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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I hadn’t planned a deep-dive essay. Just a brief think piece…maybe a couple of examples where the gravamen of the story is not cat-and-mouse with an evil nemesis…no one’s menacing their husband’s mistress at a beach house…the mastermind of heist gone-wrong isn’t being double-crossed. Yet two things happened. First, I started interviewing friend and colleagues in crime writing—from newbies and true crime journalists to reliable list-toppers to studio favorites— and found that all had a lot to say, and much of it would ruffle and rattle. So ruffling and rattling in fact that a few said they didn’t want to be identified. Second, recently on HBO, home of David Simon’s master…
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Two years before writer, director and composer John Carpenter reshaped horror films with “Halloween,” he made “7Assault on Precinct 13,” a lean, violent film made on a shoestring budget and owing a debt to predecessors like Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” and George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Released in 1976, “Assault” is an influential but little-seen thriller. It’s possible that siege thrillers like “Die Hard” would have been made without Carpenter’s original film but they almost certainly would have felt different. The original “Assault” has been a favorite of critics and film industry types for going on 50 years. And “Assault” has its own off-the-screen mys…
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Most of us have experienced a bad neighbor or two in our lifetimes. From dorm life to 20-something apartment life, I remember a lot of neighbors with loud music, pot wafting through the halls, wild parties, and some squeaky bed frames I’d like to forget, but those were simply slight annoyances compared to the bad neighbors in these spine tingling thrillers. In my new novel, The Vacancy in Room 10, I had loads of fun creating sinister neighbors keeping dangerous secrets. So if you’re also a fan of scary neighbors you won’t want to miss these. From gaslighting, kidnapping, betrayal of all kinds, and even murder, this list of thrillers is guaranteed to give you the chills a…
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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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The original opening credits of “Lou Grant,” the late-1970s, early 1980s TV series about the newspaper business, are of a particular time but also timeless. The credits montage for the first season shows a bird sitting in a tree, trees being chopped down and turned into newsprint, the reporters and editors of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune gathering news and writing stories, rolled-up newspapers being thrown into puddles and onto roofs and, finally, the newspaper being used to line the floor of a birdcage. The life of a newspaper – and a newsroom, for that matter – is very different now than in 1977. To be sure, print editions are still produced and delivered, some…
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The mix of political maneuvering, terrorism, murder and the volatile dynamics of marriage makes for great thrillers. The TV series “House of Cards” very well might have perfected this recipe. Now comes “The Diplomat,” which at times plays like “Scenes From a Marriage” mixed with “Jack Ryan.” The eight-episode Netflix series, which debuted April 20 and hopefully will see a second season because of how effective it is and also because it ends with a cliffhanger, is the latest in a bunch of new political thrillers like “The Night Agent” that plays to the strengths of the genre while subverting it, not unlike the 2022 series “The Old Man.” Instead of the patented globe-hopp…
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A silver-haired man in a black jacket prowls the arid streets of Los Angeles, shouting in indecipherable cockney, brandishing a large silver pistol at anyone who gives him grief. His name is Wilson, and he’s a British ex-con with a reputation for serious violence. He wants to kill whoever murdered his daughter, Jenny. He thinks a record producer named Terry Valentine is responsible. If you’ve never seen Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999), you might read that barest description of its plot and assume it follows the usual framework of a revenge flick: the protagonist, wronged, murders or ruins the source of their anguish. It’s a story as old as the Bible, extended to …
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as we’ve seen, the TV networks tried all kinds of variations on cop and detective shows. One of the most interesting variations was a crime show that focused on a very different kind of investigator: Hard-hitting journalists. This was before “All the President’s Men,” or course, and years before Watergate, for that matter. “The Name of the Game” ran for three seasons, airing 76 episodes on NBC from September 1968 to March 1971. It’s obscure these days, although a DVD set was issued a few years back. Some of the episodes, which ran 90 minutes with commercials, are posted on YouTube, which is where I watched them for the first time since…
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‘The Way of the Gun’ Was a Nihilistic Rebuke To Everything Cool in Nineties Crime Cinema
