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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You already know that Season 2 of Poker Face is coming to Peacock on May 8th! And now we have the full trailer!! Maybe the trailer shows a bit too much. You don’t have to watch it if you already know. But! This trailer reveals the most comprehensive list of guest stars we have so far! Giancarlo Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, John Cho, Melanie Lynskey, GaTa, Haley Joel Osment, Adrienne C. Moore, Patti Harrison, Awkwafina, B.J. Novak, Carol Kane, Katie Holmes, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Cynthia Erivo, David Alan Grier, Taylor Schilling, David Krumholtz, Ego Nwodim, Gaby Hoffmann, Sam Richardson, Geraldine Viswanathan, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Ritter, John Mulaney, Alia Sha…
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When I was in college, my roommate lent me a book, A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami. He knew I loved noir and thought I’d also love this postmodern Japanese mystery. I did not. In fact, I threw the book across the room (Sorry, Raj). Yes, it started out in a very hardboiled style with a scarred narrator searching for a missing person, er, sheep (or maybe both). Weird, wonderful. But by the end, the mystery wasn’t really solved, not in any satisfactory way. Sure, I knew more about the sheep and the missing friend, but I also knew less. I felt tricked. I had expected something different, perhaps some feeling of mastery or order that we get when most mysteries are resol…
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Living on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive in 1973, there were more than a few shops in the community where chattering kids bought all types of cavity inducing treats. My favorite spot was Jesus’ Candy Store, where the Hispanic owner and his wife watched over us kids as though they were our surrogate parents. Jesus’ place overflowed with toys, school supplies, Spalding rubber balls, comic books, chips for Skully tops and, of course, candy. However, Jesus didn’t unlock his door until the afternoon, leaving the morning trade wide open. In the summer of 1973 a new shop opened on Broadway owned and run by an overweight brother man named Jesse Powell. His st…
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“Wow, it was a page-turner.” “I stayed up all night reading it.” “No idea what would happen—I couldn’t put it down!” Comments about my recent thriller? Well, possibly, but in fact, these were reactions to my memoir about my experience founding Comedy Central (Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor, Ulysses Press, 2022). There are no chase scenes, no shootouts, just people in a television company undertaking a big project. It doesn’t sound very thrilling, so how did I get it to read like a thriller? And why would I want to? Telling stories about our experiences is what most of us do all the time. Now and then the story falls so flat th…
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I drank the high school English teacher and college lit prof Kool-Aid from jump. Never mind the glitzy-gauze then circus bigtop film adaptations. This was the great American Novel. One term paper and I was done with it and frankly neither the story nor its Minnesota author had anything in common with me but Princeton and his exposé thereof, This Side of Paradise. Likewise, paeons to F. Scott Fitzgerald from my mystery idols didn’t find much purchase with me as I began my own writing journey. “He was a dream writer and my master,” gushed hard-ass Ross McDonald. Great. “It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite,” opined Raymond Chandler. So? “Hemingway, Dos Pa…
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A bullet on the music charts can make a recording career—“number seven with a bullet!” A bullet in the chamber of an assassin’s gun can cost a young man his dreams of a career in the music business. A bullet scooped up from a homemade target range can bring a killer to justice. Late on the evening of March 9, 1989, Kevin Hughes, twenty-three, chart director at Cash Box magazine (a music industry trade publication competing with Billboard), was hanging out with Sammy Sadler, a recording artist and promoter associated with Evergreen Records. They were leaving the Evergreen offices just before 10:30 when a man dressed in black stepped from the shadows and opened fire. Sadle…
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I wish I could remember when I first read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time—I must have been around twenty—but I certainly remember how much I loved it, which has only grown with every reread. I had already become a serious reader of crime fiction, immersed in the works of contemporary crime writers in addition to the usual Golden Age suspects like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, I simply could not comprehend how a mystery writer had produced a book like The Daughter of Time, one perfectly attuned to my love of research, that upended traditional historical wisdom without devolving into outright conspiracy theory. One that featured a wonderful array of su…
