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,
3,470 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 409 views
By ten a.m. on the morning of Saturday, October 18, 1947, the awful word had gotten round among the other fifty-nine first-class passengers sailing aboard the Durban Castle, an ocean liner situated off the coast of equatorial Africa that was en route to the English city of Southampton from Cape Town, South Africa. Gay Gibson had disappeared! Gay Gibson, the vanished young woman, was an enchanting auburn-haired, milky-skinned stage actress, only twenty-one years old, who had left her home in South Africa aboard the Durban Castle in order, she told people, to find her fame and fortune strutting upon the boards in England, where she had originally resided with her peripatet…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 429 views
HUGHIE MCLOON WALKED OUT of the speakeasy at a quarter to two in the morning with a hoodlum on each arm. Here he was, the most recognized and popular little guy in Philadelphia—hadn’t they asked him to hold up the round cards at the Dempsey-Tunney fight with 130,000 people in the stands?— and now he was running his own café at Tenth and Cuthbert, five short blocks from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and life should have been, as they said in those days, the berries. McLoon was serving sandwiches, “light lunch,” and bootleg ale and whisky ladled from buckets secreted behind the counter when two wise guys with names off a Hofbrau menu, Meister and Fries, imposed …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 484 views
Spring has arrived, the clocks have moved forward, and we’re all one step closer to being about to travel for real, but as we wait for the world to open up, there’s still plenty of international crime novels to tide us over. March’s line-up features eerie Scandinavian folk horror, a thrilling Nigerian mystery, an elegant investigation in Italy, and new historicals from Poland and France. Camilla Sten, The Lost Village Translated by Alexandra Fleming (Minotaur) The folk horror wave continues! Thank god for Midsommar and all the many wonderful works that are now able to be compared to it. In The Lost Village, a documentary filmmaker is drawn to uncovering the secrets …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was everywhere. One of the director’s genuine masterpieces, “Psycho,” was released that year, on the heels of “North by Northwest” the year before, which had followed “Vertigo” and “The Wrong Man” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” “The Birds” lay ahead of him. The 60-year-old director, who had always been a familiar figure to some because of his sly cameos in his films, had become a household name through his movies and his TV show, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” The half-hour anthology series began in 1955 and ran for 10 years, including the years when it was expanded and renamed “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” Add to that “Alfred Hitchcock’s Myster…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 422 views
It was recently pointed out to me by a friend that my books are stuffed to the gills with cheating spouses. This wasn’t new information, exactly, but it did make me wonder why that was the case. Was it a peculiar obsession of mine, or was it the fact that cheating spouses are great fuel for thriller novels? I suspect it’s a little bit of both. And while all my books have a glut of unfaithful lovers, my latest, Every Vow You Break, is a novel in which the entire plot turns on a single moment of weakness, when a bride-to-be has a drunken one-night fling on her bachelorette weekend. One of the reasons adultery works so well in the realm of suspense fiction is that it can so…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 390 views
The art world is so full of colorful characters (pun intended) that I had no trouble finding real people to populate my fictional Art of Murder mystery series, all three of which are set in New York City’s bohemian milieu and its eastern Long Island outpost, the Hamptons. From the European exiles during World War II to Andy Warhol’s entourage in the Swingin’ Sixties, they don’t come any more outrageous. Their iconoclasm, supersized egos, and sexual high jinx made them perfect personalities around which to build imaginary narratives. An Exquisite Corpse features André Breton, the so-called Pope of Surrealism, his gorgeous wife Jacqueline Lamba, her American lover, artist D…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 470 views
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…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
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…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 372 views
Before I embarked upon my first ever fiction, I was a writer of non-fiction, of articles, essays, and anything else I could think of to get published. To keep a roof over my head, I also had a day job in outside sales, which gave me an income and a framework to my day, and to be honest, I had the job where I wanted it—I could work my own hours provided I met my targets. The bonus of hard work and good results was more writing time each week, though a magazine assignment sometimes meant clambering out of bed at three in the morning to interview someone in a far-flung country. One day, stuck in traffic on the way to work, waiting for the cars ahead to move, I had an idea f…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 426 views
Novelists are not prophets or psychics, clairvoyants or descendants of Nostradamus. They are not supposed to be, at least. But over the years, some have seemed pretty damn close. Dean Koontz once wrote a thriller called, The Eyes of Darkness, which predicted a global pandemic started by a lethal virus called the “Wuhan-400,” originating in Wuhan, China. True, in the original edition published in 1981, the virus was produced in the Soviet Union and it was called the “Gorki-400.” In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Koontz put out a new edition in which he changed the villain to the Communist Chinese government. Plenty of naysayers say Koontz didn’t get it exa…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 421 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alma Katsu, Red Widow (Putnam) “Katsu, a longtime intelligence analyst for the C.I.A. and N.S.A, writes what she’s most professionally familiar with after years in the paranormal and horror noel trenches. The plotting is sophisticated and laced with surprises, but what stands out most is the emotional core of Lyndsey and Theresa’s alliance, and whether there is room, in a nest of vipers, for true sisterhood.” –The New York Times Book Review Camilla Sten, (transl. Alexandra Fleming), The Lost Village (Minotaur) “Very hard to put down…delivers maximum dread with remarkable restrain…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 387 views
