Martin Edwards > Quotes

“He loved the smell and feel of old books. To hold them was to touch the past.”
― Martin Edwards, The Cipher Garden

“Seldom happier than when I'm on my own, lost in a book.”
― Martin Edwards, The Coffin Trail

“Readers came and went, only the books stayed forever.”
― Martin Edwards, The Hanging Wood

“There was something she found intensely attractive about a man with a thirst for knowledge. Marc's obsessive love of books had been--she realized now--a huge part of his appeal....”
― Martin Edwards, The Frozen Shroud

“She says I ought to throw out at least two books for every one I buy. I had new bookshelves put up in the cottage after moving in, but already the to-be-read pile is mounting on to floor of the spare room.”
― Martin Edwards, The Hanging Wood

“Whatever the reasons, we never allow anyone else to know the whole of our personal history. I suppose we're afraid of what they might think of us. But there's more to it than that. We are terrified of what they might do with the knowledge.”
― Martin Edwards, The Arsenic Labyrinth

“The notion of finding “a body in the library” of a country house was another trope of the genre. Christie had fun with it in The Body in the Library, where the corpse is found in Gossington Hall, owned by Miss Marple’s cronies, Colonel Arthur Bantry and his wife Dolly. But profound changes were taking place in British society as war was followed by peace-time austerity, and high taxes made it impossible for many families to cling on to old houses that were cripplingly expensive to run. Country house parties fell out of fashion, and although traditional whodunits continued to be written and enjoyed, detective novelists could not altogether ignore the reality. The scale of upheaval is apparent in another Marple story, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, published twenty years after The Body in the Library. Gossington Hall has been sold off, and been run as a guest house, divided into flats, bought by a government body, and finally snapped up for use as a rich woman’s playground by a much-married film star. Her entourage provides a “closed circle” of suspects suited to the Sixties.”
― Martin Edwards, Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries

“He was never lonely, not with his books for company. Books never complained, never asked awkward questions.”
― Martin Edwards, The Serpent Pool

“In an extraordinarily bold move, Carr allows Fell in chapter seventeen [in, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (1935)] to address the reader directly, giving a disquisition on the lockedroom mystery that has often been reprinted as an essay on the subject: ‘We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not . . . Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuit possible to characters in a book . . . When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything else in detective fiction, that’s merely prejudice. I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened.’ Fell proceeds to offer an analysis of different types of locked-room scenarios so impressively detailed that it has never been surpassed.”
― Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

“However hard as I try, it keeps growing. My bibliomania is pretty acute.”
― Martin Edwards, The Coffin Trail

“One thing you learn in my job is that the truth is usually the last thing people want to emerge. Guilty or innocent, it doesn't matter. Everyone has something to hide.”
― Martin Edwards, The Coffin Trail

“The man who has the courage to say he is wrong has to face the worst hatred; the hatred of those who think he is right.”
― Martin Edwards, Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries

“The Agency By Pamela Griffiths”
― Martin Edwards, In a Word: Murder - An Anthology

“On a cold night, it’s tempting to curl up by the fireside with a good mystery—and rather more pleasurable than indulging in endless online shopping.”
― Martin Edwards, Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries

“The game-playing aspects of detective fiction came into prominence only after the First World War, as a symptom of people’s reaction to carnage and bereavement; there was a hunger for escapism, and readers relished having the chance to solve a puzzle set in a detective story.”
― Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

“Plymouth Meeting PA”
― Martin Edwards, In a Word: Murder - An Anthology

“It didn't make any sense If someone was out to kill David, why drug him first? The killer could have just shot him and have done with it.  Why take the time to drug him?  Nothing made much sense at the moment.  He wondered if it ever would. Looking at all the reports and interviews, Draker was puzzled: a murder case, the victim was drugged then shot and it was made to look like he had committed suicide but why?”
― Martin Edwards, In a Word: Murder - An Anthology

“Gets blamed for a lot of things, does the weather. Convenient scapegoat, if you ask me.”
― Martin Edwards, The Cipher Garden

“Data! data! data!’ he cried impatiently. ‘I can’t make bricks without clay.”
― Martin Edwards, Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries

“For Marc, books were objects of beauty, to be loved, not just read.”
― Martin Edwards, The Arsenic Labyrinth

“In Voltaire’s Zadig (1747), the title character makes brilliant deductions from physical evidence, almost in the manner of a Great Detective. This reflects, Greene argues, ‘the assumption of the Enlightenment that humans can find answers through reason.’ It was no longer enough to wait for God.”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators

“Don't you worry Stella, we'll get to the bottom of this, you know we will.  We are the best there is in investigative journalism’. 'Yes you're right, we are'.  Stella”
― Martin Edwards, In a Word: Murder - An Anthology

“Jane Eyre was not only ‘a human document written in blood, [but] also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the world’.”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators

“Upon my word, Watson!” said Holmes at last with an unsteady voice, “I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.” “You know,” I answered with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes’s heart before, “that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.”
― Martin Edwards, Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries

“The post-war turmoil experienced in Britain after the Armistice was succeeded by the misery of an economic slump, and then by the growing threat posed from overseas by Nazism and Fascism. It is no coincidence that the Twenties and the Thirties became the ‘Golden Age of Murder’, when novelists such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley crafted complex and original puzzles of whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit that tested readers’ wits and earned their authors fame and fortune. There was something unashamedly escapist about much detective fiction written during the Golden Age, but it is also true to say that the better books reveal far more about the society of the time than critics have acknowledged. That escapism regularly took engaging but wildly unlikely forms, with impossible crimes taking place within locked rooms, vital clues being hidden by way of complex cryptograms, and mysterious ‘dying messages’ uttered by murder victims who could never bring themselves to take the more obvious step of simply naming their killers.”
― Martin Edwards, Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries

“Catch-22, Joseph Heller sought ‘to dramatize the insanity of war and the stresses that drove people to madness by writing his very serious story using all of the tools of absurdist comedy”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators

“Done to death by books? There were worse ways to go, even if you weren't a bibliophile.”
― Martin Edwards, The Hanging Wood

“Mystery*File website, have revealed that Farjeon wrote no”
― Martin Edwards, Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries

“Delaware River.”
― Martin Edwards, In a Word: Murder - An Anthology

“Like a modern counterpart of a tightly-corseted Victorian, she needed to unbutton herself, learn the act of relaxation.”
― Martin Edwards, The Cipher Garden