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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Hap and Leonard have been with me for so long, I can’t imagine them not existing for real. They seem real to me. Back in the late eighties I wanted to write a novel that would be about crime and suspense, but I wanted to write about the sixties, the generation I grew up in as well. Like the fifties, most representations of the sixties and seventies are silly and have nothing to do with how it really was. By the time I was planning to write SAVAGE SEASON, the world had changed, but the echoes of the past were still there. I decided to write in what was then a contemporary time, and look back on the legacy of the sixties, both good and bad. Take a look at what had happened…
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There is a fascinating thread that runs through literature of transfiguring visual art into written form. There are many reasons why a writer might choose to incorporate an originally visual medium into the language of a short story or novel; perhaps it is the pure challenge of the thing, an act of great imagination and skill; perhaps it is the fact that writing the visual is so viscerally and aesthetically satisfying; perhaps it is that visual artists simply fascinate and awe those writers who choose to undertake the task of transfiguration. I think it may be a little bit of all of the above, but also something more: the ability for visual art to gestate and birth revel…
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There is grim satisfaction in realizing, while sitting safely at your desk in rural Connecticut, that you know more than the Soviet secret police about an event recorded in their own archives. The satisfaction is all the greater when the documents in question concern the identity of a man who planned to strike a powerful blow against the Soviet regime, a man whom the GPU (an earlier avatar of the KGB) saw as one of its most dangerous enemies. In today’s world, punishing a national regime takes a bigger and stronger country, or even an entire alliance, as with the sanctions that the United States and NATO have been imposing on Russia. But there was a time when one determin…
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One lovely dawn in late August, the sun was cresting the tops of the distant hills to pour its golden light over the forest. Gladys Honeysuckle, always an early riser, was already on the wing, more than halfway into her daily journey toward town. She was a hummingbird (as her name implied), and her bright green wings were always in motion, going about a hundred miles an hour. Her tongue seemed no different. Gladys had something of a reputation as the town gossip. Conveniently, she was well employed by the Shady Hollow Herald, the town’s sole newspaper, where she wrote a regular column about town events and goings-on. Not a prestigious post, perhaps, but one suited to her …
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There’s the New York we see. The streets and neighborhoods, townhouses and office buildings, stoops and bodegas. That’s a damn good city, electric and irrepressible, but there’s another place just beyond that surface and it’s populated by our ambitions. A city of nighthawks and hustlers. Around every corner, a new scheme. That’s the heady undergirding of Colson Whitehead’s newest novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021). Whitehead is author to ten books and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (twice, for his last two, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys), but Harlem Shuffle marks his first entry into the world of crime fiction. It’s the story of Ray Carney, a…
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When I was putting this list together, one thing became abundantly clear—thrillers (especially psychological thrillers) written in the east are starkly different from thrillers in the west. The west tends to embrace what I like to think of as “page-turners.” The stakes are high, the protagonist is usually on a clock of sorts, and, with a few notable exceptions, the focus is usually on the “who” rather than the “why.” Thrillers coming from South-East Asia are usually paced very differently. Rather than immediately diving into solving the crime, these thrillers take their time—giving the reader a slightly claustrophobic look at the killers themselves, their motivations, an…
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Setting is a key element in all fiction, but in crime, mystery, and suspense, a book’s setting plays a critical role in establishing the flavor of the story. Imagine reading about murders that take place in a dumpster-lined New York City alley…in a family-owned café in an Iowa farming community…in an isolated Alaskan hunting lodge, and you immediately envision three vastly different mysteries. Many years ago, I survived a harrowing whitewater rafting accident, so when I began writing Over the Falls, my starting point was the vision of several specific whitewater kayaking scenes. Once I coupled those scenes with Bryn Collins, a main character who has walled herself off f…
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When I was 17, my mom suggested I join the high school newspaper. “You’re a good writer,” she said. She was right—I’d always gotten A’s in English—but as important as my affinity for the written word was a trait I’d often been chided for: I’m nosy. And being nosy is basically a reporter’s job. By the middle of senior year, I was hooked—but after a few years working magazines and newspapers I realized that I was even nosier than journalism allowed me to be. Let me explain. As a reporter, you can only publish what you get on the record: you have to either witness something, or write what someone else tells you and gives you permission to write. None of that bothered me un…
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I may not remember the specific details of a novel or show—the clue that led to unmasking the murderer, for example—but I always remember how I felt about the characters. How I marveled at Sherlock’s genius and self-destructive eccentricity. How Luther drew me into his darkness and Villanelle mesmerized me with her dazzling psychopathy. What was it about these characters that kept me coming back for more? After a year and a half of pandemic life, I look forward to my fictional friends at the end of the day. But no matter how captivated I am by their spiraling descent, sleuthing adventures, or comical escapades, when the series ends, the plot slips from my mind. I could…
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Italy is commonly perceived as having a long history of crime. So, it might come as a surprise that the country’s homegrown crime writing tradition had a late start. In the early 20th century, detective novels were considered as foreign to Italy. Terms like suspense (in reference to the genre popularized by Hitchcock) were an English import and only introduced in the language in the 1950s. The first detective novel to be published in Italy, S.S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case, was published in 1929 by Mondadori. This novel marked the beginning of a successful crime series, known as gialli—taking its name from the characteristic yellow cover. Two years later, the serie…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) “Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead (The Nickel Boys) returns with a sizzling heist novel set in civil rights–era Harlem.” Publishers Weekly, starred review Julia Dahl, The Darkest Hours (Minotaur Books) “A fast-paced thriller with multiple perspectives.. [Dahl] provides a timely story about an always relevant topic.” Library Journal Tori Eldridge, The Ninja Betrayed (Agora Books) “Eldridge’s series just keeps getting better. While readers can enjoy this book without having read the first two, a series highlight is Lily’s evoluti…
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When I met Zille in 2015, he had been working as a crime reporter for over a decade and dissembling had become second nature. The job required it: he had to maintain good relationships with the police, with gangsters, with his own TV channel. His was dangerous work that involved angering powerful people. When he was reporting on screen, the truth was ostensibly the point. But Zille had also learned to self-censor, to hedge around the subject, to avoid mentioning a specific party name. And off screen, where risks lurked at every corner, he took this further: holding back, contradicting himself, leaving some mystery about his family, his past or even his whereabouts. Perha…
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If you’ve read any self-help before, then you know that most of it reads like a 90-percent redacted NSA document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—all the most salient details blacked out, unavailable. Exactly how many nannies, for instance, did it take for Sheryl Sandberg to Lean In? If the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is such a financial genius, how come he shills real-estate seminars? And if Rachel Hollis really knows how to have a successful, sexy marriage, why’d she get divorced? Their books promise answers to life’s biggest questions, only to leave us with bigger questions. Yet why we buy and read such books is no mystery. Shit’s hard. Life can be a r…
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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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