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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When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the book’s essential reframing of an oft-misunderstood history to our readers. Lassiter makes a profound and necessary case against both criminalization and coercive rehabilitation, and time and time again, highlights the gap between white fears and white behavior. I was able to send Lassiter some questions over email, what follows is a lengthy and fascinating discussion that sheds light on many previously (may I say, deliberately?) ignored facets of the decades-long war on drugs. Also, we talk about how bad…
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It’s spring. It’s officially spring in New York, where CrimeReads is based. Maybe you, like me, wear sunglasses year-round. But maybe you are just busting yours out for the season. There can be no denying that accessory’s association with warm weather. Nothing elevates a look like a pair of sunglasses. And there are many, many slick shades in the annals of crime film and TV. There are cool sunglasses in lots of movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, Risky Business, Lolita… though Dolores wears cat-eyes, not the heart-shaped glasses, in the movie itself). But the crime genre has them in spades. So does the sci-fi genre; hey, it’s also a thing that sometimes CrimeReads c…
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When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it was meant to end the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it was the beginning of perhaps the most infamous criminal period in US history because, very simply, most Americans liked a drink – and many didn’t care where it came from. At the time many wineries were based in downtown Los Angeles, which was surrounded by agriculture, and was the center of the wine region’s trade. There were more vineyards in the valleys just a few dozen miles away too. Barely a dozen of them made it to the end of Prohibition in 1933, and some merchants paid a higher price for their barrels and bottles than falli…
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Each month, CrimeReads/me celebrates the art of the translated novel with a roundup of the best new international crime fiction releases. The list below is divided between horror, thrillers, dystopia, and satire, each driven by a moral force, for one of the most wide-ranging selections of texts I’ve ever included in this column. As the art of translation continues to be under siege, it is more important than ever to value the hard-working translators bringing international voices to new readers, and I would like to extend my utmost appreciation to these professionals. Asako Yuzuki, Butter Translated by Polly Barton (Ecco) In this sumptuous tale, a gourmand hedonist …
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Part One: An Unkindness of Ravens It was almost three years to the day after the great quake had laid waste to so much of San Francisco’s pride that the first of the extortion letters arrived, dated April 21, 1909. This one appeared at the door of the home of Mr. James O’Brien Gunn, president of the Mechanics’ Savings Bank in San Francisco. Like the other two which followed it on April 26, the missive was menacingly signed “The Ravens.” “Dear sir,” it began: Read this letter well and weigh each word of it to its full weight, for they mean exactly what they say. We wish to tell you that on next Friday night, April 23d, you must be in front of the Van Ness Theater with…
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The CrimeReads editors make their choices for the best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) Vasilyuk’s powerful debut tells the story of Yefim Shulman, moving between his death in Ukraine in 2007 and his experiences during World War II and its aftermath, when Shulman fought Germany for the USSR but soon ended up ensnared in the KGB plots, hiding his secrets from his family. Vasilyuk manages to capture both the story’s intimate drama and its epic qualities, telling the story of a double life and its reverberations across borders and generations. –DM Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In…
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Prague in the 1990s was a magical place. Communism had fallen, a seat at the opera cost a few bucks, the city’s magnificence had yet to be sullied by hordes of tourists or chain restaurants. Playwright and former dissident Václav Havel was at the helm, transforming and privatizing and chain-smoking. NATO had opened its arms. In 1994, President Clinton played saxophone at the Reduta black-light theater, where absinthe was served. Statues of Soviet dictators were vanishing. A promise of something was in the air, rising from the city like káva turk steam. To outsiders, Prague was irresistible precisely for its halfway quality. The feeling that all you had to do was dust off…
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“The city is strong in the memory, no matter how much it decays and gives way to the sea.” –Elaine Perry, 1990 Since I’ve started writing about out-of-print and “lost” Black authors, I occasionally get suggestions from writer-friends who turn me on to their favorite neglected authors. When I was writing The Blacklist column for Catapult, journalist Ericka Blount Danois schooled me on the Harlem/Brooklyn teen novels of Rosa Guy while respected Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe taught me much about the literary life and brutal death of surreal fictionist Henry Dumas. Most recently I received a note from respected memoirist Bridgett M. Davis (The World According to Fan…
