Top 30 Mark Billingham Quotes

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.

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

In the 1970s, there was a trend for all detectives on TV to have some quirk or gimmick, and this was often physical.

It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what’s coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.

In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It’s a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.

The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.

As a writer, you’re making a pact with the reader; you’re saying, ‘Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.’

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

I think readers’ imaginations are far more powerful than anything you can put on a page and, therefore, can conjure up graphic images for themselves, which I think you just have to nudge them towards.

I think there’s as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel – in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language – as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.

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

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.

There have been some brilliant and very successful standalone books that work in themselves and also seem to refresh a series. Anyone who writes a series lives in fear of it becoming stale, so you do whatever you can to keep it fresh – although it does feel a bit nerve-racking to write outside of your comfort zone.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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.’

My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered – he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don’t have any issues. I’m not suffering some secret angst.

While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.

Of course there’s pressure, and it’s still there with every book. Each one is harder to write than the last, basically because you’re always trying to write a better book. You won‘t always succeed, of course, but that has to be what you’re shooting for.

I discovered reading through libraries. I grew up in a house that wasn’t brimming with books.

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

I often wonder, with my hand on my heart, if ‘The Dying Hours‘ was made into the biggest movie franchise in history, would I pick up my pen again? Wouldn’t I be happier spending the rest of my life travelling around with my wife?

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.

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.

Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.