The study examines the works of four crosswriters, i.e. authors who write for children and for adults in different works, J. K. Rowling, R. Dahl, S. Rushdie, and M. Paver, to explore the impact of the intended reader on the one hand, and the authorial style on the other on the presentation of direct speech in fiction. It focuses on a textual feature which plays an important role in developing the readers’ relationship with the fictional characters, viz. the reporting verbs which introduce direct speech. The methodology combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis approaches. The results confirm that in books for children, the proportion of direct speech is significantly higher than in adult fiction. The reporting verbs were classified using Caldas–Coulthard’s (1994) taxonomy. When writing for children, the writers were found to rely most heavily on “descriptive verbs”, which refer to vocal effects and voice quality (e.g. hissed, mumbled), highlighting the importance of sound in children’s literature. In their fiction for adults, verbs explicitly indicating the intended illocutionary force (e.g. agreed, accused) were dominant. At the same time, the writers appear to differ in the extent of their presence in the text and the diversity of reporting verbs they employ.