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Mystery fiction

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Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement that any other single subject. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Mystery fiction is a literary genre where the nature of an event remains mysterious until the end of the story. Crime fiction is a subgenre which centres on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, often a murder.

Quotes

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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order. ~ P. D. James
Detective stories—the modern fairy tales. ~ Graham Greene
  • As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. ... He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics.
  • Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a lovestory or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.
  • Why bother yourself about the cataract of drivel for which Conan Doyle is responsible? I am sure he never imagined that such a heap of rubbish would fall on my devoted head in consequence of his stories.
    • Joseph Bell, quoted in Jessie M. E. Saxby, Joseph Bell: An Appreciation by an Old Friend (1913)
  • Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement that any other single subject.
  • I generally thought of a character or two, and then of a set of incidents, and the question was how my people would behave. They had the knack of just squeezing out of unpleasant places and of bringing their doings to a rousing climax.
  • Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
    • Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder", in The Atlantic Monthly (December 1944)
  • Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.
    • Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder", in The Atlantic Monthly (December 1944)
  • It seems to have been taken for granted, quite wrongly, that because murder novels are easy reading they are also light reading. They are no easier reading than Hamlet, Lear or Macbeth. They border on tragic and never quite become tragic. Their form imposes a certain clarity of outline which is only found in the most accomplished ‘straight’ novels.
    • Raymond Chandler, letter to James Sandoe (17 October 1948)
  • In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mobs.
  • Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
  • The setting for the crime stories by what we might call the Mayhem Parva school would be a cross between a village and a commuters’ dormitory in the South of England, self-contained and largely self-sufficient. It would have a well-attended church, an inn with reasonable accommodation for itinerant detective-inspectors, a village institute, library and shops—including a chemist’s where weed killer and hair dye might conveniently be bought.
  • What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
  • A genre which has traditionally been bedevilled by rules, regulations, and rituals reminiscent of a third-rate Masonic cult.
  • It is, it ought to be, it must be a morality.
    • Edith Pargeter (‘Ellis Peters’), from her obituary in The Daily Telegraph (16 October 1995)
  • I had an interest in death from an early age. It fascinated me. When I heard ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,’ I thought, ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’
    • P. D. James, interviewed by Shusha Guppy in The Paris Review, no 135 (Summer 1995)
  • With Agatha Christie ingenuity of plot was paramount—no one looked for subtlety of characterization, motivation, good writing. It was rather like a literary card trick. Today we’ve moved closer to the mainstream novel, but nevertheless we need plot.
    • P. D. James, interviewed by Shusha Guppy in The Paris Review, no 135 (Summer 1995)
  • Murder itself is not interesting. It is the impetus to murder, the passions and terrors which bring it to pass and the varieties of feelings surrounding the act that make a sordid or revolting event compulsive fascination. Even the most ardent readers of detective fiction are not much preoccupied with whether a Colt Magnum revolver or a Bowie knife was used to dispatch the victim. The perpetrator’s purpose, the ‘why’, is what impels them to read on.
    • Ruth Rendell, The Reason Why: An Anthology of the Murderous Mind (1995), introduction
  • All over England, it seemed to me, bodies were being discovered by housemaids in libraries. Village poison pens were tirelessly at work. There was murder in Mayfair, on trains, in airships, in Palm Court lounges, between the acts. Golfers stumbled over corpses on fairways. Chief Constables awoke to them in their gardens. We had nothing like it in West Cork.
    • William Trevor, acceptance speech on winning the David Cohen Award (1999)
    • Reported in Peter Kemp (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, 2nd ed. (2003), p. 57
  • I got a suffocating grey impression of armaments catalogues and code nerds and excessively factual dialogue disclosing how every double-cross has another behind it and all roads lead to a vast distrust.
  • When I’m asked why I write crime fiction, I always answer that I enjoy playing games.
  • It seemed to me quite poignant that this genre should have flourished as a kind of therapeutic reaction to the horrors of the Great War.
  • For me, Private Eye stories were the easiest of the lot. All you had to do was talk out of the side of your mouth and get in trouble with the cops.
    • Ed McBain, in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times (2001)
  • The mystery whose power as a storytelling form persisted despite its long-term residence in the low-rent precincts of critical esteem.
    • Scott Turow, in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times (2001)
  • Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.
    • Denise Mina, interviewed by Dinitia Smith, "Denise Mina and the Rise of Scottish Detective Fiction", The New York Times (22 July 2006), online
  • Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. This tradition began in America with writers like Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, who wrote about grifters, losers, petty crooks and bums. These were struggling working stiffs barely making it, and only a wrong decision away from falling between the cracks or pushing someone else into one.
    • Adrian McKinty, "Crime fiction: the new punk?", The Guardian (4 June 2013), online

See also

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