Book Quote by S. S. Van Dine

As much as I adore Agatha Christie - and I think people make this claim about murder mysteries in general - it's often a…

— Christopher Bollen

“It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative…

— Anthony Horowitz

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive,

— Janet Malcolm

“In a whodunnit, when a detective hears that Sir Somebody Smith has been stabbed thirty-six times on a train or decapitated, they accept it…

— Anthony Horowitz

Why are murder mysteries so popular? There's a 3-part "formula" (if you want to call it that) for a genre novel: (1) Someone the…

— Lois Duncan

I wanted to write a book that showed how the subjectification of the "the murderer" has changed little in over a hundred years, and…

— Richard Marshall

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.

— Eric Schlosser

“Feeding that ego by consistently printing and televising stories about the murders was assuring that there would be more murders.”

— Robert K. Ressler

“And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis,…

— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

“More murders have been committed for respectability than one would believe possible! The”

— Agatha Christie

“And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets…

— Raymond Chandler

“Thus we find the source of our new multiple murderer primarily among the ambitious who failed - or who believed they would fail -…

— Elliot Leyton