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At the beginning of my new novel The Hollow Tree, a man stands on the roof of a Scottish hotel. It is night, and the distant mountains are hidden. It is rural Argyll, and the stars above are clear in their spiralling array. The nearby sea murmurs, but in the dark it is invisible. The man is naked, and his toes grip the stony edge of the battlements of the baronial tower. Behind him is safety. Before him is a sheer drop into darkness. He is not alone. He turns around to face Shona Sandison, a journalist, who is staying at the hotel for a wedding. To her surprise, she can see his chest is adorned with a complex tattoo. But it is not a picture or decoration on his exposed f…
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Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in both creative writing programs and the true crime storytelling industry, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to find so much beautiful writing about terrible events. Just so, as true crime has matured, those who tell such stories have learned essential lessons in how to avoid exploitation and bring in appropriate context and empathy (the anthropologists in the list below are especially notable in their sensitivities). The works on this list are about complicated situations, torn individuals, delayed or denied justice, and a world in which those who bear the most responsibility for harm are not the ones who …
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The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda has chosen 12 of the best weird tales ever written for a new collection from The Folio Society titled, appropriately enough, Weird Tales. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano spoke to Dirda. a longtime aficionado of the “weird,” about his selections. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. OR: You’ve done such wonderful research in the history of “weird tales”—the magazine of that name, and MAM/pulp publications and sci-fi and horror stories, in general. MD: Let me start by underscoring that The Folio Society collection Weird Tales only draws one story from the self-appointed “uniqu…
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The Reaper Follows arrives out in the world this week, and I’m certainly hoping that it’s a suspenseful novel readers will enjoy! It’s the last in my ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ series—which, naturally, includes four books. Each book stands on its own, of course, a case that must be investigated, that brings danger and mystery, a beginning, a middle, and an end!” But working on this has been intriguing for me! I have always been fascinated by ancient texts of any kind, words that can be—and are—interrupted differently by different people through time. And the Four Horsemen . . . We’ve recently lived through a period in which all signs of the ‘horsemen’ might b…
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Anthony Horowitz is missing. Not the real Anthony Horowitz, of course. He’s exactly where you’d expect him to be—hunkered down at his desk, toiling away at the next novel even as his newest is hitting bookshelves around the world. But more than sixty pages into Close to Death (April 16, 2024; Harper) and the author’s literary alter ego—the Watson to ex-Detective Danielle Hawthorne’s Holmes—has yet to make an appearance. It’s a strange case indeed. “I think all my life I’ve had a fear of formula,” Horowitz—whose prolific output includes the Alex Rider saga for young adults, Magpie Murders, and original works featuring James Bond and Sherlock Holmes—confesses. “I just do…
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By the 1950s, Wheaties had gained massive popularity as the “Breakfast of Champions.” Packaged in a bright orange box with famous sports figures on the cover, the iconic breakfast cereal was marketed to consumers as a healthy way to nourish a fit and active lifestyle. According to a tip to Confidential from one of Frank Sinatra’s lovers, the megastar always ate a bowl of Wheaties before sex, then con-sumed three more between encore performances. That tidbit inspired the magazine’s May 1956 story headlined “Here’s Why Frank Sinatra Is the Tarzan of the Boudoir.” Otash joked that Sinatra’s face should grace every box. Still pissed-off at Confidential for the 1955 “Wrong Do…
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The world is terrifying. It seems like such an obvious thing to say, right? Of course, the world is terrifying! Turn on the news! Look around! The world’s always been terrifying! Still, when I think about what that means in practice, not in theory, the terror becomes sharper, more realized around its edges. I’m bombarded with tragedies at the mere click of a button, a news app that pops into my notifications every fifteen minutes. Whenever I see a college campus trending, I feel something sink inside of me, heavy and tired. And whenever I see a news story with a Black person’s photo front and center, I hold my breath. I’ve wondered if there’s a name for the feeling I’m…
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Allan Pinkerton is a storied figure in the American imagination. Most know his agency for its violent anti-union mercenary work, but few realize that Pinkerton was an Abolitionist, as well, who ran a stop on the Underground Railroad and headed Abraham Lincoln’s secret service during the Civil War. He also wrote true crime books. In them, Pinkerton recounts his detective agency’s exploits, including several about the first woman detective in the United States, Kate Warne. Pinkerton was highly unconventional for hiring her. While more and more women were entering the work force in the 19th century, which jobs were considered “suitable” for women was a major point of conte…
