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In praise of crime writing

18 December 2006

'I like reading thrillers and I don't know why the literary world is sometimes snobbish about them. It's a really flexible form because it lets you move across class and across a city. The elegant and ever-repeating form of noir fiction is that you find a dead body in the beginning, it disrupts the ordinariness of the place, the detective starts to investigate and then wants to find all the connections, and it usually ends up in some high-level cover-up. I like that approach a lot, just in the plain terms of constructing narrative. As a reader and writer, there's so much pleasure in being aligned with the detective and given all the clues.'

Vikram Chandra, author of Sacred Games in the Bookseller