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It is a truism that children imitate. You do what you see. If I had grown up the child of an electrician, possibly I would be rewiring something right now, rather than writing this essay, but as the child of a mystery writer… here I am. My mom is Paula Gosling, who published 15 mysteries during her career, both series with returning detectives and stand-alone novels. She was pretty successful, she won the Gold Dagger (the British Crime Writers Association’s top award), the John Creasey award for best first crime novel, and one of her books was turned into not one, but two absolutely terrible movies. (Fair Game, featuring Cindy Crawford and Cobra, a cult classic with Syl…
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Much has been written about Villanelle, the mischievous, fashionable millennial murderer at the center of BBC America’s beloved series Killing Eve. Villanelle (Jodie Comer) contains multitudes: she is spunky and surly, mischievous and malicious, sardonic and sentimental. Mostly, though, she’s self-obsessed, in constant pursuit of a lifestyle which affords her the maximum amount of enjoyment. Villanelle is a psychopath, employed as an assassin by an international criminal organization which pays her well—allowing her to have the highly stylish life she wants. But killing people is not only her job, it is also her pleasure; throughout the season, she resembles an assassin …
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A look at the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. Rav Grewal-Kök, The Snares (Random House) The Snares may be the most cynical take on government actions I’ve ever come across. In Rav Grewal-Kök’s brilliant and tragic sendoff of the post-9/11 world, a bored bureaucrat is recruited to approve suggested targets for the nascent drone program, and instead finds himself set up as the patsy for a deeply racist and bloodthirsty initiative. If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this. –MO Liann Zhang, Julie Chan Is Dead (Atria) Julie Chan was separated from her twin sister Chloe after a horr…
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What comes to mind when one thinks of a “crime story” is probably something that’s thrilling and gritty, involving police detectives and yellow tape and pulse-pounding excitement. But because the spectrum of crime is so broad, encompassing everything from vandalism to murder, the array of crime stories on offer has become appropriately diverse—and one unexpected source of crime fiction happens to be the young adult coming-of-age genre. For example, I’ve written a young adult novel called Pride or Die that follows a group of ordinary high-schoolers who find themselves wrapped up in an attempted murder mystery. In addition to this, there are scenes of our protagonists ille…
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When I set out to write my newest horror novel, When the Wolf Comes Home, I knew a few things. I knew I wanted it to be as fast-paced and adrenaline-fueled a chase story as any I’d ever read; I knew I wanted it to be about shapeshifters and fathers and other incomprehensible creatures; and, most of all, I knew I wanted it to be about Fear. Fear with a capital F. Fear as a phenomenon, as a character in our lives we all have to deal with, make space for, even sometimes learn to use to our advantage. Because the story’s premise centers around the uneasy alliance between a woman and the mysterious little boy she finds herself protecting, I knew I had an opportunity to look at…
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I’m going to offer a few thoughts on why and how I went about writing Return of the Maltese Falcon. But, before doing so, I need to acknowledge a few books and their authors upon whose work I depended. Dashiell Hammett obviously towers over that list. The 1961 paperback edition of The Maltese Falcon I read at age thirteen sported a Harry Bennett cover with Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Casper Gutman and Wilmer Cook portrayed in a then-modern manner. The publisher presented this great book as just another mystery novel, only twenty years after the John Huston film adaptation had been in theaters. I first saw Bogart’s breakthrough movie on a Sunday morning when I skipped church by…
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Six years ago, when I first saw the flier pinned to the wall of the pizza place, near a shambolic shelf of board games, I was skeptical. It held a clip-art silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, with his familiar deerstalker and pipe, and invited any and all to join The Dogs in the Nighttime: a monthly Sherlock group in our small island town in the upper left corner of the country. Like the detective himself, I’m not much of a joiner, a trait that makes me bad at groups and good at books. That said, I’ve been a fan of Sherlock ever since listening to Mind’s Eye audio cassettes of his stories on camping trips as a kid. For years, I taught a course in Mystery Literature, and the …
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When I pitched The Impossible Thing to my publisher, his eyes glazed over. Embarrassed, I changed the subject. I already knew it was a weird one: The true story of thirty miraculous red eggs that were all taken from the same guillemot, sold to the highest bidder for a small fortune, and then somehow disappeared, never to be seen again. I thought it was a crime novel where the victim was a bird, and a wonderful mystery. Apparently I was wrong. I tried to forget about it, but that sad little seabird that never raised a chick haunted me. Over the next few years I’d try to explain the story to people, but it was never received with enthusiasm. Finally my brave publicis…
