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 don’t know who showed up to Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre with lofty expectations, but I was not one of them. No, I went to the movies at the end of a long, hard week because I wanted—I needed—to watch scenes full of computer screens blinking with face-matching algorithms, and bald men growling into earpieces, and the slain bodies of henchmen rolling down flights of stairs, and people typing really fast on keyboards before announcing “I’m in,” and this seemed to be the kind of film that could give those things to me. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre did not get rave reviews across the board, which I think is a bit unfair, because it is a movie that seems exactly l…
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While it is Northern malarkey that summer begins in June (it’s been hot in Texas, where this editor lives, for months now), it is appropriate for a summer preview list to begin in the first official month of summer, so we are starting with June this year. The list is also a bit shorter than usual. That is because there were too many good books and we got overwhelmed and then sleepy and then didn’t read as many of them as we would have liked to…But there are still 60+ thrilling, compelling, thoughtful, and intricate crime novels on the list below! (It really is a stressful year for us in terms of reading…Why are there so many good books?!?!) There are also quite a few YA a…
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CrimeReads has been accused of a bias toward noir in the past, and we’re sorry (not sorry) to report that this year’s best of the year so far list is noir AF—the world is, after all, getting darker, and cynical take-downs are often less depressing to read than fantasies of happiness (for those of us who don’t believe in happy endings, anyway). Noir is a cornerstone when it comes to fictional critiques of social mores and growing inequality, and the books below serve as either sendoffs of the corrupt and privileged, or as folk-hero tales of those who fight the system. You’ll see plenty of household names at the top of their game, plus rising new voices who will hopefully c…
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I once attended a writing seminar that claimed the landscape of your childhood home informs the way you move, think, and talk. A rocky, mountainous place might shorten your sentences into a rhythm that makes room for quick bursts of speed; a hot and humid landscape might lead you to consider your thoughts slowly, without straining yourself. Embarrassingly, I have forgotten exactly who led this discussion (if you’ve attended something similar, please tell me!), but the idea has never left me—that, in the same way some people wind up looking exactly like their dogs, the place where you live can infect you to a deeper degree than you might have realized. It’s by turns a co…
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I like to check in on writer’s houses. Not in a creepy, hiding-behind-the-hedges way, just as a diversion during the work day when I’m stuck online and wishing I were somewhere breezy with nothing but time, mixed drinks, and books. There’s a vicarious creative thrill in seeing the places where our favorite authors produced their best work. That’s especially true when a writer and a place are entwined in your imagination. I’m thinking about Hemingway’s Paris apartment on Notre-Dame-des-Champs or the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst—addresses and edifices that have survived to our day and still manage to conjure up an artistic world. In the crime fiction realm, that’s John D.…
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Traveling the world from the safety of our armchairs is the only travel most of us get these days, so it’s a good thing that publishers continue to bring out plenty of works grounded in far-flung locales to keep our imaginations, at least, from being stuck at home. This month’s offerings include a carefully plotted German thriller, a thoughtful Ghanaian mystery, a cynical Italian noir, and two new Scandinavian crime novels. Melanie Raabe, The Shadow (Spiderline/House of Anansi) Translated by Imogen Taylor Melanie Raabe made international waves with her tricky revenge thriller, The Trap, in which a shut-in author must venture outside after being granted a new chance t…
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Draw a circle. The space inside the circle represents the positive space in the drawing. The negative space would be the shape made by the outside of the circle. It’s most noticeable in cut paper art or silhouettes or even those Nagel prints that were so popular in the 1980s. Positive and Negative Space exists within other forms of art as well: ceramics and sculpture, for example. Since writing is also an artform, the theory of Positive and Negative Space also applies to literature and, specifically in this case, world-building or setting. Often, readers and new writers assume that world-building is what the author describes in detail—whether that’s the history of the fi…
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My buddy Tex had witnessed two executions for his job with a wire service. He told me it was going to be no big deal. We had been out drinking at an oyster bar near St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, a marshy stretch of mudflats and alligators on the Gulf of Mexico. “They sit up straight when the juice hits them, and then they slump forward and they’re dead,” Tex told me, in his molasses drawl. “The worst part about it, babe—and I mean this—is the long, boring drive back home.” That is not what happened to Jesse Tafero. When the electricity hit Jesse Tafero, the headset bolted onto his bare scalp caught fire. Flames blazed from his head, arcing bright orange with …
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John le Carré Offered a Piece of Advice to a Struggling Novelist. She’ll Never Forget It.
