Crime Fiction Quotes - Page 2

• The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and-rarest of the rare-a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next.

  Laura Lippman

  Eye, Writing, Mcdonalds

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• Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

  Sophie Hannah

  Want Something, Ambitious, Rewards

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• In crime fiction, I just don't write the parts that aren't a thriller and it's exactly the same in my TV reporting - I distill the essence of the story until it's only the jewels of the tale - and leave in only the most compelling and exciting parts.

  Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Writing, Essence, Jewels

  "Interview: Hank Phillippi Ryan, 'The Other Woman'". Interview with Pamela Clare, happyeverafter.usatoday.com. October 4, 2012.

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• When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.

  Michael Connelly

  Teenager, Book, Fiction

  "Michael Connelly on Bosch and His Part in the McConaissance". Interview with Bruce Fretts, www.esquire.com. February 11, 2015.

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• Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

  Charles Frazier

  Attitude, Black, Style

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• You're about to meet a new great dame of crime fiction in Death Was the Other Woman. Linda L. Richards does a stunning job in creating a character with a voice and eye right out of a 1930s L.A. hard-boiled classic: guns and gams, booze and bodies, peepers and perps. Move over, Sam Spade: Kitty Pangborn is on the case.

  Linda Fairstein

  Jobs, Moving, Character

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• I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.

  Denise Mina

  Wings, Guy, Fiction

  "Murder she wrote - and plenty of it: Denise Mina on her career". Interview with Peter Guttridge, www.theguardian.com. July 28, 2007.

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• Henri-Georges Clouzot's cool, clammy, twisty 1955 thriller Diabolique is an almost perfect movie about a very nearly perfect murder, a film in which the artist's methods and the killers' are ideally matched, equal in cunning and in ruthlessness. The screenplay, adapted by Clouzot and three other writers from a novel by the crack French crime-fiction team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, is a fantastically elaborate piece of contrivance, but the scrupulous realism of the direction makes the unnatural tale somehow feel entirely likely.

  Terrence Rafferty

  Team, Artist, Almost Perfect

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• Captain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck.

  Leslie Ford

  Bystanders, Hands, Ideas

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• So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

  Donna Leon

  Violence, Fiction, Painful

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• The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.

  Camilla Lackberg

  Thinking, Fiction, Pace

  "Sweden’s Population: 9 Million. Camilla Lackberg’s Swedish Book Sales: 3 Million. Camilla Who?". Interview with Jesse Kornbluth, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 12, 2010.

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• I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.

  Harlan Coben

  Fiction, Crime, Jerry

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• Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

  Elliott Colla

  Wish, Fiction, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library - I'm a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction - so I'll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I'll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.

  Anthony Geary

  Book, Espresso, Lovely

  "Exclusive: General Hospital's Anthony Geary On Life, Death and the Future of Luke and Laura". Interview with Michael Logan, www.tvguide.com. October 9, 2013.

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• Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good.

  Ken Bruen

  Waiting, Black, Fiction

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• There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.

  Daniel Woodrell

  Sweet, Fiction, Realist

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