Top 30 Mark Billingham Quotes

I’ve always slightly preferred Spade to Marlowe, probably just because I thought Hammett was cooler than Chandler. He was leftwing, his name shortened to Dash rather than Ray, and he didn’t smoke a pipe or like cats.

I’m completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick’s definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: ‘Last Train To Memphis’ and ‘Careless Love.’ Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music.

I could never gamble on stocks and shares because I saw my father get hurt that way – he lost quite a lot of money when the stock market collapsed in 2001.

An actor’s life is all about rejection. It’s you they don’t want; it’s you who’s too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn’t matter what you look like.

I’m a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It’s much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don’t like – I don’t want to write about that stuff.

I wanted to write at school – to write funny stories which the teacher might ask me to read out to the class. It’s all basically about showing off.

Too much research can be the writer’s enemy. You can spend days on end in the British Library or prowling the streets with a Dictaphone, and it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re working hard. Often, it can be an excuse not to work; a classic displacement activity.

Part of the reason why Scandinavian crime has been so popular is the landscape. It is just so strong and alien. Although without taking anything away, you should probably also never discount the fact that blood does look particularly good against snow.

I was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.

Ian Rankin’s Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.

When a crime writer thinks up a delicious twist, it is a great moment. Time to relax and take the rest of the day off. I do think that it can be overdone, however.

The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on – because the reader certainly will.

What I usually do is hoard money – I accumulate as much as possible in the fear of not having enough to pay tax.

I read ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Godfather’ back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be.

You throw the kitchen sink at your early books. You put everything in there. It’s like when you meet a new girlfriend or boyfriend, you tell them all your best stories. By the time you have been married for 10 years, they are crying, ‘Shut up!’

I am trying to give the best performance possible in 400 pages. I want readers to be scared; I want them to be moved. Entertainment doesn’t necessarily mean something trivial, but it does mean people wanting to get to the end of a book.

I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn’t need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.

All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that’s why you become a writer.

Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late ’70s and early ’80s.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

I think women tend to write about how violence feels, whereas men tend to write about what violence looks like.

I find traveling anywhere very stressful. If I ever have to go on tour, I tend to find it all a bit too stressful. I am too much of a control freak with traveling, and nothing is ever on time. The one thing I can’t stand is being late.

I’ve often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for ‘Sleepyhead,’ I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who – crucially – would be unpredictable.

All you can hope for when you get a book adapted for TV is that you get a good actor and not some muppet off ‘EastEnders.’

Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid, and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of ‘Fifty Shades of Whatever.’

There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.

It’s heretical, I know, but I’ve never really been able to get on with Agatha Christie. She is, of course, a giant of the genre, but I never feel that she cared a great deal about the characters. Consequently, neither do I.

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character’s mouth is you talking.

Having worked as both comedian and crime writer, the one thing I know is that both involve the delivery of a performance.