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Crime fiction (and crime film) has always had an uneasy relationship with the violence it portrays. Every creator knows that a large portion of their audience slaps money down for a full helping of murder and mayhem—and yet, so many go out of their way to insert a bit of moral finger-wagging into the narrative. Sometimes this appeal to morality is overt, as in the original “Scarface” (1932), when director Howard Hawks was forced to add scenes in which characters condemned the gangster lifestyle; in others, it’s slightly more subtle, as in the innumerable mysteries in which a detective ruminates on the evils that humans do—after a couple hundred pages of describing those…
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I was 25 years old and had a novel written when someone named the feeling that has chased me my entire life. Survivor’s guilt. I sat on a Zoom call with someone I didn’t know, but who’d read my debut novel and used these two words to describe it like it was nothing more than a theme. She asked me how survivor’s guilt impacted me as a Syrian American. I stared back at her blankly. Some people search their whole lives for a diagnosis—visiting countless experts, regurgitating their symptoms—until they obtain the validation that comes with uncovering what is wrong with them. At first, I liked it: Two words that captured what I’d needed ninety thousand words of a novel to u…
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The first time I read Frankenstein, I was unimpressed. I was freshly fifteen, slogging my way through a series of classics for English class, and desperate to be spending my time finishing up Buffy or The Vampire Chronicles instead. I found Victor Frankenstein relatable enough in the beginning; like him, I was a precocious (read: terribly conceited) student, determined to make my mark as a scientist. But as the book went on, I found him more and more pathetic in his failures and his self-loathing, unforgivable in his choice to abandon his creation – not least because, if he’d only stuck with his monster, I was sure, it would have made for a far more interesting story. I f…
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On the eve of the parade, Hanna Schröder was asked to have the Allerton sisters ready for the party in under an hour. It would be difficult, given the girls’ general recalcitrance and specific disregard for the help, especially those with whom they lacked any consequential rapport. When Hanna appeared in their bedroom and asked that they please wash and clothe themselves, the children called her a stranger and told her to go away. “I may be unfamiliar, but I’m no stranger,” Hanna said, stepping toward the girls. “I do your laundry every day. We’ve spoken before. You’re Alice, and you’re Rose.” “I’ve honestly never seen you in my life,” the older one, Alice, said, and H…
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There are few places in the world that inspire awe and terror like the Alps. With peaks that top 4000 meters and immense crevasses cracking through granite, the Alps give a god-like vantage above the world one minute only to plunge one to its depths the next. This dizzying sensation was best expressed by the French essayist Chateaubriand when he wrote: High mountains suffocate me, and while the lack of oxygen is certainly a factor, it is just one of the elements that make the Alps the perfect setting for chilling crime, suspense, and horror fiction. One of my favorite novels set in the Alps is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. Shelley perfectly captured th…
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Rex Stout began writing before Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner did. Between 1912 and 1917, he published more than thirty stories and four novels, most in pulp magazines. At age twenty-seven, Stout gave up writing to run a company that arranged for schoolchildren to set up savings accounts. The earnings from this business enabled him to move to Europe and launch a second writing career. The first fruits of that effort put him among authors who were adapting modernist techniques for a wider readership. How Like a God (1929) was called “an extraordinarily brilliant and fascinating piece of work,” and Seed on the Wind (1930) made “the Lawrence excursion into sexual psychology…
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Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard My school counselor said that I have to do this. She said she wouldn’t, ever, read what I wrote. She added: not that she didn’t want to know what was going on in my head, it was just rude to assume someone could read the words you had just written. She would need my permission. Her name is Ms. Cifuentes and she’s glaring at the two boys in the back who are mumbling to each other. I know why I’m here, but I’m not sure why they are. Ms. Cifuentes seems to always have a bunch of us come see her, though we’re not in her office, which is tiny. Today we’re in an area of the cafeteria not far from where a bunch of other kids are messing around…
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The world of poisons has always been something of immense fascination to me, I think because I always saw the other side to them. Don’t get me wrong, they were always alluring in that poetic and murderous way, sure, but growing up with an herbalist mother meant I was raised with the idea that a lot of things that may harm you can actually be used to heal more often than not. As the saying goes, it’s the dose that kills—and it’s that idea of the dose that has kept my interest all of these years. The fact one drop can help, and ten can kill. It’s also an idea that has existed throughout history. I recall sitting in a lecture hall one day in graduate school, staring at Pow…
