Art & Creativity Quote by Jane Haddam

Haddam’s line is a quiet manifesto for a certain kind of crime writing: the kind that treats plot as the consequence of personality, not the other way around. In a genre often marketed on premise ("a body in the library", "a locked-room puzzle"), she’s tipping her hand toward what actually keeps readers turning pages: the human engine inside the machinery. Start with a person, and the “situation” stops being a gimmick and becomes pressure applied to a psyche.

The subtext is craft-based, almost defiant. When Haddam says she “comes up with people,” she’s implicitly rejecting the paint-by-numbers approach where characters are just delivery systems for twists. A character-first process forces coherence: motives have to track, choices have to feel inevitable in hindsight, and the surprises have to emerge from who someone is rather than what the author needs them to do. That’s why character-driven mysteries feel fair even when they’re shocking; the reveal reads like recognition, not trickery.

Context matters, too. Haddam (also known as Orania Papazoglou) built a long-running series around Gregor Demarkian, a sleuth defined less by eccentric props than by temperament, ethics, and community ties. Her statement aligns with that tradition: crime as a social disturbance that exposes relationships, class friction, and private rationalizations. Situations can be invented endlessly; a person vivid enough to generate consequences is rarer. She’s telling you where she spends her scarce resource: not on puzzle-box ingenuity, but on the messy, believable inner logic that makes a puzzle worth solving.