Mystery Novels quotes:

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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. -- Raymond Chandler
There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth. -- Peter Straub
You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!' -- Harlan Coben
Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it? -- Patricia Cornwell
Secrecy can be sexy. It's essential to any good mystery novel. -- Heather Brooke
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. -- Demetri Martin
[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. -- Dorothy Parker
I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible. -- Rabih Alameddine
make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. -- Dorothy L. Sayers
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot... -- Don DeLillo
The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen. -- Mary Roberts Rinehart
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away. -- Anne Tyler
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present. -- Lisa Gardner
Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver. -- Scott Turow
After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults. -- Rodman Philbrick
What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings. -- Sebastian Faulks
I love mystery novels... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure. -- Natasha Trethewey
Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. -- Natalie Goldberg
When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure. -- James Patterson
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. -- Ayn Rand
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot. -- Patricia Highsmith
You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage. -- Sonia Levitin
After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought. -- Jeff Greenfield
I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like... Gene Hackman. -- Alan Furst
Shetland' is adapted from the novel 'Red Bones.' The book is based around an archaeological dig, and the mystery starts with the murder of the elderly woman who crofts the land where the dig is happening. -- Ann Cleeves
Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way. -- Lena Dunham
Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul. -- Gary Krist
Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it. -- Susanna Kearsley
My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.' -- Eleanor Catton
Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' -- Cathleen Schine
One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective.... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero. -- Carolyn Wheat
My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel. -- Sherman Alexie
When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank. -- Linwood Barclay
I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery. -- Patrick Rothfuss
Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. -- Dorothy L. Sayers
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well. -- Lauren Willig
my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest. -- Mary Roberts Rinehart
I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book. -- Alan Bradley
I don't believe that murders can be "solved." I think that this is the big lie of the mystery novel, that you should close the book and feel that the world is back in order and everything's all right. I want the reader to know that the world is not all right, and maybe we ought to do something about it. -- George Pelecanos
Steve Forman strafes the south Florida scene with Boca Knights, an outrageously funny mystery novel with a raft of offbeat characters and prose that moves trippingly off the pen. His main man, Eddie Perlmutter, ex-Boston cop attempting semi-retirement in Boca Raton like a fish trying to retire out of the water, is a character for the ages. Carl Hiaasen, watch your back. -- Douglas Preston
Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints. -- Dorothy L. Sayers
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away -- Anne Tyler
The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law."(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949) -- Raymond Chandler

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