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Most of the generation of authors that produced the Golden Age of detective fiction–that brief era when the puzzle plot purportedly reigned supreme in mysteries–had departed not only from the field but from life itself when, over a half-century ago in the Spring of 1972, British crime writer and critic Julian Symons published Bloody Murder, his landmark study of mystery, detective and crime writing (there is a difference among them to be sure) and the first popular survey of the misdeeds and mayhem genre since Howard Haycraft published Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, three decades earlier in 1941. (Revised editions of Bloody Murder followed…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death (Harper) “An absolutely engrossing tale…written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to anyone who can figure this one out!” –Booklist Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt (William Morrow) “Paretsky’s phenomenal gifts for significant and riveting stories, lacerating dialogue, rich psychology, and barbed humor reach tornadic force.” –Booklist Alyssa Cole, One of Us Knows (William Morrow) “Cole mixes a spooky, isolated setting with a hint of the gothic and a storyline that isn’t …
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The prisoner hauled before a Brooklyn judge in 1928 did not look the part of one of the most notorious criminals in history. He squinted at the world through round-framed spectacles. When he removed his broad-brimmed hat, the sudden exposure of the baldness beneath added years to his appearance. “A pudgy little man, with only a vague collar of chestnut hair,” was the assessment of James Kilgalen of the International News Service, one of the journalists in the courtroom that day. “He seemed old and tired.” Other newsmen were more charitable in their descriptions. One called him “a meek lamb.” Another thought he could pass for a retired stockbroker. Yet another found him “…
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I can’t write crime. That’s the troubling discovery I made while drafting my second novel Sing, I. As a discipline of the crime genre for decades, particularly detective fiction and more recently true crime, I initially found my inability to write crime deeply frustrating and surprising. I knew from the outset that Sing, I would begin with a store holdup and the robber would continue to commit local crimes and evade capture. As I wrote on, I fully expected Ester, my main character and one of two victims of the store holdup, to become increasingly embroiled in the hunt for the repeat offender—along the lines of a heart-trembling psychological thriller. But Sing, I’s story …
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Spring is here, summer is coming, and June is Pride Month. What does this mean? Lots of great new queer mysteries and thrillers to read on the beach or at the park on a lazy Sunday. This season, many beloved characters return: Katrina Carrasco’s queer 19th-century outlaw Alma Rosales, John Copenhaver’s 1950s crime-solving (and—committing) lesbian duo Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, Dharma Kelleher’s goth tattoo artist and vigilante Avery Byrne, and Robyn Gigl’s passionate trans defense attorney, Erin McCabe. New characters and scenarios also abound: Leslie Karst and Jack Ori begin a new series set in beautiful Hawaii and on an ominous college campus, respectively. A…
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Throughout the shooting of The Exorcist and into postproduction and publicity, a half-dozen crew members would insist that Linda Blair had emerged from the experience unscathed, but barely a year after the film wrapped, she was burning rubber in the Hollywood fast lane and, before the end of the decade, she would become a teenage alcoholic, bizarrely mirroring one of the dismal TV movies she starred in after establishing Regan MacNeil as an offbeat cultural touchstone. Her brief but lurid interval in the spotlight culminated with a notorious drug bust in 1977. “The Exorcist, for me, lasted a lifetime,” Blair told A&E. Like Jason Miller, accosted in the streets by di…
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Three years ago, when I ranked 100 Sherlock Holmes performances in an article for this very website, I had thought that I had landed upon the most challenging project I’d ever undertake at CrimeReads. Watching countless film and TV adaptations, attempting to ascribe value to various interpretations of the character, attempting to force a logical ranking out of them all… for weeks, I wrung my hands over it, and, when it was over, I washed my hands of it—and the notion of putting together any similar list ever again. And yet here we are. Here we are again. The list which you are about to read is a ranking of the 85 film and TV performances of Sherlock Holmes’s esteemed col…
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“I’m a firm believer that things happen when the time is right,” says USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan. She should know. Her time to write psychological suspense didn’t arrive until she was 55 years old. Ryan was in America’s early 1970s class of female broadcast pioneers along with Jane Pauley, Jessica Savitch, and Leslie Stahl. Long before she ever considered writing thrillers, she’d won the hearts of her viewers along with numerous Emmys for her investigative reporting on WHDH-TV in Indianapolis, and in Atlanta and Boston. Then one day in 2004, a spam email popped up on her computer screen at Channel 7 News, and by mistake, she opened it. The subject …
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“What a rotten writer of detective stories Life is!” By the time he wrote these words, Nathan Leopold, Jr. was middle-aged and balding. But in the American consciousness, he was forever immortalized as the sullen teenager he had been in the sweltering Chicago summer of 1924, infamously linked—in name and in deed—with his partner in crime, Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb were nineteen and eighteen respectively when they committed the “crime of the century.” On May 21, the two boys, driving a blue Willys-Knight rented under a pseudonym, picked up fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks as he walked home from school. They had planned carefully for months, orchestrating what they thou…
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