Marble Hall Murders

It is astonishing how many thieves and murderers do not resemble thieves and murderers,' Pund replied.

It’s what makes a murder mystery unique in the world of popular fiction. It may seem brilliant, but an awful lot depends on the last chapter. Only when you get there do you find out if the book was worth reading to begin with.

The great joy of fiction is that no matter how problematic the journey, the resolution is somehow inevitable.

Is there really such a thing as a happy ending?

This is the South of France, not Shanghai. The only thing that’s criminal round here are the restaurant prices!

Put bluntly, he wanted to be Salman Rushdie, not Agatha Christie – but that was never going to happen. He was stuck with himself.

Given the right circumstances, are we all potential killers? Was that the ultimate appeal of murder stories, that they reveal not just the facts of a particular crime but the truth about all of humanity, that civilisation and decency are only skin-deep and just beneath the surface we are all potentially monsters?

It's strange how characters can become bigger than their authors, but popular fiction is absolutely crowded with them.

Real life, with all its nuances and complexities, isn't the same, and this is especially true in the twenty-first century. Bad people prosper. Good people go bust. Read the newspapers or social media and it's easy to believe that there is no justice in the world and nobody is happy at all.

There was something about the ritual, the formality of it all, that made me feel uneasy. It was like having dinner in a lepers' colony where nobody is allowed to mention the disease.

make them his own. His main reason was ideological. Take a nation’s art and you take its soul – something Napoleon had already figured out. The Louvre is full of German treasures the emperor snatched in his time, and now it was

The wound hurt much more after it was dressed, but that was a good sign, the nurse said cheerfully. There’s no healing without a little pain.

The detective has no escape. Without evil, there is no reason for him to exist.

I must tell you, Frédéric, that I am at peace with my life and the leaving of it. Je suis fatigué. I have been tired for a long time.

would have preferred to go on my own, but I had to know more and when he’d suggested coming with me, I hadn’t complained. I’d turned into Alice down the rabbit hole, but instead of white rabbits and playing cards, I’d been sucked into a nightmare landscape – more Hieronymus Bosch than Lewis Carroll.

She may not have been a racist but she was a dreadful woman and we had to make sure that the public never found out.

With Eliot Crace and Atticus Pünd both out of my life, I suddenly felt very alone. Was this the horrible truth about my life? That if you took away work, there would be nothing

How can you hate someone who is loved by every single person on the planet? How can you have any life of your own when your very name is defined by her genius and everything you do will be compared to it?

So far, everything you’ve said about it has been completely unconstructive. You didn’t like the title. You didn’t like the opening. You didn’t like the setting.

Art thefts are definitely what they are, Mr Pünd, and you could add that Elmer Waysmith and his partner in Switzerland are complicit in war crimes.

Could Miriam really have been the horror he had described? How could she possibly have created the world’s most lovable family when she’d been so hateful to her own?

nine bedrooms, a dining room, a breakfast room, a library, a conservatory and a ballroom – not to mention the coach house, stables, tennis court, swimming pool, lodge house and

Wealth is a great blessing, but it is my opinion that it can be destructive, if placed in the wrong hands.

When a woman approaches a well-known detective and asks for him to investigate and then, just a few days later, is found murdered, of course it’s important,’ Voltaire

We have been married for six years now and he has become my best friend and confidant: someone in whom I have complete trust.