Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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The thief of perfume is, in fact, one of the most active of the twenty-first century. In the UK, cosmetics/perfume was the fourth most-shoplifted category in 2019 (after packed meat, razor blades, and whisky/champagne/gin). In the US, perfume is first on the list of products pinched by women, and an AdWeek list of the ten most shoplifted items ranks Chanel No. 5 at No. 9 (a few notches down from Axe body spray). Just ask Mrs. Thyra G. Youngstrom. In a 1959 news article, she’s reported as having discovered her West Hartford, Connecticut, home had been ransacked. It seemed everything was out of place, but nothing was gone: until she noticed she was poorer two bottles of Ch…
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Carol and Charlie were my upstairs neighbors. They were an older couple, sliver-haired and retired, always around on weekdays. I registered them as vaguely eccentric but sweet, complete opposites from one another. Carol was gregarious. She was always smiling, always generous, delivering packages from the lobby to our apartment doors and feeding a feral cat on our block. I met her as I was moving into my now-husband’s place. She seemed delighted to have me in the building, peppering me with personal questions like some cheerfully nosy aunt, welcoming me to the family. Charlie was quieter, inconspicuous. I don’t remember much about him except that he wore hats. Well, one …
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la valle d’abisso dolorosa . . . the valley of the sad abyss . . . —Dante, Inferno You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. Harry Kendall Thaw (the Pittsburgh coal heir who shot Stanford White, the beaux arts architect, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906), Jean Harris (the Smith College alumna and Madeira School headmistress who murdered the diet guru Dr. Herman Tarnower in 1980), and William Bradford Bishop (the Yale-educated diplomat who bludgeoned his family to death with a sledgehammer in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976) very nearly exhaust the list of WASPs who killed other than in the service of the state and the intelligence agencies. As for Li…
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I got married in 2012. I remember sitting on the plane en route to our honeymoon staring at my brand new wedding band and thinking: I am somebody’s wife now. A small thrill passed through me at the idea of belonging to someone in this way. Ever since, I have always enjoyed introducing myself to my husband’s coworkers or high school classmates as “Rob Baker’s wife.” Hey, he’s a great guy to be married to! But also, let me be perfectly clear, as much as I love him, ‘til death do us part and whatnot, that sobriquet better not be the thing engraved on my tombstone. And furthermore, if someday I become rich and famous or just really interesting, y’all better not title the ensu…
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__________________________________ “The Text Message” by Luc Brahy is excerpted from FIRST DEGREE: A CRIME ANTHOLOGY. Used with the permission of the publisher, Humanoids. Copyright © 2021 by Luc Brahy. View the full article
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Last year, I took part in a London festival’s panel discussion of the work of Agatha Christie. On the panel with me were four other writers, all passionate Agatha fans. One by one, we described what we loved about her work and talked about how much she meant to us. Then it was time for the Q&A, and the questions we were asked by the audience were, by and large, the same ones I’ve been answering on Agatha-themed panels since around 2011: why is she still the no. 1 bestselling novelist of all time? Is her work dated now or is she still relevant? Even though she’s widely and rightfully regarded as a plotting genius, wouldn’t the panel all agree that she’s not actually a …
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August brings an almost overwhelming bounty of great crime novels, both from promising newcomers and established voices alike. The variety of subject matter is almost as astonishing as the vast number of releases, and below, you’ll find such disparate settings as a ballet school, an apartment in lockdown, 1970s Mexico, and 1940s Chicago and Paris, just to mention some. Whether your tastes are traditional or twisted, you’ll be sure to be pleased with August’s selections. Stay tuned for more recommendations. Megan Abbott, The Turnout (Putnam) Megan Abbott has already written about the high-stakes (and highly dangerous) sports of cheerleading and gymnastics, and now she…
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In the area surrounding the Green Banks Observatory in West Virginia, devices emanating radio frequencies are banned. The region has come to be known as The Quiet Zone, due to the absence of cellular service, wifi, and other modern technology. Thousands live in The Quiet Zone. The following is excerpted from Stephen Kurczy’s new book, The Quiet Zone, an exploration of the area and its residents. ___________________________________ Still in his pajamas, Bob Sheets turned on his kitchen griddle and whisked up a bowl of blueberry pancake batter. I had come to debrief. The Sheetses were becoming my guides to better understanding the Quiet Zone, and my head was spinning. I h…
