Mystery fiction Quotes
Mystery novels
Top Quotes
“It is, it ought to be, it must be a morality.”
“Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.”
“What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.”
“Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.”
“When I’m asked why I write crime fiction, I always answer that I enjoy playing games.”
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
“Detective stories—the modern fairy tales.”
“Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement that any other single subject.”
“A genre which has traditionally been bedevilled by rules, regulations, and rituals reminiscent of a third-rate Masonic cult.”
“The mystery whose power as a storytelling form persisted despite its long-term residence in the low-rent precincts of critical esteem.”
“It seemed to me quite poignant that this genre should have flourished as a kind of therapeutic reaction to the horrors of the Great War.”
“"Quotes on Crime Writing", Crime Thriller Hound (2013–2024)”
“For me, Private Eye stories were the easiest of the lot. All you had to do was talk out of the side of your mouth and get in trouble with the cops.”
“In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mobs.”
“I had an interest in death from an early age. It fascinated me. When I heard ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,’ I thought, ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’”
“Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.”
“A Private Eye was Superman wearing a fedora.”
“I got a suffocating grey impression of armaments catalogues and code nerds and excessively factual dialogue disclosing how every double-cross has another behind it and all roads lead to a vast distrust.”
“Why bother yourself about the cataract of drivel for which Conan Doyle is responsible? I am sure he never imagined that such a heap of rubbish would fall on my devoted head in consequence of his stories.”