"I have to say here that I didn’t choose it (detective fiction), it almost chose me. I wrote many novels before my first novel was accepted. I had never submitted one of them to a publisher and the first novel I ever did submit to a publisher was a sort of drawing room comedy, which is a very hard difficult genre for a young writer to try and deal with. This was kept for a long time and then returned to me and I was told that they would accept it if I would completely rewrite it. I wasn’t prepared to do this and they asked if I had done anything else. I had written a detective story just for my own entertainment or fun, and that was my first published novel, which is called From Doon with Death. It was quite successful for a first novel, and I was caught up really because of this success within the genre. Having now established for myself a means of livelihood, I was constrained to work within the detective genre and doing so I found that I preferred to deal with the psychological, emotional aspects of human nature rather than the puzzle, forensics, whatever most seem to come within the ambience of the detective novel."
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"
Shakespeare, King Lear (Edmund) Act I, scene ii
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