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I didn’t always love surfing. Or surf culture. Or surf books for that matter. I never really thought that much about any of it. But today, my love for the genre of surf noir borders on obsession. I’m always looking to discover new books in the surf or beach noir genre. Or even just good books on surfing. The only problem is there isn’t a ton out there. There are some staples, sure, and there are a few new ones here and there. And there are some oldies that people might forget about. But the simple truth is, I could use a lot more. We can all use a lot more. My interest in surf noir started four years ago in a poetry class I was taking at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. In t…
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He opens the tray table and sets his water bottle down, then opens a packet of chocolates and pops one in his mouth. The train leaves Ueno and returns to the world above. A few clouds float in the sky, but mostly it’s just clear blue. The sky’s as sunny as I am, he thinks. He sees a driving range, with its backstop like a giant green mosquito net. It f lows off to the left and a school slides into view, a string of concrete rectangles, uniformed students hanging around the windows. He can’t tell if they’re his age or a little older, and Satoshi ‘The Prince’ Oji spends a moment trying to figure it out, but almost immediately decides that it doesn’t matter. They’re all the …
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Every writer has a bag of tricks to conjure the muse or to, as David Lynch puts it, “catch the big fish.” For some, it’s a simple ritual, such as “morning pages” or imposing a daily word count. For others, it may be a complicated mélange of caffeine, nicotine, booming opera music and a rigorous pass through the day’s tabloid reportage. Carson McCullers purportedly required a beer to start the writing day, then moved onto a sherry-tea concoction before turning to bourbon as her closer. I know at least one writer who has a standing desk/treadmill situation so he can constantly be moving as he writes—all while he has two TV screens rigged to soundlessly play movies on consta…
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I’ll start with the basics: Craig Rice was a woman, and her name wasn’t exactly a nom de plume. Shortly after Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig was born, her artist parents absconded to Europe, leaving her in the care of her paternal aunt (or half-aunt). The aunt, whose married name was Rice, adopted her niece, tacking on yet another name. The future comedic crime author eventually boiled her moniker down to two of its shorter parts, a wise edit for book-signings. All this happened a long time ago. Rice was born in 1908. Her first novel, Eight Faces at Three—this one—was published in 1939. She’s been dead for more than sixty years. As I’ve wrangled with what my job is here…
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In 2018 the Staunch Book Prize launched, recognizing thrillers in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered. It’s a noble cause; in domestic and psychological suspense (the cloistered, relationship-driven genres I myself write in), the victims of violence tend to be female. I understand the impulse to center books that don’t leverage gratuitous female pain as a plot point. (Picture the central dead body in the heralded Mare of Eastown: a nubile young women woman stripped naked and splayed over the rocks, orbited by a wolfpack of potential male killers.) But there’s a reason none of my thrillers qualify. In reality, women are more likely t…
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I’ve always avoided writing a book with multiple characters, as I worried about keeping up with the various personalities and timelines it would incur. In fact, I initially pitched The Guilt Trip as a holiday gone wrong between two couples. To which my publishers said, ‘We love it, but how about throwing in a few more people to really mix it up?’ The mere thought induced a cold sweat, yet as soon as I started writing, I quickly realized that the additional cast members gave me more freedom and flexibility within the plot, moving the story forward at a pace that may not have happened with just my original ensemble. Even more surprising was that my six characters naturally…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here (Ballantine) “Bartz takes the idea of a ‘frenemy’ to new heights. . . . Yet another expert vivisection of female modes of communication and competition.” –Los Angeles Times Megan Abbott, The Turnout (Putnam) “Abbott’s novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity….In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood.” –The New York Times Book Review Nao…
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Quite how Ian Fleming got to Portugal in June 1940 is unclear. To have gone overland would have been extremely unlikely, and as his objective was to get to Madrid if going overland, why go to Portugal? He could have gone by sea, but he would have had to obtain a visa from the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux. These were freely obtainable, thousands being issued by the consul, Aristides de Sousa Mendes. However, most people traveled by land and the influx was so great that it led to the Spanish closing the border with France, and an increase in tension between Lisbon and Madrid. Sousa Mendes paid for this humanitarian act with his career and the ruin of his family by a furiou…
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We had books, radios and cars. What we didn’t have was the internet, cell phones or GPS. It was 1976, the bicentennial year, and I was a young private investigator, employed by a small detective agency operating just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC and everyday brought a new adventure. Information is the private detective’s stock in trade. Our business focused on matrimonial problems, insurance fraud, criminal law and locating people who didn’t want to be found, and each problem usually came down to uncovering information someone wanted to keep secret. Much has changed since the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; perhaps nothing more than our acce…
