Quotes About Detective Novels

#1. Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

Umberto Eco

#2. I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

Patrick Modiano

#3. 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

#4. In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.

Stieg Larsson

#5. When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.

Tim Pratt

#6. Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.

Sarah Vowell

#7. The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Rex Stout

#8. I love the Swedish people for their detective novels, their archipelago, their sense of humor, their carbonated vodka, and most especially, for their wonderful hospitality.

Michael Levitt

#9. I read a lot of detective novels.

Caitlin Kittredge

#10. I read Parker's Spenser series in college. When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he's an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.

Harlan Coben

#11. I did not have an unlimited library to choose from on Robben Island. We had access to many unremembered mysteries and detective novels and all the works of Daphne du Maurier, but little more.

Nelson Mandela

#12. The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels.

P.D. James

#13. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Paul Auster

#14. 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.

James Patterson

#15. The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story.

Adam Christopher

#16. He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.

B.V. Lawson

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

George Orwell

#18. I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#19. 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

#20. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

B.V. Lawson

#21. Your blood reveal your most intimate secrets. Are you dying of leukimia or AIDS? Did you smoke cigarette or drink a glass of wine in the last few hours? Are you prozac because you're depressed, or Viagra because you can't get it up?

Tess Gerritsen

#22. Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.

B.V. Lawson

#23. I was so high, I needed a stepladder to scratch my own ass.

Kinky Friedman

#24. We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it.

Robert Magarian

#25. I've written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city's Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.

Liz Williams

#26. A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

Kerry Greenwood

#27. 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

#28. The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.

Soseki Natsume

#29. My first three books, the collections, were fun to write and a great start but I have matured so much as a writer since then and am extremely proud of the Detective Byone novels- they will be my legacy!

Ricardo M. Fleshman

#30. I included receipts, faxes, newspaper clippings, all sorts of things. I've read novels composed entirely of emails or letters, but not assembled across this kind of mix of materials. I wanted to create the feeling of a detective going through a box of clues.

Brian Pinkerton

#31. Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

Otto Penzler