Quotes About Murder Mysteries

#1. In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

Ellen Glasgow

#2. I don't have a whole bunch of literary connections. I don't write reviews or attend writer's conferences. I'm kind of shy and don't want to go to a party. I just want to stay home and read my murder mysteries and try to write and cook dinner.

Susanna Kaysen

#3. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents in the school holidays, and the only books in the house were a copy of the Bible and Agatha Christie's 'Murder at the Vicarage.' I developed a taste for murder mysteries and then later discovered libraries, second-hand bookshops, and jumble sales.

Val McDermid

#4. You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

Lily King

#5. People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

Denise Mina

#6. Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports.

Mason Cooley

#7. Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#8. I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.

Stephen Sondheim

#9. On the advice of my U.K. publishers, I chose a sexless anonymity and published my first five books under the semi-pseudonym, S. J. Bolton. I was happy. I could hide behind a genderless, classless persona and let my creepy, psychological murder-mysteries speak for themselves.

Sharon Bolton

#10. I read murder mysteries. I exercise 40 minutes a day. I watch videotapes while I exercise. I listen to audiotapes when I am in my car. And I try to stay in three different centuries.

Grover Norquist

#11. In case the term is unfamiliar, the best description ever for 'cozies' is 'murder mysteries where no one cares who got killed because they're all distracted by cooking new recipes or following intricate handicraft instructions.'"--The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

Wendy Welch

#12. People who would never sneer at sci-fi and murder mysteries have no trouble damning the whole romance genre without reading one.

Lauren Willig

#13. Then, like a born and bred asshole, he added to the sheriff, He writes murder mysteries.

Josh Lanyon

#14. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Donna Leon

#15. My goal in life is to get the federal government down to half its present size and under control, and then I can write murder mysteries.

Grover Norquist

#16. As much as I adore Agatha Christie - and I think people make this claim about murder mysteries in general - it's often a very conservative mode of storytelling. Usually it's the greedy, climbing, new-money slimeball who wants to take from the aristocracy.

Christopher Bollen

#17. I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.

Alan Furst

#18. Murder mysteries are puzzles that are fun to resolve.

Kathy Reichs

#19. It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.

Steve McConnell

#20. I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Alan Furst

#21. My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.

Christopher Bollen

#22. Quote taken from Chapter 1 of The Corpse Wore Gingham:
"You love to figure out things as much as I do," Piper said.
"Like what?" Bill asked.
"You fix broken stuff," Piper replied.
"Repairing a broken toaster or steam iron is far different than unraveling a murder mystery," Bill said.

Ed Lynskey

#23. Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.

Neil Gaiman

#24. Within the same hour as the murder took place, Isabel Trumbo sat in her armchair dozing, the Alaskan Outdoor magazine on her lap. Her kid sister Alma fidgeted in the other armchair, from time to time picking up her newspaper folded over to the day's crossword puzzle.

Ed Lynskey

#25. He told me he was used to getting what he wanted.

Celia Conrad

#26. I always loved watching and reading family-friendly mysteries growing up, like the shows Murder, She Wrote and Nancy Drew, and am thrilled to be bringing these New York Times best-selling books right into your living room on the small screen.

Candace Cameron

#27. San Francisco would be a good location for a murder mystery.

Alfred Hitchcock

#28. In the absence of any concrete evidence. I plump for Leonard Stock as the murderer. First, because he's the most unlikely person, and as anyone who has ever read a murder story knows, it's always the most unlikely person who turns out to have done the deed--and fifty thousand authors can't be wrong.

M.M. Kaye

#29. Forgetfulness can sometimes bring freedom of a sort

Neil Gaiman

#30. The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

Maureen Corrigan

#31. It's an honour to have such a wonderful international cast on board for this world famous murder mystery. Writer Stewart Harcourt has created an exquisite script. His attention to detail is impeccable.

David Suchet

#32. I don't think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn't necessarily have a murder in it.

Ruth Rendell

#33. People named Tinkerbell name their daughters Susan.

Neil Gaiman

#34. It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad; I found this far more disquieting than the alternative.

Neil Gaiman

#35. 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

#36. Writing mysteries lets me get away with murder. I think 'the mystery' may be the greatest form for social criticism, simply because it is pedestrian.

Gregory McDonald

#37. A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach.

Gilbert N. Lewis