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—Translated by Daniel Hahn Frustration and liberation. These two extraordinarily strong feelings were what prompted me to write Two Spies in Caracas, my first novel. The frustration stems from my conviction that I was not telling my readers the complete story, the real story of what was happening in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. I have been writing newspaper columns, academic articles, books about Venezuela and about President Chávez for more than two decades. About his Bolivarian revolution, his 21st century socialism and about his executions both inside and outside Venezuela. All these were analytical works in which I used the best techniques I could find in social sc…
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What do you call twenty-five skydiving lawyers? SKEET! If you haven’t heard this one, I bet you’ve heard another or have a good lawyer joke that you love to tell. Have you heard the one about the lawyer that… the list is endless, and no one loves to tell lawyer jokes more than lawyers! Before I began writing legal thrillers, I asked myself why we love the law and what brought about our fascination with lawyers, civil conflict stories, and those involving people in trouble with authority. I went in search of the origins of the genre and found a rich history of chills and thrills. I also discovered something particularly interesting about how people view lawyers through th…
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I think we all can agree that the twin peaks—so to speak—of film noir came in the 1940s and 1980s. What’s that? How can I ignore the 1950s, which gave us gritty crime classics like “The Phenix City Story” and others? How can I pass over the classic noir of the 1970s? “Chinatown,” after all? Well, if you’re already outraged, I’ll outrage you further. When I began to research this article, I preferred the noir of the 1980s to the films of the then-new genre in the 1940s. Maybe—just maybe—I still do. If you haven’t already thrown your phone out the window or tipped your laptop off your lap, come along for my argument. After all: “Blood Simple.” “Body Heat.” “Thief.” “Bla…
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The Indian Runner is a movie of profound ambition. It seeks to dramatize nothing less than the history of violence within the United States, and how that violence infects spirit after spirit, like a powerful and contagious disease. It is also the screenwriting and directorial debut of one of the world’s greatest actors, Sean Penn. The two-time Academy Award winning actor would go on to direct four more films, and at one point openly discuss the possibility of retiring from acting to become a full-time filmmaker. The Indian Runner demonstrates why Penn’s cinematic style is important and under-appreciated. In 1982, Sean Penn began dating photographer Pamela Springsteen, le…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (Flatiron) Cosby’s drive to expand the chorus of voices representing the South is on full display in his follow-up, Razorblade Tears … The novel’s DNA may seem familiar to readers of Blacktop Wasteland or Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series, but its composition feels utterly unique, as if the elements of one’s waking life were scrambled in a dream … Cosby has an unnerving ability to describe what fists, knives, guns and assorted garden implements can do to the human body, which may make the violence more vivid than some readers can abide. Riding shotgun wit…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * John Fram, The Bright Lands (Hanover Square Press) “John Fram delivers with his mix of Southern Texas humidity, mystery and dread — along with police corruption and toxic masculinity…[The Bright Lands] gives us the queer thriller in the age of Grindr we’ve been waiting for.” —Rolling Stone Lisa Lutz, The Swallows (Ballantine Books) “With a memorable cast of characters and more than a few secrets, Lutz’s latest is a turbocharged tale for our times.”—Newsweek Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water (Sourcebooks Landmark) “The locked room murder meets a Michael Bay movie, by way o…
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What is Sneakers, the early 90s film featuring Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, David Strathairn, and River Phoenix as a motley group of security specialists pulling off an impossible job? What is it? Is it a heist movie? A caper, an espionage thriller, a comedy? I know that films can exist within multiple genres at once—the impulse to taxonomize it isn’t the source of my question. What intrigues me is how Sneakers exactly knits qualities from these genres together: instead of feeling super-fueled by multiple genres, jumping between them or fusing them together, it seems a little surprised when hallmarks from those genres manifest, treating them like speed-bum…
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Whether you’re basking by the poolside or sweltering in your less-than-adequately-air-conditioned apartment, take a mini-vacation with these new international thrillers, gripping enough to take your mind off the heat, yet stylish enough to go perfectly with your #hotvaxxsummer. Sebastian Fitzek, Seat 7A Translated by Steve Anderson (Head of Zeus) There’s a certain immediacy to Sebastian Fitzek’s thrillers that takes hold of the reader and won’t let you go till you reach the last page. In Seat 7A, an entertaining addition to a new wave of airplane thrillers set on, well, airplanes, a passenger with a deathly fear of flying finds his panic becoming more and more ratio…
