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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In 1969, a Bob Dylan bootleg LP full of unreleased tracks (nicknamed “Great White Wonder” for its blank white cover) became a massive underground hit. The album was produced by two hippies, soon to be known as Pigman and TMQ, named for the small pig illustration and stamp reading “trademark of quality” appearing on each of their bootleg recording. Pigman and TMQ weren’t particularly bothered by legality, and quickly became the targets of officials trying (and failing) to reinforce copyright protection. Great White Wonder was a shock to everyone in the music business. It was the beginning and the end. It was beginning, in the form of the first unauthorized bootleg album …
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By definition, part of what makes a mystery a “cozy” is that it takes place within limited geographical boundaries. The action rarely takes the characters beyond the scope of a small town or neighborhood, where most of the inhabitants know one another, along with one another’s business, and there are often limited means of leaving, which puts both the suspects and potential victims at greater risk. Think And Then There Were None, or Murder on the Orient Express. In the former, the characters have gathered on a remote island. In the latter, they’re traveling on a train. They can’t simply hop in a car and go. Newport is a small city at the southern end of Aquidneck Island.…
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My love affair with the Gothic novel began at roughly the age of fourteen, which is when I began devouring every book the Brontë sisters had ever written. I became infatuated with the elements of a Gothic setting: tumbling-down towers and ruined ancient abbeys; mysterious mansions with secret passageways leading to ghastly hidden chambers; and graveyards with crumbling tombstones covered in moss. And the Gothic landscape, of course. Isolated. Atmospheric. Both beautiful and ominous; romantic and deeply disturbing. When I first visited Big Sur on the Central California Coast, I was struck by the feeling that this could be a terrific Gothic setting. Not that it was exactl…
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In seventh grade I was bedridden with the flu for two or three days, and my mother bought me some paperbacks to read while I recovered. One of them was Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean. I was hooked from the first page, where a mysterious narrator named Carpenter, a British doctor, is trying to talk his way onto an American nuclear submarine that is preparing for a rescue mission in the Arctic. Drift Ice Station Zebra, a British meteorological outpost, has suffered a catastrophic fire, leaving the survivors with little shelter or food, and this submarine is the only ship that could possibly reach the men before they perish in the savage winter above the Arctic Circle…
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The hot vaxx summer has ended, and the long, cold winter approaches, but in that sweet spot between unbearable heat and brutal cold comes the season of Fall Previews. Yes, the leaves are starting to turn, the horror novels are coming out in force, and the boarding school thrillers and luxe psychologicals continue to expand at roughly the same rate as the economy is shrinking. (Coincidence?!?! I think not!). New laws in Texas have shifted female experience from body horror to straight-up-thriller. High-concept thrillers and scifi noirs speak to our increasing instability in the Future that is Now, while charming whodunnits remind us that no matter the times, people will al…
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I have a clear memory of one of my earliest conversations with another author. It was perhaps nine months or so before the UK publication of my debut novel, then called The Ghosts of Belfast. I was talking with Colin Bateman, writer of the seminal Belfast crime novel, Divorcing Jack. He said to me, quite confidently, “They won’t let you keep that title, you know.” When I asked why, he told me it was because UK retailers wouldn’t stock a book with Belfast on the cover. He was proven correct a few months later when I received a phone call from my editor—himself a Belfast native—telling me the title needed to be changed for exactly the reasons Colin had predicted. After much…
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The American Historical Association in Washington, D.C. was two blocks from James Grady’s apartment on Capitol Hill. Each day during the Spring of 1971 Watergate hearings, Grady would pass the large white townhouse at the corner of 4th and A Streets, SW, on his way to the office of Sen. Lee Metcalf, D-MT, where he was a college intern. Curiously, not once during all those months in Washington did he see anyone enter or exit the building. “It struck me,” he says. “What if it was a CIA front?” What really went on at 400 A St., SE? Grady let his imagination run wild. “I thought, what if one employee went to lunch and everyone else was murdered. Those two things stuck i…
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‘My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.’ These are the opening words of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Many of the myths recorded by Ovid are graphically physical affairs, as in the case of the weaver Arachne’s transformation into a spider by Pallas Athena: ‘her hair … fell off, and with it both nose and ears; and the head shrank up; her whole body also was small; the slender fingers clung to her side as legs; the rest was belly.’ A significant part of the shock and fascination of horror lies in its attempts to render these transformations convincingly before the audience’s very eyes. In 1887, the actor Richard Mansfield stunned theatregoers with his use of pho…
