Books Quote by Cyril Connolly

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath…

— Dorothy L. Sayers

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last,…

— Dashiell Hammett

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving…

— Christopher Bollen

I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution.…

— Robert Cormier

A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations. Such matters…

— S. S. Van Dine

“Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he…

— Jonathan Lethem

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

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

— Shane Black

A detective story is just the premise for conflict, as a Western is.

— Lorne Greene

“The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.”

— Natsume Soseki

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

— Anonymous

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that…

— Raymond Chandler