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WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
An Algonkian Success Story
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New York Pre-Event Assignments - June 2021
1. Before you begin to consider or rewrite your story premise, you must develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? To assert her presence in a society that dismisses her as invisible and voiceless 2. in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. The antagonistic force is the Philippine class system as embodied by various characters. Among the primary ones are members -
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The Genealogy of Disaster
© Vyacheslav Argenberg, Beirut, Lebanon, 2008, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. We walked over to the olive trees, he and I. There were three of them, and some little holm oaks. On the horizon, to the east and the south, you could see mountain ridges, and in the two other directions it was so wide that you couldn’t make out the boundary of the plot. The fellow had offered me another one, with a sea view, and I had replied that I didn’t care. I can look at the sea often enough, every day at home, and if I’m going to be in the mountains I might as well gaze up at the peaks and the canopy of sk -
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Road Trips, Small Town Romance, & More
A Good Duke is Hard to Find A Good Duke is Hard to Find by Christina Britton is $1.99! This is the first book in the Isle of Synne series and I’m sure it’s pronounced “sin” but my mind went to “sine” and I, for one, will avoid an island of calculus. No thank you! Get swept away by a Regency romance of broken engagements, second chances, and stolen kisses from the author whom Publishers Weekly calls “irresistible”. After her third fiancé leaves her at the altar, Lenora Hartley is beginning -
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Two Thumbs Up and a Smiley Face
Everybody knows the book The Little Engine That Could. Published in 1930, over the years, that little blue engine has taught billions of kids to keep on trying, to not give up. "I think I can, I think I can," was popularized by the train engine that managed to make it up the mountain. A bigger, more powerful engine broke down; other locomotives were asked to take over, but each of them refused. The little blue locomotive was asked, and it agreed to try. Because it kept believing it could, because the little locomotive kept encouraging itself, it suceeded in making it over the mountain. But n -
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To Be Liked, or Not to Be
I’ve spent virtually my entire life in the entertainment business, starting as a child in local amateur theater, then professional music, then this whole crazy book-writing thing. As different as these disciplines are, they have some core traits in common, chief of which is the need to please an audience. After all, if nobody comes to your show, or listens to your music, or reads your book, aren’t you just shouting into the void? So a core trait that each successful artist has in common is that they do please their audience. The really successful ones please a really BIG audience. But it’s n -
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Perfume Thieves and the History of Temptation
The thief of perfume is, in fact, one of the most active of the twenty-first century. In the UK, cosmetics/perfume was the fourth most-shoplifted category in 2019 (after packed meat, razor blades, and whisky/champagne/gin). In the US, perfume is first on the list of products pinched by women, and an AdWeek list of the ten most shoplifted items ranks Chanel No. 5 at No. 9 (a few notches down from Axe body spray). Just ask Mrs. Thyra G. Youngstrom. In a 1959 news article, she’s reported as having discovered her West Hartford, Connecticut, home had been ransacked. It seemed everything was out of -
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The Bleakest Noir: A List of Ultra-Dark Thrillers
Carol and Charlie were my upstairs neighbors. They were an older couple, sliver-haired and retired, always around on weekdays. I registered them as vaguely eccentric but sweet, complete opposites from one another. Carol was gregarious. She was always smiling, always generous, delivering packages from the lobby to our apartment doors and feeding a feral cat on our block. I met her as I was moving into my now-husband’s place. She seemed delighted to have me in the building, peppering me with personal questions like some cheerfully nosy aunt, welcoming me to the family. Charlie was quieter, inco -
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Suicide, Despair, Lunacy, and Hysteria (and Surprisingly Little Murder) Among WASPS
la valle d’abisso dolorosa . . . the valley of the sad abyss . . . —Dante, Inferno You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. Harry Kendall Thaw (the Pittsburgh coal heir who shot Stanford White, the beaux arts architect, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906), Jean Harris (the Smith College alumna and Madeira School headmistress who murdered the diet guru Dr. Herman Tarnower in 1980), and William Bradford Bishop (the Yale-educated diplomat who bludgeoned his family to death with a sledgehammer in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976) very nearly exhaust the list of WASPs who killed -
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There’s an Abundance of Wives In Book Titles—Where Are the Husbands?