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People say you should never meet your heroes. When, in 2011, I sat next to David Cornwell (aka John le Carré) I was more worried for my hero meeting me. As the bright-eyed 81-year old leapt, smiling, to his feet, a kink of snow-white hair kicking up over the collar of his dinner jacket I made a pact with myself: Under no circumstances should I bring up the crime novel I am struggling to plot. Crime novels (including spy novels) are best known for their plots. Almost all reviews of successful crime novels will talk about plot before they mention character. Grisham’s plots are “intricate”, Agatha Christie’s are “ingenious”, Ruth Rendell’s are “twisting”. But le Carre, this…
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What Writing About the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre Taught Me About the Madness of Crowds
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I was reading a great interview on CrimeReads.com the other day—Paraic O’Donnell talking to Lee Child, genius author of the Jack Reacher novels—and they has this wonderful debate about the unreality of fiction. When I say it out loud, it sounds obvious, but it came up twice. And Lee said: ‘The only two real people in the transaction are the author and the reader.’ It’s absolutely true. Even if I put the Queen of England in the heart of my action—like in the ‘The Crown’ on TV—it isn’t actually her. It’s a fictional appearance by a ghost of a real person. If I put the 16th century Catherine de’ Medici on the page, a woman who history pretty much assures us was an embodimen…
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What is it about trains? What is it about them that fires the imagination, that suggests to those of a certain disposition the possibility of danger lurking behind every seat and in every carriage? There is, undoubtedly, something in the collective experience of a journey that lends itself to storytelling, and then of course the tantalizing proximity to strangers of every stripe. The chance meeting, whether fleeting or prolonged, the accidental brush of hands as the train hurtles around a sharp bend, a casual conversation in the bar car taking an unexpected turn. In a letter she wrote to her friend Marc Brandel in 1985, Patricia Highsmith confessed to thrilling to the id…
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“It is impossible to drive anywhere in America today without encountering a patient, droop-shouldered chap who stands by the roadside and continuously jerks his thumb across his chest. He is the hitch-hiker, one of the strangest products of the auto age, and he is getting to be a prominent part of the American landscape. He is also getting to be an intense pain in the neck. Just why it should be considered proper for a man to stand by the roadside and beg free transportation from total strangers is a mystery….But the hitch-hiker is something more than a nuisance. There are times and places when the hitch-hiker is an actual menace to public safety….[M]urders of motorists b…
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“What if Dracula’s long-suffering, bug-eating lunatic henchman Renfield finally got fed up with the abuse wrought unto him by his master, and decided to quit?” is, objectively, a very good premise for a movie. It’s got the three best things a movie can have: room for a rich character arc, a clear source of conflict, and Dracula. “What if Renfield goes to a support group for people in abusive or dysfunctional relationships, and his new friends help him on a journey of self-discovery and encourage him to leave Dracula?” is another good idea, a good way to develop this premise, love it. Additional good ideas include,”what if this movie is styled after and positioned as a se…
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When considering the great artistic accomplishments of England, what often comes to mind first is English Literature. Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Dickens—names that hold as much or more relevance today as they did when these authors lived. Their brilliance is as well-documented (the work speaks for itself, really) as it is undeniable. Their words live on era after era, with each subsequent generation of readers finding new meaning and understanding, new insight, and new revelations, in these centuries-old works. English literature is without doubt among the world’s great treasures. A cultural treasure needs, above all, to be enduring, to withs…
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“One of the most authentic, gripping, and profound collection of police procedurals ever accomplished.” – Michael Connelly Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were pioneers. First of all, they virtually created Scandinavian noir, and all the giants who followed them happily admit it. Second, with Ed McBain, they revolutionized the police procedural, emphasizing the squad as a whole, people who sometimes argued and fought and failed again and again, but who ultimately complemented one another as a team: “normal people with normal lots, normal thoughts, problems, and pleasures, people who are not larger than life, though not any smaller either,” in the words of Jo Nesbø Third, and…
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At first glance Poland’s major city Warsaw can seem like one of the grittier of Eastern Europe’s capitals—not with quite perhaps having the charm or romance of a Budapest or a Prague, or maybe even a Bucharest. Thanks to Hitler wanting to wipe the city off the map the old town is pretty much gone (except for a newly built ersatz ‘new/old’ town). Then in the Cold War the Stalinist architects got a go and stubbornly, but predictably, refused to build anything with a human dimension. Now there’s new money, European Union membership, and skyscrapers are popping up. But you can’t keep a good old city down—Polish hipsters are opening up all manner of cafés, restaurants and bout…
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What’s a mystery all about? The ending? Well, of course, you say—the denouement, the unraveling of the clues, the big reveal. If it’s too easy to guess the ending before that very moment, or if the ending doesn’t seem to mesh with the clues provided by the author you’re disappointed with it. It’s a lousy mystery, right? Really? Ever re-read a mystery? Even though you know the solution? (If you’re like me, of course, you can re-read it a year later because you’ve forgotten the solution, but that’s another matter.) But what’s the pleasure in re-reading if the entire pleasure is in the solution dangled like a carrot before you? Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, op…
