Quotes on Mysteries

 "Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil."  -Lord Byron

"It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit."  -Antoine Rivarol


"The crime novel is the great moral literature of our time."  -Jean-Patrick Manchette     

"Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book."  -Mickey Spillane   
                    
"Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art."  -W.H. Auden
             
"I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of."  -Dashiell Hammett
 
"[Dashiell Hammett’s] The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote."  -Rex Stout     
                    

"There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better."  -S.S. Van Dine       
              
"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."   -G.K. Chesterton   
                     
“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.” ― Thomas Moore
 
“When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”  ― Charles Baxter 

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."  -Agatha Christie
 
"A really good detective never gets married."   -Raymond Chandler

"To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy."  -Rex Stout

"A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week."   -Evan Hunter

"What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order."  -P. D. James
  

“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work."  - Arthur Conan Doyle