Otto Penzler Quotes

When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

Having set its tonal template, Vertigo Crime laid low for a few months before starting in earnest at the beginning of 2010.

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.

I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.

I am more of a suspense writer. A mystery writer solves mysteries. I am a 'high suspense' writer.

I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.

I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.

For whatever reason, I am just very attracted to mystery stories, solving mysteries. I was a huge fan of 'The Jinx.' That's such a satisfying show because it's all... I don't want to give it away to anybody, but it's really amazing.

I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

I've always really liked murder mysteries and thrillers, and great to be able to be actually part of one.

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

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.

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.

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

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.