Quotes from Mark Billingham

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

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.

Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.'

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A good agent will sometimes need to be a scrapper, and that's the one you want.

It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living.

I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

Life isn't fair. Fair is somewhere you go to ride the dodgems and win a goldfish.

He was a big man; fifty or so, with greased-back grey hair and an expression that looked as if it had been kicked into position.

It was like being some not quite all-knowing, not quite all-seeing force, hamstrung by the missing pieces of the jigsaw. Omnipotent and impotent. Like being God with Alzheimer's.

Thirty-Four The Third Day Thirty-Five Thirty-Six Thirty-Seven Thirty-Eight Thirty-Nine Forty Forty-One Forty-Two Forty-Three Forty-Four

The whole scene seemed lit by a thousand dusty, forty-watt lightbulbs. He had to make a move. 'I need to get to my officer,' he said. Palmer didn't appear to be listening. Thorne took a step forwards, and in a second the gun was levelled at him. 'No!' Palmer shouted. Thorne was genuinely surprised. 'What are you playing at, Martin?' Palmer said nothing.

There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.' ROBERT WILSON LYND

This Christmas will be dramatically different for most of us from our Christmases past. But the comfort of reading is a constant. It's a salve for isolation and a haven when we need to escape into someone else's imagination.

pointless spunktrumpet.

It was relaxed. It was coffee and biscuits and comfy-chairs casual. But Thorne could hear the tension and defensiveness in everything Roper said. The same way that a Parisian would always hear Thorne's London accent, however fluently he might speak French.

A recent survey claimed that two thirds of young British Asians believe that families should live according to the concept of honour. Seventy per cent of Sikhs and Muslims. Three per cent said that they sanctioned honour killings.