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In Scots, there are separate words for fine driving snow (snaw-pouther) and small flakes (spitters)—plus about 400 other snow-related terms. Alas, English isn’t nearly so rich. And yet there is something about the winter landscape that begs to be written about. The crackle of ice underfoot. The calls of crows that mass at sunset. A setting so bleak and yet full of beauty practically begs for mystery. If it’s not clear by now, I’m a sucker for setting. Not just any setting, but settings that loom, that breathe. Settings so alive that they feel like another character in the story. And winter makes a particularly good one for a mystery. Cold is an implied threat just out…
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Breathless (1983) is a textbook-perfect example of how to create a great remake. It offers many of the same narrative pleasures which helped make Jean-Luc Godard’s first film of the same name a highly influential cinematic phenomenon. But at the same time, writer-director James McBride and his collaborators behind and in front of the camera find numerous ways to make their version of this film feel vibrant and alive in ways that are completely original to it. From a storytelling standpoint, these two versions of Breathless are nearly identical. Both films center on a young car thief (Jean-Paul Belmondo in the original, Richard Gere in the remake) who set off for a major …
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A resort vacation? Thousands. A novel making fun of one? Less than 30 bucks! And the look on your rich cousin’s face when she realizes you don’t give a shit about her tan and plan to ask her leading questions about labor conditions instead of letting her show you pictures? Priceless. (This is a hypothetical cousin I’m making up here, in case any of my actual family is reading). Why bother lamenting a lack of travel to new territories when you can stand firm in the knowledge of your own moral high ground? Americans are all badly dressed assholes abroad anyway, like, who shells out for an international plane ticket but won’t bother investing in long pants (that’s aimed at …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker (Atlantic Monthly) “In his sort-of-mystery debut, with understated humor and zippy prose, former New Yorker fact-checker Kelley is a fluid and funny writer, divertingly digressing on the nature of fact-checking and filling out a backstory for the narrating fact-checker, who, both well-informed and hilariously unaware, is as charmingly pedantic as a character could be.” –Annie Bostrom, Booklist Bailey Seybolt, Coram House (Atria) “Seybolt blends true crime and fiction in this absorbing debut. Seybolt skillfully blends points of view. Part Gothic nov…
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When I first trial-ballooned the idea of writing a fantasy murder mystery to a few other writer friends, the concept was met with a little skepticism: Could be really tough! Murder mysteries need people to know exactly how the world works. With fantasy, you can do anything, so it’s hard to build a mystery out of that. I knew instantly that this wasn’t so. Fantasy magic works only when the audience knows exactly what it can and can’t do: that’s a core thesis of worldbuilding. But more to the point, I knew that a fantasy murder mystery had been done before – and had been so successfully that it had become a cornerstone of entertainment culture. The first four Harry Potter…
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Jonathan Ames was born in 1964 and raised in New Jersey by a traveling-salesman father and a schoolteacher mother. He was educated at Princeton and at Columbia, where his writing teachers included Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster. His senior thesis became his first published novel, which bore a blurb from Philip Roth. (“Mr. Ames’s antisocial young hero comes through as a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield.”) By 2019, he had written ten books, had a one-man New York stage show (Oedipussy), appeared several times on the David Letterman show, was a frequent participant in The Moth storytelling showcase, wrote and produced two television series (Bored to Death…
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At the highly impressionable age of eleven, I moved with my mother from the smallholding that had shaped my young life and nascent imagination to a wonderful bungalow in the suburbs of Bulawayo. All the houses looked the same—modest single-story abodes tucked away on acres of land and bordered by bougainvillea or hibiscus hedges. All houses that is, save one. The house that broke the uniformity was not a house at all but a castle—a seemingly abandoned, crumbling ruin hidden behind a fortress of never-green savannah vegetation—situated two houses down from where I lived. The entire place was shrouded in mystery for me. Who had built it and why? And, perhaps, more important…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
