While I was in jail, they handcuffed me and took me to a backroom, where a detective from the FBI and a Secret Service agent were, and they interrogated me for about three or four hours.
I’ve always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television – by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame – has always called my name. And after seeing ‘True Detective,’ can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets?
Speaking from personal experience, I watch zero shows when they air. The only shows I watch live are awards shows or sports. Shows like ‘True Detective’ and ‘Game Of Thrones,’ I watch every episode, but I don’t watch them as they air, and I think that’s becoming the case for people more.
Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.
I liked dark, urban stories like ‘Peter Gunn,’ which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.
I played a homosexual bodyguard in ‘The Last Detective,’ and that was quite a pleasure to do something slightly different. I was a very camp bodyguard!
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader… He has to die! I can’t have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.
I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
I’ve always wanted to play a police officer or a detective, because I think if I wasn’t an actress that is what I would want to do.
I went to pick my son up from school and walked him back and was in the house preparing dinner, and he came in the house and gave me this flower of chrysanthemum that was full of ants. And he went back out to play and ran out into the street and got hit by a car. The car happened to be driven by a LAPD detective.
I would say ‘The Chill’ by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read ‘The Day of the Jackal’ and ‘The Exorcist’. I hadn’t read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I’m of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.
A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week.
If I’m home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.
My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.
The old detective story that’s got a really complicated motive doesn’t apply to mine.
It’s like being involved in a detective story, looking for that thing that nobody else has found.
You need a crime, a detective, and the solution.
I felt really lucky that ‘Hairstyles Of The Damned’ and ‘The Boy Detective Fails’ were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from ‘Demons’ was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience.
Occasionally, I have written about stories related to crime, but I have never attempted a traditional detective story. So I want to write a true detective story.
When you’re a detective on the midnight shift, you don’t have a specialty: you roll on any time they need a detective, whether it’s big or small.
With the second book, I didn’t have an ideal reader in mind, as it developed quite out of my control, this detective novel of why am I so full of anger, why did I pick up a guitar when I was poor and uneducated.
With any project I work on – not just ‘True Detective’ – I don’t feel the need just to play a strong woman. I don’t want the audience to say, ‘Oh, she was so strong.’ I want to play characters that are flawed and interesting.
There is a sequence in my ‘Detective Comics’ run where you can’t find consecutive issues by the same artist. That’s intentional. That was done on purpose.
As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.
Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it’s 4 A.M.
I wanted to play a TV detective because it’s a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven’t done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.
I remember watching ‘Colombo’ a lot with my dad. That was one of the first detective shows I remember watching. And I remember my dad turning to me – my dad loves to turn to me and explain why things are funny. He used to do that with ‘Seinfeld’ all the time. He did it with ‘Colombo’, too, set the scene.
I didn’t know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!
I tend to be a fan of darker shows and love ‘The Americans,’ ‘Ray Donovan,’ ‘True Detective,’ ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Peaky Blinders.’
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I’m sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.
I think the process is one of using the camera and sound in the way a detective uses a magnifying glass: to find the clues. They’re discovery devices, not performance devices – you’re watching things the way a cat does. You’re not judging. You’re there to witness something.
I’ve always felt if you followed a real private detective around, it would be boring.
I’ve written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city’s Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.
I made ‘True Detective’ like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.
I think Morse’s thing about being a poor policeman but a good detective is a very good description of him.
When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I’ve gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown’s bicycle.
My first films were comedy, ‘Murder By Death,’ and ‘The Cheap Detective.’ But now they won’t think of me as a comedian. Now, they think of me as a bad guy, and I can’t do comedy.
It’s no secret – I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like ‘Detective Frost.’
The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters.
The thing I don’t like about detective stories is looking for criminals.
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn’t primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
I had spent so many years on ‘Law & Order: UK’ being a downtrodden detective standing on Hammersmith Bridge at six o’clock in the morning, being rained and snowed on, and I thought, ‘I’ll have a bit of a change of direction in my career and go and do ‘SunTrap’ in Gran Canaria.’
A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, ‘In The Morning I’ll Be Gone,’ in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican’s daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered.
When I was younger, I watched all the detective shows.
I don’t feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life – which is my life – writing detective stories.
I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don’t describe anything in the society outside.
If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they’re all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That’s what’s called American fiction these days.