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No one has ever lived in the past. Every human being in the history of the world has lived in their own present. The past is now, or should be, for the characters we create to populate crime fiction regardless of the time period in which we write. But there are challenges and pitfalls here because the past itself does not have the same shape or coherence as does the present which we inhabit. The past is filled with countless people, places, and conflicts which we turn into something called history to impose order upon chaos. As the 19th century historian John Lothrop Motley said: “There is no such thing as human history. Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true. The a…
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A prison is a bleak setting. An integral part of a country’s justice system, it can be a place of brutality and mistreatment, often manned by too few officers in degrading conditions, who use violence and mental abuse to control an often-unmanageable pool of inmates. It’s a high-tension environment that can be fraught with inhumane living conditions, substandard medical care, poor education, inedible food, and the stress of close living conditions. Gang life doesn’t stop when inmates are incarcerated; there are simply different gang structures within the prison walls, where inmates are often forced to take sides on an existing gangland battleground. As a result, what is …
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Her hand emerges from beneath the covers to caress her granddaughter’s dark hair, but Eugénie is no longer looking at her: her attention is focused elsewhere. She is staring at a corner of the room. It is not the first time that the girl has frozen, gazing at some point in the idle distance. Such episodes do not last long enough to be truly worrying; is it some idea, some memory flashing into her mind, that seems to trouble her so deeply? Or is it like that time when Eugénie was twelve and swore that she had seen something? The old woman turns to follow her granddaughter’s gaze: in the corner of the room there is a dresser, a vase of flowers and a few books. ‘What is it,…
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We all have a picture in our mind of the archetypal detective of American fiction. The hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s, most influentially in Hammett’s novels and in the pages of the legendary magazine Black Mask. American crime fiction has a much longer history. It begins, of course, with Edgar Allan Poe. (The history of most genre fiction in the USA begins with Edgar Allan Poe.) His chara…
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Ask any woman who writes fiction meant to shock or disturb about response to her work, and she will no doubt offer up at least one anecdote involving something like, “You write that? But you look so nice!” It’s certainly commonplace among modern female horror writers, and it seems likely that their sisters in the past occasionally endured similar responses. It’s hard to say exactly what readers imagine a female horror writer looks like. Women have been writing this sort of fiction more than even the most avid of readers may realize and for just as long—perhaps longer—than their male counterparts. Why aren’t they as well-known today as their male contemporaries? Why did…
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My novel Ice Angel is set in the Canadian Arctic diamond field, an area where I spent many happy days as a reporter covering the great discovery and diamond rush of the 1990s. In fiction, you create your characters, but a reporter takes them as they are. Luckily, when it comes to diamond exploration, that’s good enough. This is a story about one of them. His adventure says a lot about the mistrust, the competitive obsessions, and the plain craziness of a mineral rush. I never got to interview this particular character, because I lacked the necessary skill: proficiency in husky. In the Spring of 1992, the winter staking rush was over in the Barrens. The Arctic summer was …
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My new thriller Rock Paper Scissors is about a marriage in trouble. But what is it that fascinates writers and readers so much about unravelling relationships? Maybe it has something to do with our desire to love and be loved. We all know the joy of real love, the fear of rejection and the pain of true heartbreak. Living in the Screen Age, we can see what used to remain behind closed doors all day every day, albeit through a filter. Perhaps our fascination with the lives and loves of others, is really about better understanding ourselves. Or, we might just be a nosy and voyeuristic species. In Rock Paper Scissors things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long t…
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David Rizzio Plays Tennis with His Assassins Late Saturday afternoon · 9th March, 1566 Indoor tennis court · Palace of Holyrood · Edinburgh Lord Ruthven wanted him killed during this tennis match but Darnley said no. Lord Darnley wants it done tonight. He wants his wife to witness the murder because David Rizzio is her closest friend, her personal secretary, and she’s very pregnant and Darnley hopes that if she sees him being horribly brutalised she might miscarry and die in the process. She’s the Queen; they’ve been battling over Darnley’s demand for equal status since their wedding night and if she dies and the baby dies then Darnley’s own claim to the throne would be…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ian McIlvanney, The Dark Remains: A Laidlaw Investigation (Europa / World Noir) “Laidlaw… surprises the reader at every turn, showing himself to be literate, intelligent, and thoughtful. McIlvanney’s fans will relish this gritty early perspective on Laidlaw.” Publishers Weekly Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) “Stick a bunch of devious psychopaths together and what could possibly go wrong? Find out in Never Saw Me Coming, a completely original, clever whodunit from a talented new arrival to the world of psychological suspense. Vera Kurian is one to watch!” Mary Kubica …
