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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Like many cozy mystery authors, I love adding animals to my stories. The more the merrier. This is a trend used by many other authors, too. There’s nothing better than reading a cozy mystery and discovering there is an entire series by the same author. Wait, there is something better—when the series includes a lovable pet (or two) that assist in solving the crime! Many cozy mystery authors include pets in their stories because, let’s be honest, life is more interesting and enjoyable with our furry friends coming along for the ride. Pets are great characters, every dog I’ve owned has had his or her unique personality. Not to mention, pets are smarter than we give them cr…
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September 1905 Hampshire, England Unable to bear the stench of bananas, horse dung, smoke, and salty air, Jesse James Prescott pulled the red bandanna up over his nose. He stretched his shoulder blades, sore from leaning so long against the clapboards, and shot a glare up at the bunches of yellow fruit dangling above his head. Nasty things. Made him choke the one time he’d tried one. What had he been thinking, suggesting Snook’s as the rendezvous point? Sure, in the chaos and bustle of the ship’s arrival, the fruit merchant nearest the wharf, with its flashy displays of exotic produce enveloping the entire storefront, was an eye-catching landmark no one could mistake. B…
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Sweden has a proud tradition as a country of exports. American homes are not only decorated with furniture from IKEA— their bookshelves are bursting with suspense novels from a morbid country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean with a disproportionate number of crime writers per capita. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö paved the way with detective Martin Beck in their socially critical novels, published back in the sixties. Hennig Mankell walked the same path a couple of decades later, and then, in the beginning of the 21st century, Stieg Larsson took the sensation of Swedish crime to a completely new level. His Lisbeth Salander novels have sold close to 100 million copies…
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The woman born Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins wrote dozens of novels under four names: the pseudonyms D. B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley, Noel Burke, and, of course, her second married name, Dolores Hitchens. She was a prolific writer with the kind of range that might necessitate multiple pen names, traipsing around the genre with agility and bravado throughout a career that spanned decades—from the 1938 publication of The Clue in the Clay to her death in 1973. Her Rachel Murdock series, which featured a spinster detective with a feline sidekick, was an early example of the cat mystery subgenre, now firmly associated with cozy mysteries. Her two James Sader books, Sle…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Megan Miranda, Such a Quiet Place (Simon and Schuster) “Miranda, who makes the setting, where everyone knows one another and ends up fearing one another, all the more chilling for its seeming normality, is a master of misdirection and sudden plot twists, leading up to a wallop of an ending. A powerful, paranoid thriller.” –Booklist Ace Atkins, The Heathens (Putnam) “Exceptional. . . Atkins artfully alternates between that pursuit and Colson’s search for the people he believes slaughtered Byrd. The diverse cast of characters and their intricate relationships elevate this above mos…
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There’s more than a little blurring of lines between movies and TV (including streaming) these days. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the division between what we watched on TV and what we paid to see in theaters was as solid as the Berlin wall. Despite the division, network TV executives really, really wanted you to think that what you watched on TV was as good as theatrical movies, with big-name casts … or at least a couple of big names. And plenty of thrills. So the networks poured some money and effort and a boatload of marketing into made-for-TV movies, and in the 1970s, many of the best of them were mysteries and thrillers with a touch—or sometimes more than a touch—…
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Books adapted from movies don’t have a sterling reputation. They’re often viewed as slapdash cash-grabs by writers-for-hire, despite some notable examples to the contrary—for example, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (written concurrently with the screenplay) and Alan Dean Foster’s “Alien.” Now Quentin Tarantino is providing his own twist on this odd genre with the novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the 2019 movie he wrote and directed. The story follows fading Western-movie star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and his stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, drinking and talking and lur…
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Everyone, gather round! Sadly, this list marks the end of our Summertime Crime Movies series. But we’re ending it on a very cozy note: campfires, s’mores, looking up at the stars through a lush canopy of evergreens, being hunted by deranged hillbillies… The thing about summery crime movies set in the woods is that they’re almost always horror movies. This is fine, but it’s kind of not what this series is about. (They are often also westerns or war films, which again is fine, but not the target, here.) I’ve tried to keep them as non-horror as possible, but forgive me if some tropes worm their way in. This is why there aren’t many… if I could build a list from Straw Dogs t…
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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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