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.
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.
I admit," I said, "that a second murder in a book often cheers things up." - Hastings
I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.
I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.
Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?
... 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.
Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre.
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.
I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.
The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.
Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.
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.
We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.
There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.
I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.
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.
It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.
Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.
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.
Six books after the surprises of 'Full Dark House,' the Bryant and May novels continue to stay within the bounds of formula by straining against them in new ways.
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.
When I was asked to play 'Miss Marple,' I was given the Kevin Elyot script for 'The Body in the Library.' I was a fan of his theatre work anyway, and I just thought it was brilliant. I was immediately taken by 'Miss Marple,' so I read some of the novels, and I knew I had to do it.
I was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.
