Mystery Fiction

"“Hard-boiled = tough, noir = screwed." - Jack Bludis

 "Science fiction is about upsetting society.  Mystery is about restoring it." -Roberta Rogow

 "In Shakespeare, tragic heroes fall from mountaintops; in noir they fall from curbs." - Dennis Lehane

"The badder the lead, the better the read." - Lawrence Maddox

"All you have to do to get me to buy an Agatha Christie novel is change the cover." - Fran Liebowitz

"I don’t think of my bad guys as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank." -- Elmore Leonard

"Only a crime writer finds a lack of evidence suspicious." - Mysti Berry

“Really good mysteries always make me feel like an idiot.” – B.K. Stevens

“Norman Bates was one of my first crushes.” – Gillian Flynn

"Everything goes back to Saint Hammett and Saint Chandler.” - Larry Kleinfeld

“ I love mysteries and thrillers, but many are so well plotted and written that I don’t feel guilty at all about reading them.” -Lynne Cheney

“Hammett wrote the man he was afraid he was, whereas Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be.” - James Ellroy

“The Detective novel is the art-for-art’s sake of yawning Philistinism.” – V.S. Pritchett

“The police procedural is almost by definition a novel of manners.” –Rex Burns

"The detective story developed as a form of science fiction." -Aaron Marc Stein

“It’s always good to bring the police into a story. It makes a use for them.” – Michael Stanley

"The more people who die in Chapter Two, the fewer names you have to keep track of in Chapter Three." -Kurt True 

"When I see a book that's supposed to be 'gut-crunching suspense' I always ask myself, do I sincerely want my guts crunched this week?" -William DeAndrea