, I do what I want to do, and I am beholden to no one.
Mark M. DeRobertis
#69. 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
#70. We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it.
Robert Magarian
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.
B.V. Lawson
#74. 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
#75. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
