A Quote by Andrew Shaffer

If you're reading a mystery novel, you kind of want the character to solve the crime instead of completely bumble their way through it. — © Andrew Shaffer
If you're reading a mystery novel, you kind of want the character to solve the crime instead of completely bumble their way through it.
I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'
'The Turnaround' isn't even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don't know any other way to do it than crime.
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
The easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to solve.
Human beings are like detectives. They love a mystery. They love going where the mystery pulls them. What we don't like is a mystery that's solved completely. It's a letdown. It always seems less than what we imagined when the mystery was present. The last scene in `Blow Up' is so perfect because you leave the theater still dreaming. Or the end of `Chinatown,' where the guy says `Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.' It explains so much but it only gives you a dream of a bigger mystery. Like life. For me, I want to solve certain things but leave some room to dream.
The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.
We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.
How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don't think it's so hard, but that's my opinion, and I've written two books on how I think one should do it. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn't look for a magic bullet. You mustn't look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want to look for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build some kind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem you have and what method to use.
Reading my way all the way through Sherlock Holmes gave me a lifelong love for crime and detective fiction.
All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.
If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.
I’d like to be the kind of actor who is remembered for my character. You know how there are cases where even when you watch all the way through the end of a drama, you remember the actor’s name, not the character’s. I want my character’s name to be more remembered than mine.
I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here.
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