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’ve never played a hero in the cinema.” – Orson Welles in a Cahiers du Cinema interview Did anyone ever play a villain as well as Orson Welles? He was perfect as the charming black marketeer Harry Lime in The Third Man, the clock-obsessed Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler in The Stranger and the corrupt border-town detective Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. But have you seen his performance as the strangest villain of all, the title character in the 1955 crime film Mr. Arkadin? Most people have not, and until recently that unenlightened group included me. Then, during a one-month trial of a popular streaming service, I spotted Mr. Arkadin among their selections so I q…
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In a scene from the Apple TV+ series The Mosquito Coast, the mysterious American fugitive Allie Fox (Justin Theroux) is held at gunpoint. His assailant is a Mexican coyote named Chuy (Scotty Tovar), who in a previous episode ironically smuggled Fox and his family from the U.S. into Mexico. “You want to run away from America, but you’ll never be able to,” Chuy admonishes Fox, adding, “Because of the way you are. The way you think you can buy people; the way you think you can buy anything you want. You are America, asshole, and you’ll never get away from it.” The moment strikes at the heart of the series’ themes of American entitlement and hubris, which are also key aspect…
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“Democracy! That’s what it means, Slim! Everybody equal. Like tonight! All them big shots, listening to little shots like me, and being friendly!” —Sergeant Brooklyn Nolan, in the film Hollywood Canteen, 1944 In The Hollywood Spy, Maggie Hope travels from London to Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, with the United States at war. Maggie’s there to solve a murder, of course, staying as a guest of her friend Sarah, a ballerina starring in the Gold Brothers’ Star-Spangled Canteen—a fictionalized version of the actual Warner Bros. film, Hollywood Canteen. So what was the Hollywood Canteen? Well, the real Canteen was a social club for Allied servicemen, founded by John …
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The mind is the locus around which everything revolves in a psychological thriller or mystery. These stories are often tales rife with unreliable narrators, sociopaths, narcissists, and characters with all manner of mental aberrations. Probing, examining and attempting to analyze the thoughts and motives of these protagonists and antagonists is what keeps the reader reading and the viewer viewing, for upon this knowledge rests the key to and ultimate resolution of the story. There is an element, however, that can ratchet up the mystery and unknowable to the next level, and that element is amnesia. Amnesia as a literary device has the power to make time and memory fickle,…
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What draws readers to espionage fiction? It’s a question I’m asked again and again, at events, and in conversation, when I describe my novels—for want of a better descriptor—as part spy-thriller, part domestic noir. Objectively speaking, the answer might be obvious: the world of international espionage with its seductively glamorous settings and endless scope for subterfuge, is as alluring for readers as it is for writers drawing audiences into their darkly alluring worlds, and then wrong-footing them at every turn. With double lives straddling—and sometimes blurring—the lines between good and evil, hero and antihero, the inner workings and often outlandish actions of th…
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The following is excerpted from the introduction to Palm Springs Noir. * Ten years ago, when my first noir short story, “Crazy for You,” was published in Orange County Noir, my mother-in-law asked me to define the genre. She read mystery fiction and cozies but wasn’t familiar with noir. “In noir, the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals,” I said, “but they keep making bad choices, and things go from bad to worse.” Her response was immediate: “Like real life.” We burst into laughter, but it was tinged with the bittersweet pain of knowing. All of us, at one time or another, have found ourselves in sticky situations w…
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Women love true crime. While certainly not a universal truth, it’s a generalization that feels apt enough that even SNL has noticed. On February 27, the song spoof “Murder Show,” aired to general acclaim — if the women I follow on Twitter are any indication. As the skit begins, Nick Jonas leaves his girlfriend alone for an evening of unwinding and self care. Bubble baths and sheet masks come to mind. But as soon as he shuts the door behind him, she curls up on the couch, opens Netflix, and breaks into song about the specific delight of watching murder shows. It’s the kind of parody that works because it feels a little perverse. This is a guilty pleasure, emphasis on the…
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It has been suggested that Voltaire’s interest in the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask had been stimulated as early as 1714, when he began attending the salon of Louis-Urbain Lefebvre de Caumartin. He first conceived the idea of writing a history of the age of Louis XIV in 1732, although he anticipated that the work would take a long time to accomplish. Six years later, in October 1738, Voltaire wrote to a friend, the abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, noting that he had been well informed about the prisoner he called l’homme au masque de fer, who had died at the Bastille, claiming that he had spoken to men who had served this person. In fact, Voltaire had himself been impri…
