Quotes for All
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 … Read more
[On Dashiell Hammett:] … he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. Dorothy Parker
make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. Dorothy L. Sayers
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot. Don DeLillo
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. Demetri Martin
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
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Arthur Conan Doyle
I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you’re going … Read more