Top 1200 Detective Stories Quotes & Sayings

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

When you're a detective on the midnight shift, you don't have a specialty: you roll on any time they need a detective, whether it's big or small.

The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

In detective stories . . . I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but . . . there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.

Crime makes for great drama and it's interesting because it delves into the darker side of us. Those kind of stories go way back, the detective and the criminal.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.

I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

I could imagine actually being a scientist or a detective, but not a detective who puts his hands into gory, bloody things. But more like someone who figures things out. I like to figure things out.

My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.

I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980].

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.

I've always wanted to play a detective. Always loved detective shows, right back to 'Columbo', 'The Rockford Files', 'Starsky & Hutch'.

Our old stories happen to be your new stories. The stories that you're seeing as immigrant stories are your grandparents' stories, are your great-grandparents' stories. You just happen to be separated from them a little bit.

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.

The tradition, particularly in old-school British detective things, is everybody's in the drawing room or the library, and they're all gathered, and the detective walks around and tells them where they were that night, and you see the flashbacks.

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters.

to keep believing in life, until you're sure of death, it's the way a detective should be." - Kogoro Mouri, Detective Conan

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

I think there's part of me that's longing to play a Sherlock Holmes or sort of a House character, like a real detective. Like a real, moody detective. Like a real, sarcastic, mentally ill detective. I think it would be really fun to do something like that.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived Sherlock Holmes, why didn't he give the famous consulting detective a few more quirks: a wooden leg, say, and an Oedipus complex? Well, Holmes didn't need many physical tics or personality disorders; the very concept of a consulting detective was still fresh and original in 1887.

There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living ? cook books and detective stories.

Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.

It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like 'Detective Frost.'

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.

Boredom has been used as a technique, it is a device. In Zen, boredom is used as a device: you are bored to death, and you are not allowed to escape. You are not to go outside, you are not to entertain yourself, you are not to do, you are not to talk, you are not to read novels and detective stories. No thrill. No possibility to escape anywhere.

I liked dark, urban stories like 'Peter Gunn,' which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.

I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story.

Occasionally, I have written about stories related to crime, but I have never attempted a traditional detective story. So I want to write a true detective story.

I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

I spent a lot of time with a real detective, a lady detective inspector who was the only female detective inspector in the whole of East London. She and I hung out a lot. She showed me what she did and I spent time with her. So, [she was] a lot of the inspiration for the way I dressed and sometimes the dialogue in those interview scenes where we're cross examining and questioning the youths and trying to get a confession out of them.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

I suppose I'm not quite the oldest detective on the block - David Jason is. When's he going to retire and give rest of us a chance?! No, his Touch Of Frost is terrific and a wonderful antidote to the po-faced detective shows around at the moment. Anyway, I can't retire. I have a wife and five chickens to feed.

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.

My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.

I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.

Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. The only place success comes before work is a dictionary Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

I like to consider myself a detective, which is how I justify my obsession with my phone. By nature, since I was a kid, I've always wanted to be a detective, and any portal to information and investigating things I have ever been given access to, I have dived into. With my phone, unfortunately, I have immediate access to everything.

Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is unlike True Detective as: it features women who do things. THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is like True Detective as: we shamelessly rip off huge chunks of stuff from Alan Moore.