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The gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, who is both expert cat-burglar and brilliant detective (as well as a master of disguise), made his debut in the short story “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” in July of 1905. A year later, author Maurice Leblanc thought, why not feature his genius protagonist facing off with the most famous sleuth of the day, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? As a character, Lupin does not have much in common with Holmes, despite their enormous intellects and penchants for showmanship; if he resembles anyone in British literature, it’s the popular gentleman thief character A. J. Raffles, created by E. W. Hornung (who was, incidentally, Conan Doyle’s broth…
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I’ve always loved, and been comforted by, television, but I have found myself turning to it more and more, as I’m sure many of you have, during the past year. Nothing can make the stresses, exhaustions, or sadnesses of the pandemic go away for good, but television *can* make the days move faster, which is all that we can ask for. Escapism. That’s what I want. Well, actually, what I really want is for my brilliant mother and her amazing close friend (love you, Aunt Chris!) to write and star in a show about two super clever, beautiful, sixty-ish-year-old women who run a PI business together. But if that can’t happen, I want to watch something similar. See, lately, I’ve fou…
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While the site of the infamous Borden murders has long been available to visit for those interested in the darker side of Americana, it’s now up for sale with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own one of the most well-known murder scenes in history (We assume the blood’s been cleaned up since). Lizzie Borden’s sensational trial and never-determined culpability will live on the American imagination no matter what physical artifacts remain of her life, but it’s always nice to know that historic structures are getting preserved. According to the house’s listing, “This is an unbelivable[sic] opportunity to own and operate one of New England’s top tourist attractions. Enter…
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The beloved character Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief who moonlights as a detective, was created as a direct result of the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, which surged throughout Europe and America towards the end of the nineteenth century. As scholar David Drake notes in a 2009 article on Lupin, though Holmes had been introduced in the 1887 novella A Study in Scarlet, he did not become a sensation until author Arthur Conan Doyle published six Holmes short stories in The Strand Magazine from July to December 1891. With queues of excited readers forming at newsstands on release dates, the stunned Conan Doyle agreed to write another six. But quickly bored of his character, …
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As an undergraduate in the 1980s I took a class on Ernest Hemingway taught by poet Donald Junkins. Late in the semester, Junkins invited a bunch of us over to his house to watch a Hemingway documentary. The video opened with some stock footage of Hemingway: There he was aboard a deep-sea fishing vessel; here alongside a trophy animal; there with a bottle of booze; here with a woman, and so forth. The narrator commenced the video with a bravura the producers must have imagined fitting for the masculine writer. “Hemingway,” he announced, “Fighter. Hunter. Fisherman. Drinker. Lover.” I must admit, it sounded promising to me at the time. But from the back of the room Junkins…
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Of King’s epics, many fans rate The Stand as the best. Others might point to the haunted house story to end all haunted house stories, The Shining. But for me, Misery—especially in the form of its outstanding William Goldman film adaptation—is his greatest story of all. With Misery, Stephen King plays the game straight up with no chaser. There are no ghosts, no telepathic children, no Randall Flagg on his evil way to town. (*Warning: Spoiler Alerts ahead*) In Misery, there are only two very real seeming people who are pitted against each other. In one corner, there is a romance writer named Paul Sheldon, and in the other is a nurse named Annie Wilkes who is his murder…
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Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA offers an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. When I was getting my degree, I read countless essays where genre fiction was referred to as “escapist fiction.” The essays we read were (of course) written by proponents of literary fiction who made it clear that genre fiction was something common and vulgar which should only be sold from seedy shops in back alleys. Genre fiction wasn’t true literature (affect a snobbish accent and be sure to look down your nose). Genre or popular fiction was deemed insignificant and those who read it weren’t as cultured as readers of literary fiction. At the time, I didn’t pay the labels much attention. Di…
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“You know what I mean? You haven’t seen him, but the hairs on your neck tickle against your collar. It makes you shiver. Everything looks normal but it ain’t. It’s like you got a belly-dancer sucking Turkish delight while she blows hot breath down the back of your neck. You don’t mistake that. Maybe it’s an echo to your footsteps. Maybe your subconscious starts to recognize the same pattern of walking: the same guy, in the same shoes, still the same distance behind. But he’s on a loser, because he can’t follow you on the underground. Not if you’ve guessed. Even if you’re six foot two, like me, and you stand out in the crowd. You can lose him.” These are the opening lin…
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