Some of the most brilliant speech in novels can be found in this genre. From Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler and even Martin Amis, here are some of the best practitioners

I think the most important ingredient of a crime novel is style, and I have tried to embody this philosophy in my new book, The Yellow Diamond, which concerns a unit of the Metropolitan Police that investigates the super-rich. The settings – Mayfair and the south of France (both in winter) – seemed to demand a certain formal elegance, and I read a lot of Scott Fitzgerald while writing the book.



Fitzgerald wrote finely nuanced dialogue, as any stylist must. He was not a crime writer, but many of the best dialogue writers have been. Dialogue lends an immediacy that suits the genre. Also, crime fiction is essentially demotic (even if it’s about the rich), and bad, unmusical dialogue, always makes me think the author is too self-obsessed to have paid attention to how other people speak.

Hammett and Chandler were the kings of the wisecracking, hardboiled style, but Hammett’s dialogue is slightly more naturalistic than Chandler’s. At the start of this novel, the detective Sam Spade’s secretary, Effie Perine, says, “There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.”

‘A customer?’

‘I guess so. You’ll want to see her anyway; she’s a knockout.’

‘Shoo her in darling,’ said Spade. ‘Shoo her in.’

Mr Lindsay Marriott asks the detective Marlowe to accompany him on a rendez-vous but won’t say why. Marlowe suggests, ‘You just want me to go along and hold your hat?’ which annoys Marriott:

‘I’m afraid I don’t like your manner,’ he said, using the edge of his voice.

‘I’ve had complaints about it,’ I said. ‘But nothing seems to do any good.’



Marlowe is irresistible, partly because such laconicism signifies bravery. Later on, he says to another character, ‘I talk too much when I’m scared too.’ But in fact Marlowe never talks too much.

Christie’s dialogue is underrated. The fastidious tone gives away the first speaker in this conversation about sailing as Poirot. The personalities of the vicar and the major are also immediately evident from just a few words:

‘There is no such thing as a really calm sea. Always, always, there is motion.’

‘If you ask me,’ said Major Barry, ‘seasickness is nine-tenths nerves.’

‘There,’ said the clergyman smiling a little, ‘speaks the good sailor – eh, Major?’

‘Only been ill once – and that was crossing the Channel!’

A stretch, perhaps, to label this a crime novel, but the tormenting of the unnamed narrator – new mistress of the house called Manderley – by the baleful housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, is as relishably nasty as anything in the genre.

‘I don’t have a maid,’ I said awkwardly; ‘I’m sure Alice, if she is the housemaid, will look after me all right.’

She [Mrs Danvers] wore the same expression that she had done on our first meeting, when I dropped my gloves so gauchely on the floor.

‘I’m afraid that would not do for very long,’ she said; ‘it’s usual, you know, for ladies in your position to have a personal maid.’

Here, the relentlessly pushy (and psychopathic) Charles Anthony Bruno is beginning the entrapment of Guy Haines into his plan for the perfect double murder:



‘Shall I tell you one of my ideas for murdering my father?’

‘No,’ Guy said. He put his hand over the glass Bruno was about to refill.

‘Which do you want, the busted light socket in the bathroom or the carbon monoxide garage?’

‘Do it and stop talking about it!’

The insinuating tone of Bruno is the chief delight of a brilliant novel.

The working-class spy hero of this novel was called Harry Palmer in the film of the book. In the book itself, he is unnamed. Here the KGB man, Colonel Stok, has just chided him for fraternising with “evil” enemies of Russia. Our hero responds:

‘… but in my experience there aren’t many evil people around. Just ill-informed, misguided and ignorant ones.’

Colonel Stok said: ‘In Russia our people are not misinformed.’

‘There are many people who think that water has no taste,’ I said, ‘because we were born with it in our mouths and it’s been there ever since.’

What I like about Deighton’s books are these moment of elliptical weirdness that contrast so effectively with the terseness of the prose and the sharpness of the plotting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ornate and natural ... Josh Brolin in the 2007 film of No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers. Photograph: Allstar/Miramax/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Amis has deprecated the importance of dialogue, saying it’s too easy to write, “like riding a bike downhill”. But he’s very good at it, as demonstrated in this “postmodern” but still hardboiled crime novel, set in what is probably LA. The female detective, Hoolihan, is quizzing the partner of Jennifer Rockwell, an astrophysicist who committed suicide. The ellipses are Amis’s:

‘You guys were building for the future?’

‘Such was my understanding.’

‘Get married. Kids.’

‘Such was my understanding.’

‘You two talked about it … I asked if you talked about it … Okay. Kids. You wanted kids? You yourself?’

‘… Sure. I’m thirty-five. You begin to want to see a fresh face.’

This is the second book concerning the misadventures in showbiz of Chili Palmer, who is encountered here getting off on the wrong foot with the dangerous Raji:

‘You wear your shades at night,’ Chili said, ‘so I’ll think you’re cool, but I can’t tell if you’re looking at me.’

Raji put his glasses down on his nose, down and up. ‘See? I’m looking the fuck right at you, man. You have something to say to me fuckin say it so we be done here.’

It’s the sudden lurch towards confrontation that Leonard’s so good at.

Here, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy, Wendell, view the aftermath of drug-related gunfight in the Texan desert. McCarthy doesn’t use speech marks or apostrophes in his dialogue (which is slightly irritating), but Wendell speaks first:

Could have been checkin the quality. Getting ready to trade.

They didnt trade. They shot each other.

Bell nodded.

There might not of even been no money.

That’s possible.

But you dont believe it.

Bell thought about it. No, he said. Probably I dont.

What I like about the line, “There might not of even been no money” is that it’s both highly ornate and completely natural.

A creepy tale of a young English lawyer, Nick, who is seduced in Moscow by a scheming Russian woman called Masha.

I said, ‘How is your mother, Masha?’

‘Not bad,’ she said, ‘but very tired. Coming old now.’

‘I would like to meet her.’

‘One day, maybe.’

‘How is your job?’

‘I pretend work, they pretend pay me.’

Between 2004 and 2007, Miller was Moscow correspondent of the Economist, and he obviously kept his ears pricked.

• Andrew Martin’s The Yellow Diamond is published by Faber. To order it for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.