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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Photo credit: Sally Good/Chicago Tribune You know the story of John Wayne Gacy. You’ve seen the pictures of the smiling clown standing proudly outside the suburban home. You’ve heard of the young men and boys buried in the dark crawl space below Gacy’s ranch house. Maybe you’ve watched the news footage of the investigators bringing them out from the house in white body bags and loading them into a coroner’s van, the flash of camera lights illuminating it all for the eyes of America. But you don’t know the story of those boys. You might think you know; you might have heard them called—dismissed as—runaways or hustlers. But you don’t know their names; you don’t know th…
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I was delighted when Otto Penzler asked me to be involved in this new short story project. I felt the request implied he thought I had something worthwhile to offer on the subject. I’m always delighted to create that impression. But sadly, on this occasion, an impression is all it is. I don’t know much about short stories, or their true origins, mechanisms, or appeal. My only consolation is I’m not sure anyone else does either. What is a short story? Clearly there’s a clue in the name. A short story is a story that’s short. A story is an account of events – in this context almost certainly made up – and the adjective short acts to separate the form from other t…
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With the tagline, “I’m Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” the marketing for the villain-revision vehicle Cruella, which landed in theaters this summer, invites a compelling challenge to the viewer: “Watch this film,” Disney dares us, “and fall in love with one of our most vicious villainesses!” Dodie Smith’s dog-killing, dog-skinning heiress sets a high bar on unlikability. For me, a fan of the unlikable, a lover of the hard to love in fiction, the prospect was thrilling. During the film’s first minutes, however, young Estella, who will eventually transform into the vengeful fashionista Cruella, witnesses her mother being forced off a cliff by trai…
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Love. It isn’t all hearts, flowers, and romantic, moonlight strolls in the park. Real, wild love, can come become violent, angry, destructive. Other times it’s grasping and obsessive. We choose people who are not right for us. Or we meet someone who we think we can share ourselves with, and it turns out that he’s someone else altogether. Or our devotion to someone twists around us like a vine, keeping us in a relationship that we know is dangerous. Of course, you might argue that these things are not real love. But desire has so many faces. Who can say what’s real? In my new novel, Last Girl Ghosted, advice columnist Wren Greenwood isn’t really looking for romance. In fa…
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Little John’s, near Churchill Downs Racetrack, attracted tourists from all over the world. In a presidential tone and tailored suit, the diminutive Filipino pawnbroker explained that gold was selling at “an awesome” fifteen hundred dollars an ounce, “but not for long.” Now was the time to sell your unwanted jewelry, he insisted. In the breakfast room, I popped the last bite of toasted onion bagel into my mouth before grabbing the remote. Behind Little John, a cop, a construction worker, a cowboy, and a Native American clumsily danced and sang to the melody of the disco classic “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People. “We’re going to Little John’s today / To take our jewelry in …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Val McDermid, 1979 (Atlantic) “McDermid is at her considerable best here, raising the stakes ever higher and conjuring the atmosphere of the newsroom so strongly that the cigarette smoke will have you coughing. The good news is that this excellent novel marks the start of a new series.” Laura Wilson, The Guardian John Banville, April in Spring (Hanover Square) “Sumptous, propulsive and utterly transporting, APRIL IN SPAIN is the work of a master writer at the top of his game.” Bookreporter Tess Little, The Last Guest (Ballantine) “Little intercuts the party’s aftermath with…
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A landlocked republic of 26 “cantons” bordering Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Lichtenstein (apologies, we have yet to do a Crime and the City on Lichtenstein or its capital of Vaduz—and that’s a world capital city I bet most of you have learnt today!). We’re talking eight and half million peace loving people, skiing, chocolate, discreet banking, cheese full of holes, fancy army knives, and a fair amount of crime. Yes, this Crime and the City is all about Switzerland. And you’ll note in my stereotyping list above of all things Swiss I made none of the same mistakes as Harry Lime in The Third Man (original book and movie script both by Graham Greene): ”For 30 years u…
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There are many events and books that inspired I Am Not Who You Think I Am, from Dennis Lehane’s tragedy Mystic River and his psychological thriller Shutter Island, to my watching a barn burn to the ground one dark night as a kid. But for the deep gothic atmosphere and the unrelenting psychological disturbance that permeates my new novel, I found the greatest inspiration right outside my kitchen window, a view of a mountain known for its unsolved disappearances and a legendary ghost town—Glastenbury Mountain, or what I call Shirley Jackson and Donna Tartt Country. It is this mountain where Jackson and Tartt, two of the world’s greatest gothic writers, drew much of their …
