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 have never liked fog,’ said Miss Marple.” ——At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie The history of mysteries and detective fiction includes several instances of authors and characters falling victim to dementia. If the intersection of detective fiction and dementia is so striking, it’s because they’re like a matched set of mirror opposites. This essay looks at four examples. In the classic sense, a mystery begins with a puzzle or number of unexplained circumstances. Typically, at the outset, someone is killed. The killer and the motive for the murder are unknown, and the circumstances for the crime are shrouded in mystery. As the story unfolds, a detective sorts t…
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The SHOT Show held annually in Las Vegas is a multicolored, multifaceted, overwhelming, ballistic, gargantuan, flamboyant, and slightly surreal look at the U.S. firearms industry. The biggest gun trade show on the planet fills the sprawling Sands Expo and Convention Center, boasting more than 700,000 square feet of exhibition space. Closed to the public, it attracts over sixty thousand people from the industry, including gun makers, gun importers, gun dealers, gun repairers, gun specialist lawyers, gun trainers, gun lobbyists, and gun anything else you can think of. Representatives from armies and police forces around the world attend, sealing bulk orders in meetings in g…
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The 1930s was the decade that cemented Poirot’s position in the public consciousness, something that hadn’t gone unnoticed by those that might wish to capitalize on any literary success. In the late 1920s and early 1930s this is exactly what theatre and film had done, but towards the end of the decade it was the turn of radio and the new medium of television to bring Poirot to the masses. Unfortunately, none of the British radio and television productions from this decade survive, but scripts and other paperwork give us a good flavor of what was seen and heard by audiences. It might be a surprise to learn that Poirot appeared on the fledgling medium of television before he …
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Ashley Audrain, The Push (Pamela Dorman) In Ashley Audrain’s slow-burn suspense thriller about motherhood, Blythe Connor doesn’t have much of an idea about how things are supposed to go–after all, her own mother left when she was a young child. She’s determined to be the perfect mother she never had, but she can’t ignore the worries caused by her eldest’s many outbursts. Something seems…off, about the child, something that she’s never felt about her darling youngest. As her checked-out husband reassures her that everything is fine, Blythe becomes increasingly certain that…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Camilla Bruce, In the Garden of Spite (Berkley) “Bruce uses a framework of fact to create fiction that horrifies…[a] grisly historical thriller.” –Booklist Eliza Jane Brazier, If I Disappear (Berkley) “Blending the true crime compulsion of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark with the immersive creepy-craziness of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, Brazier creates a heady, pitch-dark cocktail all her own.” –Publishers Weekly Joanna Shaffhausen, Every Waking Hour (Minotaur) “Tight plotting and sophisticated surprises fuel the rich storytelling. Schaffhausen layers much em…
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The Boston public school system is a mystery to me. I grew up in a small community. One elementary school, one middle school, one regional high school. You stood at a corner, the bus came and took you where you needed to go with the rest of the neighborhood kids. Boston, on the other hand . . . Public schools, charter schools, international schools. Forget local geography, such as Mattapan. From what I read, a high schooler could attend any public school in the city of Boston, using some crazy application process that probably made engaged parents want to shoot themselves and disengaged parents . . . well, that much more disengaged. Given such madness, high schoolers di…
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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg remain the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for conspiracy to commit espionage, the only two American civilians executed for espionage-related crimes committed during the Cold War that roughly lasted from 1946 to 1991, and Ethel is the only American woman killed for a crime other than murder. Today there is widespread recognition that Julius did pass military information to the Soviet Union, yet skepticism that the couple had, according to the phrase used at the time, stolen “the secrets” of the atomic bomb. Much was known about the basic physics involved in making a bomb; the main difficulty was devising practical weapons and the a…
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While working on our recent ranking of prison escape movies, I hit a wall after thinking about movies in which the villain gets himself (or herself, possibly, but it’s almost always a “him”) caught, as part of an evil plan. In these films, it is only by “getting captured” that the next phase of the villain’s plan may commence. And then, usually, he’ll escape. Often, out of some sort of large glass box. So, these films didn’t seem like they should go on my prison escape list, but felt relevant. Hence, the mini sub-list. But of course, there are also movies where the good guy wants to get caught, so he can escape and do something. I think these instances are fewer, but sti…