I got married in 2012. I remember sitting on the plane en route to our honeymoon staring at my brand new wedding band and thinking: I am somebody’s wife now. A small thrill passed through me at the idea of belonging to someone in this way. Ever since, I have always enjoyed introducing myself to my husband’s coworkers or high school classmates as “Rob Baker’s wife.” Hey, he’s a great guy to be married to! But also, let me be perfectly clear, as much as I love him, ‘til death do us part and whatnot, that sobriquet better not be the thing engraved on my tombstone. And furthermore, if someday I be -
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First Degree: A Crime Anthology
__________________________________ “The Text Message” by Luc Brahy is excerpted from FIRST DEGREE: A CRIME ANTHOLOGY. Used with the permission of the publisher, Humanoids. Copyright © 2021 by Luc Brahy. View the full article -
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One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
Squee One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston June 1, 2021 · St. Martin's Griffin Contemporary RomanceLGBTQIA CW/TW: reference to a historical hate crime against LGBTQ people One Last Stop is the tale of August, a young woman who has recently moved to New York City, and Jane, the mysterious woman that August meets on the subway. When August moves to New York, she intends to do what she’s done her whole life, namely, keep to herself. However, h -
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Authenticity and Apocalypse: An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman
Photo: Nina Subin. I first encountered Alexandra Kleeman’s work in the pages of this magazine. Her story “Fairy Tale”—published in 2010, when Kleeman was still a student in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University—is a nightmarish account of a woman confronted by a barrage of strangers who all claim to be her fiancé. The one she is forced to choose tries to kill her. Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine employs a similarly arch and sinister surrealism to tell the story of two roommates whose identities slowly melt into one. In her latest novel, Something New under the Sun, the -
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Interview with Johanna Sinisalo (THE BLOOD OF ANGELS)
Johanna Sinisalo is a pioneer of the Finnish Weird. Her debut novel Not Before Sundown (2000, translated 2003) won the prestigious Finlandia prize in her native Finnish and won the James Tiptree, Jr Award on its translation into English. The novel is a wonderful mix of the speculative and the realist, imagining an alternative Finland in which trolls really exist from the perspective of the gay community in Sinisalo’s hometown of Tampere. Her other novels translated into English include Birdbrain (2008, translated 2011), a masterpiece of the eco-Weird, the utterly wonderful The Blood Of Angels -
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The Walking Stick
There’s a concept in storytelling that I’ve long tried to understand: “authentic”. Mostly it’s invoked with respect to characters. It’s important to know them. It’s important that they act and speak in ways consistent with who they are, whether entering a room or rocketing to the stars. It’s also important to know how they came to be who they are. Back story wounds and burdens shape and define them and become the engines of change. If writing is “authentic” then every gesture, action and utterance is “honest” and everything observed is rendered in a way both original and pinpoint accurat -
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Sophie Hannah on the Literary Side of Agatha Christie: “Her style is not simplistic but, rather, beautifully simple.”
Last year, I took part in a London festival’s panel discussion of the work of Agatha Christie. On the panel with me were four other writers, all passionate Agatha fans. One by one, we described what we loved about her work and talked about how much she meant to us. Then it was time for the Q&A, and the questions we were asked by the audience were, by and large, the same ones I’ve been answering on Agatha-themed panels since around 2011: why is she still the no. 1 bestselling novelist of all time? Is her work dated now or is she still relevant? Even though she’s widely and rightfully regard
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