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When it comes to pinning down the first scream queen, most genre fans can easily find their way to Fay Wray, whose shriek was immortalized in 1933’s King Kong. More dedicated film buffs might go back even further to silent movie stars such as Greta Schröder (Nosferatu; The Golem: How He Came into the World) and Mary Philbin (The Phantom of the Opera; The Man Who Laughs). While all these women left indelible marks on cinema, singling any of them out as the first scream queen makes two assumptions: that the archetype was birthed on celluloid, and that she belongs exclusively to the horror genre. In fact, the woman who can most credibly lay claim to the title was a stage ac…
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Every writer inevitably gets asked where their ideas come from. And every writer has stared into the abyss of the blank computer screen or the empty notebook and wondered in the cold grip of panic—What on earth can I write about this time? And it would be easy—oh so easy—to say, I know! I’m going to write a book about a writer writing a book. After all, I don’t really know about much else. And I spend most of my life thinking about and then actually writing books. I’ve dealt with this issue myself. My newest book, Kill All Your Darlings, is about a writer who has written—okay, actually stolen—a thriller about a murder that turns out to be frighteningly true. And the pu…
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Sometimes the world says, You love this. I’m going to take it away from you. That cruelty can prove a source of inspiration. In September 2004 I moved to Barcelona with my wife and daughter. We lived in an area called Sarrià. Once a village, it was swallowed up by the city when the city expanded in the 1920s, but the streets and buildings date from long before. We rented an eighteenth-century stone house that was actually two small houses, joined together by a covered walkway and a tiled courtyard. It started life as a match factory. There was a ghost—a young girl in a white dress, like a wisp of smoke. I never saw her, though my wife and daughter did. I heard her once,…
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“L’affaire Flactif,” as it is known in France—the Flactif case—was one of the most terrifying murders that France has ever seen. Firstly, because two adults and three children (ages 6, 9, and 10) were literally massacred; secondly, because the motive, which seemed to be rather ridiculous, was in fact extremely complex. If we stuck only to the facts reported by the police and the media, we might believe that David Hotyat murdered an entire five-person family for the sake of a chalet and a few knickknacks (a camera, telephone, DVD, etc.). We would think that it was a murder committed out of jealousy. But here is the rest of the story. Born in northern France to a blue-col…
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Named after an influential psychiatrist who helped bring about the desegregation of Maryland’s psychiatric hospitals, the Clifton Perkins Hospital Center—usually known simply as Perkins—has beds for 350 patients and is usually at capacity. Some of the hospital’s patients have committed serious felonies and are being held for competency evaluations, to see if they have the capacity to stand trial, and some are inmates who’ve been sent to Perkins from prisons or other psychiatric facilities in Maryland because their behavior has been violent or aggressive and they meet the criteria for involuntary commitment. Most, however, have been found incompetent to stand trial or have…
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I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. Dust floated in the beam of the headlights as the car rocked back into park. Riding shotgun, my friend Jaimie peered into the dark woods that surrounded us, confused as to why we were stopping. “This is going to be weird,” I said, “but I promise I’ll explain everything when I’m done.” The phone vibrated in my hand. “I have to take this call.” With a shaking finger, I picked-up. *** It’s hard to keep going after 41 agent rejections. It’s hard to keep going when the people you’re putting your work in front of can’t even be bothered to send a proper rejection. I say that with all due respect to the agents who rejected m…
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Agatha Christie had an astonishing talent for writing detective novels. Her short story And Then There Was None is the world’s best-selling mystery. With over 100 million copies sold, Publications International lists the novel as the world’s sixth best-selling title of all time. But writing aside she was also one of the most adventurous women of her age—and she found her passion for surfing every bit as fervent as her enthusiasm for entrancing murder plots. In the summer of 1924, she and her husband Archie had taken a side trip from their planned round-the-world sailing route specifically to try the surf in Hawaii. This was the leg of their voyage they had been most exci…
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In 1893, Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, visited the Chicago World’s Fair and advocated for the closing of one exhibition: the “danse du ventre”—the belly dance. (Excerpted from Amy Sohn’s The Man Who Hated Women.) ___________________________________ By the time Ida Craddock traveled to the World’s Fair, there was plenty of sex information for progressive, curious young people. The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which coined the terms sadism and masochism, had been translated into English a year earlier. In 1894, Havelock Ellis, an English psycho…