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Legendary New York City gangster Joey Gallo’s closest friends in the show biz world were actor Jerry Orbach and his wife Marta. They when they happened to be eating in the same restaurant (Queen on Court Street in Brooklyn). Jerry at that time was best known for playing gangsters in Broadway musicals—he’d played Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls—but would later be famous for playing Detective Lennie Briscoe on several Law & Order TV series, and as the voice of Lumiere, the candelabra in Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast. Jerry first sought out Joey because he was playing a part in a movie based on Joey, and considered J…
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Writing a novel is a series of decisions—millions of them, from big ones like whodunnit and where to begin all the way down to a character’s eye colour and footwear. One of the most important choices a writer can make is the main character’s profession, which has implications far beyond the practical concern of whether you know enough about a specific job to write about it. The profession of your main character might affect the entire tone and character of the book you write: in fiction, perspective is everything. At the beginning of the Golden Age of crime fiction, the amateur detective was a key figure, from Agatha Christie’s little old lady Miss Marple to Dorothy L. S…
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Publishing Is a Nightmare: 31 Horror Films about Writing, Reading, and the Book Business
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The business of writing and reading pops up all the time in horror films. Maybe it’s that screenwriters understand better than anyone the terror of creation. Maybe it’s that long, late hours spent alone in an office juxtaposes nicely on screen against glamorous events hosted by the literati. Or perhaps we’ve all just had a traumatic childhood experience in a library. Either way, here are 31 films guaranteed to give you an October that’s equal parts eerie and erudite. We’re taking a broad understanding of both the horror genre and of the book biz, with films featuring authors, agents, screenwriters, journalists, and just straight up evil books. Whether or not you’re a har…
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CrimeReads editors select the best new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers coming out in October. * James Han Mattson, Reprieve (William Morrow and Custom House) It’s hard to do justice to how awesome this book is without giving much away, so I’ll just tell you the set-up: in the mid-90s, in a small university town in the middle of nowhere, there is a haunted house. Not just any haunted house, but a full-contact mansion of horrors, where the well-heeled cliental can go in smiling and emerge screaming, and a few daring souls each year attempt to win a cash prize by completing an exceptionally disturbing challenge. Reprieve is a self-aware and furious deconstructio…
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Many years ago, my uncle, Clinton Barbra, looked out his front window and saw a police car idling at the end of his driveway. The car sat there for a moment, and then pulled away. My uncle ran out the back door of his house, went into the trees, and started pulling apart his still. The squad car was driven by a friend of his at the station. That little pause by the driveway was the tip-off: the cops were on their way. My uncle hid what he could in his attic. He couldn’t hide the barrels of mash, however. The police arrested Clinton and poured kerosene over the barrels. When his wife bailed him out, he went back home, dipped out the kerosene, reassembled the still, and ra…
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Since I was a boy, I desired only two things in my life. Not money or fame. No, I’ve always had too healthy an ego to crave that. What I wanted was to be a writer, and I longed to return to Italy, the country of my parents’ birth. No one in my family was a writer and there weren’t many books in my home. To a set of parents from the war-torn and the poverty-stricken mezzogiorno—only one of whom made it out of grammar school—a book was a luxury, unless it was a textbook. Yet I became a journalist and author. Perhaps unlike most writers, for me the desire to scribble stories on a page came at a precise moment: It happened in Mrs. Hogan’s (I hope you are still out there.) 7…
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Fear doesn’t have to make sense to the character. What matters is the effect the emotion has on the character. The sensation triggers the body’s natural reaction to threats of harm, and it’s intuitive and vital to survival. Determining how a character reacts and responds to fear is critical to the story line and the character arc. Motivation plays the most critical role. Respecting the outcome of a specific fear, either real or imagined, doesn’t make a hero or heroine any less a person. The emotion isn’t a sign of cowardice but often compels a character to pursue coping or survival skills. The anxiety and pressure can trap a sufferer, causing them to do whatever is neces…
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It’s always hard to decide on the best James Bond movie (as those squabbling nerds from late-season Buffy can testify). These films are so hard to compare with one another, especially because their production has spanned six decades and many technological (and, ahem, social) innovations have arisen during that time. They swing from hardcore action to camp to downright parody. They play fast and loose with their source material, the novels and stories by Ian Fleming. It’s not an easy job, ranking them. But we’re going to do our level best, today. There have been seven actors to play 007 so far, and they’ve all got their unique takes on the role. Sean Connery is bemused an…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) “… dazzling … the language here is wiseguy crisp, zinging with street vernacular … Whitehead flexes his literary muscles further, extending the boundaries and expectations of crime writing … The book is also a social drama interrogating the nature of prejudice and how an environment limits ambition. The nuances of Manhattan’s topography drive much of the action … Part of the book’s pleasure is that it keeps you guessing. By the end, I felt, as Ray does of Harlem: ‘Its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone.'” –Colin Grant (The Guardian) J…