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This January, the Collins Crime Club issued a new edition of Rudolph Fisher’s classic crime novel The Conjure-man Dies, originally published in 1932 and considered to be the first detective novel by an African-American author, as well as being steeped in the literary culture of the Harlem Renaissance. The Collins Crime Club, a historic British imprint, was relaunched a few years ago with the intention of bringing lost and little-known classics back into print, focusing on Golden Age writers. We asked David Brawn, the publishing director for the Collins Crime Club, a few questions about the imprint, its history, and its latest reissue, The Conjure-man Dies. CrimeReads: Br…
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The historical roles of women in combat during the Second World War have always interested me. When I started my research into the women who served their countries for my upcoming novel, The Paris Apartment, I was introduced early to the biographies and memoirs of women in combat on the Eastern European front, where the war had come to the cities and towns with unspeakable savagery and a shocking number of casualties for both civilians and soldiers. From this horror emerged lethal snipers such as Klavdiya Kalugina, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and Roza Shanina. Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest award for bravery during combat at the helm of her…
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The Los Angeles Police Department has long defined its mission in its motto: “To protect and to serve.” Now LAPD, like departments across the county, faces a new level of scrutiny about how it fulfills that responsibility, particularly to Black citizens and other citizens of color. The fall-out from the death of George Floyd at the hands—or, rather, the foot—of a Minneapolis police officer and the response of police departments, including LAPD, to the demonstrations triggered by his death has raised awareness of police abuses even among Americans ordinarily unaffected by them. There is, however, another long-standing form of police misconduct that has not generated the s…
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In conversation with Andy Warhol, another artist who spent a great deal of his career silently staring at bodies in intimate situations, Alfred Hitchcock claimed he had glimpsed pornographic films only once in his life, and that was after the age of sixty, and by way of happenstance. It occurred after a steak dinner during a publicity trip to Tokyo, he said, when he was led blithely “into this upper room and there they had a screen that showed these awful films,” the specifics of which he didn’t divulge. However, he daydreamed about including acts of sexual voyeurism in his films. The story of Adelaide and Edwin Bartlett, which Hitchcock frequently cited as his favorite t…
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We all know the power of fiction to do some good. It’s cover for forbidden facts. It can shine a spotlight on corruption. Ars gratia artis has it’s place, but not for me, not today. We’re living in a world of teenagers too young to drink or drive, sporting AR-15s. Of Putin and Xi assembling an all-star team of autocrats to take on the world. Fiction has a job to do. And one genre in particular is up to the task. “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,” Raymond Chandler begins his iconic essay on the crime writer’s craft, “The Simple Art of Murder.” The father of American noir goes on to rip apart the British cozy and most detective fiction as too improb…
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When we decided at CrimeReads that our next roundtable would be with women who write espionage fiction, I really did not know what to focus on. How does espionage work in a Trump or post-Trump world? As this roundtable was back in the dark ages between the election and inauguration, I knew we’d have to address the orange man in the room but not how to put it into an espionage context. Fortunately, our excellent panel had many ideas about the political climate and the hallmarks of espionage: double-dealing, lying, manipulating, cheating, money, reputation. Once we got into our discussion it seemed inevitable that a regime like the one recently past would be chock full of …
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What is it that draws suspense authors to Texas settings? In a word: variety. From the sunbaked desert to the shadowy piney woods, from the rugged Chisos Mountains out west, to the sugary sand beaches down south, authors of Texas-based stories have a wide variety of dramatic settings to choose from. As America’s second-largest state, Texas encompassing nearly 270,000 square miles, offering storytellers an array of interesting places to set their adventures. And the people are just as varied as the topography. Across the sprawling Lone Star State, many different people and worlds collide, creating conflict and tension—two key ingredients in suspense fiction. The list of…
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For the lonely and longing, nothing is as sweet as the dream of a stranger who comes to the rescue and makes everything all right. Perhaps that is why otherwise sensible people open their heart, souls—and wallets—to perfect strangers online, hoping it will lead to a better tomorrow. Before the dawn of the internet, it was the newspapers that connected people through personal ads, a practice that started to flourish at the height of the 19th century. The result might be disappointing, however, as not all placing personal ads are honest—and some are even dangerous. For a serial killer, finding adequate victims can be challenge. Ideally, the victim is a stranger that cannot…