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The “coming-of-age” novel is its own multiverse of stories, spanning genres from fantasy to romance to adventure. Varied though these novels may be, they are generally underpinned by the universal themes of self-discovery and a fall from grace. The difficulty of finding your way into a rigid society is always in the ether too, authority of one kind or another looms large and a protagonist will either succumb to the tight space of adulthood that is on offer, or find a way out. The “coming-of-age” novels that have elements of mystery or the supernatural are my personal favorites. They are like fairy tales for grown-ups where the notion of the end of innocence is taken to e…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (Flatiron) “Razorblade Tears is superb. No doubt, S. A. Cosby is not only the future of crime fiction but of any fiction where the words are strong, the characters are strong and the story has a resonance that cuts right to the heart of the most important questions of our times.” Michael Connelly T.J. Newman, Falling (Avid Reader / Simon & Schuster) “One of the year’s best thrillers . . . This novel is like the films Die Hard and Speed on steroids . . . Newman keeps up an extreme pace from the first page.” Library Journal Tess Gerritse…
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Like many people watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on September 27, 2018, I found myself crying at her description of the assault she had experienced and the psychological aftermath—what she called the sequelae—of that attack. Many women reported reliving their own traumatic experiences as they listened to Dr. Ford. I am fortunate enough not to have experienced sexual assault or rape; the person I cried for as I heard Dr. Ford describe the claustrophobia, panic attacks, and anxiety that she experienced for years was my mother. My mother slept with the light on her entire life. She shook when I took her to the doctor and had such bad claustrophobia that she n…
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I’m a crime writer. And that means, like most crime writers, I frequently write about murder, and murderers. But only once (well—only once, knowingly) have I encountered a killer in real life. His name is Ian Huntley, and on the 4th of August 2002 he murdered two 10-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in the English village of Soham, Cambridgeshire. At the time I was a news reporter, sent to cover the story of two missing children for the morning news show I worked on, and I interviewed Huntley, caretaker at the local secondary school, live on the programme on Friday the 16th of August. It wasn’t just me he talked to; he’d participated in numerous press inter…
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Mount Elbrus, 21 August 1942 The joint twenty-three-man team rose early, an hour before dawn. These were elite mountain troops, some from the First Mountain Division, the rest from the Fourth. Led by Hauptmann Heinz Groth and Hauptmann Max Gammerler, both veterans of countless alpine ascents, they brewed coffee, struck camp and set off for the last steep kilometres that would take them to the summit of the highest peak in Europe. With them, they carried the Reich War Flag, as well as a pair of divisional standards. Both Gammerler and Groth knew that the rest of Army Group ‘A’ were doing less well below them, moving at snail’s pace through the mountains, plodding south t…
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Sure, you could celebrate Independence Day by looking inward and bingeing some homegrown series (if that’s your inclination, let me recommend the criminally under-seen and sadly no longer in production Briarpatch, an excellent Ross Thomas adaptation), or you could follow the revolutionary spirit in a more internationalist direction and look abroad for your extra day’s worth of entertainment. What’s better at the midsummer mark than a border-crossing thriller, after all? Here are a few recommendations for you. If you’re in the mood for a family (fugitive) road trip… The Mosquito Coast Streaming on: AppleTV Seasons: 1 If you’re really looking for some wild, internatio…
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Erle Stanley Gardner was in a quandary. Even something of a snit. The year was 1936, and as crime writer/critic Dorothy B. Hughes recalls in her 1978 biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, Gardner was seriously entertaining the notion of phasing out Perry Mason as a protagonist. By then, he’d already published nine novels featuring that Los Angeles criminal defense attorney; his younger secretary with the “perfect” legs, Della Street; and Paul Drake, the droop-shouldered private eye whose 24-hour investigative agency never seemed to find time for clients other than Mason. The books had sold well, allowing Gardner to end his own marginally sati…
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The ad copy called him, “the biggest thing in the entertainment world since The Beatles.” The New York Times labeled him Ian Fleming’s successor. The Daily Mirror called the title character in his first book, “the most modern hero in years.” However, almost 50 years removed from these headlines, few people recognize the name of Adam Diment. Readers can be forgiven being in the dark about Diment; at the height of his fame, he just vanished. Diment was a sixties icon through and through. In style and in substance, his ‘about the author’ photo was the kind of thing you’d find in an encyclopedia under the heading, ‘mod.’ Diment came to prominence in 1967, when he landed a si…
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I don’t believe in ghosts, but I love the idea of the dead communicating with the living in a fiction. In a traditional mystery, it’s up to a brilliant detective to follow a trail of clues around a death and then deduce who the murderer is—think of Hercule Poirot bragging about his “little grey cells.” As satisfying as that construct can be, it sometimes leaves me feeling like the murder victim is the character who matters least in a novel. The reader rarely meets them and often has no insight into what made them tick. Their death is simply the engine that powers the story, ultimately showcasing a sleuth’s dazzling skills. For me, there’s always been a powerful attractio…
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