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“L’affaire Flactif,” as it is known in France—the Flactif case—was one of the most terrifying murders that France has ever seen. Firstly, because two adults and three children (ages 6, 9, and 10) were literally massacred; secondly, because the motive, which seemed to be rather ridiculous, was in fact extremely complex. If we stuck only to the facts reported by the police and the media, we might believe that David Hotyat murdered an entire five-person family for the sake of a chalet and a few knickknacks (a camera, telephone, DVD, etc.). We would think that it was a murder committed out of jealousy. But here is the rest of the story. Born in northern France to a blue-col…
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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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– by Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl, coming Tuesday, June 22 My mother the (retired) librarian read my latest book while visiting me over Memorial Day weekend. We are WASP-y people—well, she’s 100 percent WASP, I’m 75 percent—so I did not expect effusive praise and I was not disappointed. She said that Dream Girl kept her attention and she would be curious to see what reviewers said. “It’s so different from your other books,” she added. I will unpack a lot of this at my next therapy session. (For the record, the book has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, the last of which called it a “masterpiece.’) But the comment that…
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Soon Wiley’s debut novel, When We Fell Apart, is sublimely haunting and will linger in your mind long after you turn the last page. After a young woman disappears in Seoul, her ex-pat boyfriend searches for her, and in the process, for himself. Ahead of the book’s publication, Soon Wiley was kind enough to answer a few questions over email. Molly Odintz: This is your debut, but it doesn’t feel like a debut—the writing is so sophisticated. What’s your writing process? Soon Wiley: First off, thanks for the high praise! Like a lot of writers, my first foray into fiction was with the short story form. During my MFA program, I was incredibly fortunate to have some excellent …
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Excerpted from “Rebecca,” reinterpreted and illustrated by Emily Rose Dixon, included in The Graphic Canon of Crime and Mystery, Vol 2, edited by Russ Kick. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Seven Stories Press. Copyright © 2021 by Emily Rose Dixon. View the full article
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When people describe me as a mystery writer, I’m a little taken aback. While I am of the firm belief that there is a mystery at the heart of all fiction—why else are we reading but to discover something new, about the world, others, ourselves?—I have never seen myself in that light. A traditional mystery implies a “who-dun-it,” and as far as “who-dun-its” go, I have always found the reveal of “who-dun-it” to be something of a letdown. I’m far more interested in the why-they-dun-it. I also don’t consider myself an author of crime fiction. Police procedurals and detective fiction don’t interest me much at all, and while a crime of some sort often plays a part in my novels…
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1. The 1934 Extinguishing of the Frank Clements and Elsie Hildreth Smith Family The coroner declared that there was no evidence that the house had been forcibly entered, but added that the investigation showed that the Smiths frequently did not lock doors and windows at night.—“Alabama Banker and Family Slain—Couple Were of Leading Families,” New York Times, November 26, 1934 As day began to dawn on Sunday morning, November 25, 1934 in Demopolis, a quiet little Alabama town of just over four thousand souls situated in rural Marengo County at the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers in the heart of the state’s old plantation belt, Gertrude Robertson, coo…
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Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht was about to embark on a new career as a playwright and Academy Award-winning scriptwriter when he first met the infamous Joseph Weil. In fact, the encounter took place amid the chaos and clutter of a press room that would inspire the setting for The Front Page, the hit play Hecht co-wrote in 1928 with colleague Charles MacArthur. As usual, Weil—most people knew him only by his nickname, the “Yellow Kid”—looked like a wealthy, respectable citizen. “Our town’s most brilliant confidence man…always dressed like a matinee idol,” Hecht recalled in his 1963 memoir, Gaily, Gaily, “down to his pearl-gray spats.” The mustache of his neatly trimmed, …
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There’s a line roughly 45 minutes into the first episode of “Three Pines,” Amazon’s new adaptation of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books, that so incensed Penny she denounced it on her Facebook page when the show’s trailer was first released. The crabby old poet, Ruth Zardo, tells Gamache, a homicide investigator with Canada’s Sûreté police force, probing the murder of a hated neighbor, “This village is the most welcoming place on Earth. But if you don’t belong here, Three Pines will find you out and chase you one way or another.” In her social media post, Penny told fans she asked for the line to be cut but lost the fight. She wrote, “It makes me wonder if they und…
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