Mark Billingham

“More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.”

“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...”

“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 me...”

“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.'”

“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,...”

“I moved from acting to stand-up because castings are just about what you look like. It doesn't matter if you can act or not. In comedy, no one cares what you look like.”

“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 tale...”

“As I write each new Thorne novel, I'm determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me...”

“Whenever people ask where I get my sick and twisted ideas from, I reply, 'Just open your eyes.'”

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“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 l...”