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I didn’t know “Dark Academia” was a Thing until my younger, much cooler friend showed me some Instagram accounts. “It’s an aesthetic,” she said, recommending that I buy some female Sherlock Holmes / librarian attire. But it’s so much more than an aesthetic. To me it’s a mood, a strangely welcome feeling of claustrophobia, of being trapped in a single location, but a cozy location with dark nooks to explore. When I started writing what would become my debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, I started with the basic premise that it would be about a program for diagnosed psychopaths hosted at a psychology department at a university. I love college novels, and hadn’t seen many my…
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The film industry has long provided a grisly backdrop for authors. A world of rags-to-riches and sudden reversals; glamour and seediness; eccentricity and charm—cinema and its players are perfect fodder for the criminally inclined. And it’s not just Hollywood. Around the globe writers have killed, maimed, kidnapped, or ransomed with abandon the glitterati and their supporting cast. Throughout these novels, certain tropes repeat themselves, regardless of a writer’s nationality. Beautiful starlets who are either innocent dupes or promiscuous mantraps; artistic integrity squandered or sold to the highest bidder; shady financiers and thuggish studio execs; rogue cops and di…
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It was August 1985 and I was a full-time student at the University of Edinburgh. When not studying, I was writing novels. By 1985 I’d written two. One had been rejected but the other had been accepted by a small press in Edinburgh and would be published the following February. I was now at work on a third, a detective story featuring a gnarly middle-aged guy called John Rebus. August in Edinburgh is Festival time and that includes the International Book Festival. William McIlvanney was a guest on one particular day and I was determined to meet him. He was a writing hero of mine, a working-class Scot who had won literary prizes but had also recently started writing crim…
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Over the course of her more than 20-year career—her debut novel, Ralph’s Party, came out in 1999—Lisa Jewell famously transitioned from rom-coms to psychological thrillers. But what really marks her as a writer is her non-plotting, open-ended approach: she’s a perpetual writer-explorer, taking readers along for hair-raising, heart-stopping rides. Her latest novel, The Night She Disappeared, begins with the mysterious vanishing of a young couple, Tallulah and Zach, after a gathering at the home of Scarlett, a local rich girl. Tallulah’s mother, Kim, does what she can to keep the police case active, but the suspense-laden fireworks really kick off when, a year later, new he…
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In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the identity of the potential murderer in the apartment complex is never ambiguous. Confined to his wheelchair near the courtyard-facing casements of his Greenwich Village apartment, our protagonist, L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) believes that the man living in the unit across the way has murdered his wife. There’s no body, there is no evidence. For the dozens of other residents in the complex, there isn’t even any suspicious activity. Only Jeff, who sits at his window all day and night, with his giant long-range-zoom lens attached to his camera, notices enough to begin to suspect this plot. Still, Jeff applies the same method in …
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Turns out that if you think someone might murder you, you’ll want to keep your house clean. This isn’t one of those “wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident” warnings. Although that is good advice. This is about truths I’ve learned over a few decades of covering crime scenes and murder trials, usually filling in for Douglas Walker, our newspaper’s longtime criminal justice reporter. Others are gleaned from the experiences of other reporters covering crime here in Muncie, Indiana, the so-called typical small American city and subject of three true crime books Walker and I co-wrote, most recently The Westside Park Murders. Remember that Robert Fulghum book “Al…
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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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The Puzzling Life and Uncertain Death of Heinrich Feldmann, A Spy in the First World War
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The Great War—what we now call World War I—was fought on such a massive never-before-seen scale that it stretched the governments, systems, and civilizations of every nation caught up within its swirling vortex in unprecedented ways. It forced them to think and act in ways they’d never before imagined. Their intelligence gathering services were no exception. One unique factor which played into the war was the geographical location of the Netherlands, who managed to remain neutral through the entire conflict. Perched across the North Sea from Britain, bordering Germany and German-occupied Belgium, and but a few days march from the Western Front, it sat at a strategic junc…
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