San Francisco would be a good location for a murder mystery.
I admit," I said, "that a second murder in a book often cheers things up." - Hastings
I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!
A human hires a hit man to kill his cousin for money, boring. That same hit man botches the job twice, funny. Then �the desperate hit man sends a ghoul after the girl to finish things up, my curiosity's piqued. That same ghoul ends up with his head cut off by a mysterious redhead . . . Ah. Now I'm interested.
Yeah, I had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists.
One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.
The Postman Always Rings Twice that's a book that I think every writer should read - that has to do with technique. But it's also a novel narrated by a guy who has decided by page 11 that he's fallen in love with a woman, and they're going to murder her husband so they can be together. There's nothing remotely likeable about him, but James M. Cain brings you so far into his head that, at a certain point, you have that uncomfortable but also thrilling sensation of seeing things exactly as he sees it.
I believe that the evidence will show that there was not so much a conspiracy, but a convergence of interests with three different groups that had an interest in eliminating [Malcolm X] voice and his vision.
Last night, two men tried to force my shutters. I recognized them: they are two of Rodin's Italian models. He told them to kill me. I am in his way; he wants to get rid of me.
I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
There is no question at all that Manson was sending Tex, Sadie, Katie, and Linda out on his mission of murder.
There is nothing more dread and more shameless than a woman who plans such deeds in her heart as the foul deed which she plotted when she contrived her husband's murder.
I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.
The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.
People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.
After further introductions were made, we settled in the family room. Yes, the living room would have been nicer, but I wanted comfortable surroundings while plotting to murder one famed historical figure with another one. ~Cat