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When you think of the 19th Century English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, you don’t necessarily think of suspense. Rather, he brings to mind the agricultural world of the southwestern counties of England, where most of his novels are set, and the harsh social circumstances (to put it mildly) of his characters. He’s renowned for his lyrical writing style, the romantic and pastoral elements of his books, and his commentary on the moral, social, philosophical and religious values of his time. But when I re-read one of my favourites, his 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it struck me that Hardy is also a master of suspense. And I felt compelled to start taking notes. Pe…
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It’s a perennial question: do spies write the best spy novels? It’s the business of secrets, after all; you can’t help but wonder how much authors get right. Surely, the only authentic spy books are the ones written by people on the inside, right? As a retired intelligence professional and a published novelist, and now the author of a spy novel, I’m here to set the record straight: Even when you’ve been in the espionage business, it’s hard to write a good spy novel. The heart of a good spy novel is not the caper but the personal or moral issue facing the protagonist. In a nutshell, that is the spy business, particularly on the clandestine side. You’re constantly asking…
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“Life doesn’t have a narrator – it’s full of lies and half-truths – so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that.” “So fiction really is fiction,” Brunetti asked. Paola looked across at him open-mouthed in surprise. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came. –The Temptation of Forgiveness (2018) \Guido and Paola Brunetti know a great deal about lies and half-truths, and all the other human failings, he as a commissario (detective superintendent) in the Venice police, she as a professor of English literature beset by lazy students and self-important colleagues – but still, after more than twenty years of marriage, they make each other l…
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You probably know a sociopath. Maybe he’s the neighbor you chat with at the mailboxes who always has a funny story. So what if also takes perverse pleasure in shooting squirrels with his BB gun? Or maybe it’s your ex-girlfriend, who seemed lovely at the start but then sent X-rated photos of you to your boss when you broke up with her. Estimates vary, but current research says approximately 1 in 25 people is a sociopath, meaning your average kindergarten class contains one. Why this happens and what can be done about it is a fascinating, vexing puzzle that has inspired both fact-based research and devilish fiction. The core paradox of a sociopath—someone who appears ordin…
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Even Sherlock Holmes, wrote the Monster, couldn’t beat us. In March of 1984 a kidnapping rocked Osaka. Masked men with guns dragged 42-year-old Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the multimillion-dollar Ezaki Glico confectionery company, out of his bathtub. Here was a man whose name was a fixture in stores and vending machines across Japan (Glico candies are iconic; Pocky is just one of them)—the leader of a company that in the ruins of postwar Japan had been an engine of revitalization, selling everything from dairy products to meat curries, coming to represent health and vitality to so many millions of Japanese. Now his wife and daughter, and even his mother in the house ne…
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__________________________________________________ Excerpted from the book MEADOWLARK: A COMING-OF-AGE CRIME STORY by Greg Ruth and Ethan Hawke. Copyright © 2021 by Ethan Hawke and Greg Ruth. Illustrations © 2021 by Greg Ruth. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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The idea for my latest novel, You’ll Thank Me For This, came from an article in The New York Times about a Dutch tradition known as “droppings” in which tweens and teens are blindfolded and left in the woods and expected to find their way back using only rudimentary tools such as compasses, maps, the wind and the stars—obviously no smart phones or modern GPS devices. Although I’ve lived in the Netherlands for 15 years, I had never learned about droppings, and although I do contribute regularly to the Times (about art and culture) from here, the article was written by a colleague, Ellen Barry. I asked around and lots of my friends had done a dropping in their youths; thei…
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I love the show Moonlighting, but everyone loves Moonlighting. To see Moonlighting is, in fact, to love it, though if you didn’t watch it when it aired, from 1985 to 1989 on ABC, there’s a chance you may never have seen it. None of its five seasons are available in digital versions, for purchase or subscription streaming. The handful of DVD editions produced in the early 2000s are out of print. The only way to watch it now is via a mélange of YouTube clips, or to get your hands on those rare physical copies (which is what I did, via many stressful eBay auctions, tortured soul that I am). The eventual obscurity of this show is, as far as I’m concerned, a crisis. Moonlighti…
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During the late-1960s, with Los Angeles’ skies still blotted by poisonous smog, an angry mother fastened a sign in her station wagon that you never would’ve imagined in the planet’s car capital. “This GM,” her placard read, “is a killing machine.” Intended as an activist war cry, her words by the end of the next decade carried a more diabolical meaning. Predators were no longer only skulking neighborhood back alleys or through unlatched windows to snatch up their quarry. They were adopting their own vehicles as murder accomplices, exploiting Southern California’s go-anywhere roadways to create distance between themselves and the corpses they left behind. For these dark…
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