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Few people emerge into the world as monsters, fully formed. It seems to be a gradual journey, step by step, into monsterhood. You might not realize what direction you’re headed in until you turn around and see how far you’ve come along that dark road. Perhaps the most monstrous of the monsters don’t ever recognize themselves as such. This has always been one of my greatest fears—that I may, unknowingly, have become a monster. It’s a fear I put in all my books. Writing monsters can be difficult. It’s a problem I struggled with during the early stages of The Last House on Needless Street. How do you conjure deeds and actions that are unthinkable, let alone unwritable? Writ…
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Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s question in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial is the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history. Prosecuting Penguin Books for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s novel three decades after the author’s death, Griffith-Jones asked the jury how they would feel having the novel lying around at home: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Griffith-Jones was used to cutting an intimidating figure in court. He had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremburg. But when he asked this question jurors laughed. Griffith-Jones had talked past the three women in the jury box, and by 1960 very few British families employed live-in se…
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I have always been sort of obsessed with the idea that a house can be a character. Judging from the number of people who watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, I’m far from alone. I remember reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and becoming entranced with the idea of Manderley, the foggy moor, the gray sea beyond the estate’s gates. The idea that a house can embody the mood of a whole novel, how large it looms in the background, influenced much of my writing. In Shirley Jackson’s original version of The Haunting of Hill House, the house itself was both sentient and positively insane. Having spent the last decade living in a 200 year old home, this concept was—and i…
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With technology changing so quickly, have you ever wondered how cyber investigators keep up? And what about the fiction authors who write about them? “All crime is cyber crime,” an FBI agent once told me. We were standing beside a cubicle lined with mug shots of people wanted for online crimes ranging from child pornography to sextortion. I was doing research for a book featuring an online predator and had just asked him how his cyber crimes unit managed to keep pace with the ever-increasing case load. The agent may have been exaggerating that all crime is cyber crime, but there can be no doubt that the majority of investigations these days involve some sort of online …
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Terry Tice liked killing people. It was as simple as that. Maybe “liked” wasn’t the right word. Nowadays he was paid to do it, and well paid. But money was never the motive, not really. Then what was? He had given a lot of thought to this question, on and off, over the years. He wasn’t a looney, and it wasn’t a sex thing, or anything sick like that—he was no psycho. The best answer he could come up with was that it was a matter of making things tidy, of putting things in their right place. The people he was hired to kill had got in the way of something, some project or other, and had to be removed in order for business to proceed smoothly. Either that, or they were super…
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In the summer of 1939, Father Charles Edward Coughlin, famed “Radio Priest” of Detroit, Michigan, called for the creation of a Christian Front. He hoped the group would act as a counterpoise to the Popular Front, adopted by the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935 and ostensibly aimed at reconciling revolutionary objectives with a commitment to democracy. As far as Coughlin was concerned, this was merely sleight of hand—a “nefarious . . . endeavor to Sovietize America” wearing “the false mask of liberalism.” In his broadcasts and his publications, Coughlin pushed his millions of followers to reject atheistic Communism in the name of Christ and cou…
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The following is an excerpt from Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War, in which Joseph Weisberg, former CIA officer and the creator of the hit TV series The Americans, makes the case that America’s policy towards Russia is failing—and we’ll never fix it until we rethink our relationship. ___________________________________ Cherkashin In 2004, a former KGB officer named Victor Cherkashin published a memoir called Spy Handler. Cherkashin had run two of the most devastating moles in the history of U.S. intelligence, CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen. It wasn’t the stories in the book about Ames and Hanssen that grabbed me, thoug…
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Home is supposed to be our refuge: the one place we can retreat when the outside world becomes overwhelming. But what happens when our home is no longer a safe place? Where can we go when the very walls we sleep inside twist against us? These eight books explore just that: from external threats beating at your door to the very building itself becoming corrupted, there’s no place of safety inside these stories. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay Merry recounts her childhood where, infamously, her sister became the subject of a documentary on a possible possession. When teenage Marjorie claims to hear voices and conventional medical treatment fails to help, her p…
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