There is a widespread misconception that the heroes and villains in life will be marked clearly for all to see; to easily distinguish who we should listen to and who is trying to con us. Media doesn’t help. Just look at superhero films. Captain America and Iron Man wear bright colors, have their identities known to everyone, and are always around to protect innocents despite sometimes causing massive destruction themselves. The villains they fight, on the other hand, are what we’d expect from the truly evil and vile. The Red Skull is a literal Nazi with an almost comical skull for a face. Thanos was a massive purple alien who thought the only way to save the world was to …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 384 views
Anti-heroes are the assholes of literature. But they serve a purpose: they teach us something about morality, about nobility, about the line between right and wrong, good and bad. They challenge our own moral compass and get us to think: “What would I do? How would I act? How can I do better?” In my thriller, Do No Harm, my protagonist, Dr. Emma Sweeney, isn’t your traditional anti-hero. She isn’t cool or a bad ass. She isn’t a maverick or some sort of epic mess up. She is no Walter White, cooking up meth and breaking the law with style. She’s just a mom who wants to save her son’s life. And she’s willing to take the law into her own hands to accomplish this goal. She s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
I just wanted to remind you all of the time, in 2016, when a Norwegian organization called Kongsberg Maritime sent a high-tech robot down into Loch Ness to scan the depths, and it sent back sonar scans of a creature that looked exactly like the Loch Ness monster. Sadly, very sadly, this turned out to be a model of the Loch Ness Monster built for Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which had accidentally sunk into the Loch during filming in 1969. The survey, which BBC’s Steven McKenzie reports was supported by VisitScotland and expert Adrian Shine’s “the Loch Ness Project,” reported that they were positive that the sonar scan had detected the prop a…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 546 views
Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction from the Wittliff Collections (UT Press, 2007) included a bibliography of 196 Texas authors, past and present. Likely there are enough now to fill every one of the state’s 254 counties. Among the names—from Texas or writing about Texas—were some of the best in the business: Jim Thompson, Joe R. Lansdale, James Crumley, Rick Riordan, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, Harry Hunsicker, Rolando Hinojosa, Walter Mosley, Jay Brandon, Kinky Friedman, Lee Child, Dan Jenkins. An updated list today surely would include Attica Locke, Cormac McCarthy, Meg Gardiner, Nic Pizzolatto, Kathleen Kent, Lisa Sandlin, and Fernando Flor…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 514 views
In 1961, a dashing young President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was sworn into office amidst world crisis. To greet the new President, East Germany covertly erected the Berlin Wall and Russia launched Yuri Gregorian into Earth orbit from a secret underground bunker. Not to be outdone, CIA trained mercenaries stormed the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and later assassinated the Dominican President, Rafael Trujillo, in bungled attempts at regime change. Nuclear warheads were bristling at “Fail Safe” designation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Cold War was hot and spies were in demand. Espionage fiction was also in demand, led by a dashing British secret agent …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 418 views
America wasn’t even three months into Ronald Reagan’s first term when Cutter’s Way came out, but no film of the following decade would provide so indelible a metaphor for the nation’s callous transition from post-Watergate, post-Vietnam angst to the cartoonish nostalgia of Morning in America as when the movie’s eponymous hero, Alexander Cutter (John Heard)—a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed casualty of our deadly misadventure in Southeast Asia—drunkenly unloads his pistol into a smiling stuffed animal floating in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Released in March of 1981, Cutter’s Way (originally titled Cutter and Bone, after the Newton Thornburg novel of five years prio…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 393 views
My book The Note Through the Wire tells the WWII love story of Josefine Lobnik, a Slovene resistance fighter, and Bruce Murray, an Allied prisoner of war. They met by chance when she passed a note through the wire of a POW camp seeking information on her brother Leopold who had been captured by the Nazis. I’ve known about this story for almost 40 years—Bruce and Josefine were my parents-in-law and I learned about their wartime exploits when I was introduced to them over a traditional Slovenian dinner accompanied by more beer, wine and slivovitz than was healthy for any of us. I felt somewhat intimidated being in the company of genuine war heroes but quickly learned that …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 499 views
The funeral took place on a Friday. It was ten days into December and the air was grey with sleet. I met Jakob Aasen outside the chapel. At first I hardly recognised him. He had grown a beard and his dark, tightly curled hair was speckled with grey. For an instant we stood looking at one another. Then he smiled tentatively, while I nodded a kind of acknowledgement. ‘Varg?’ I nodded. ‘Jakob…?’ We shook hands. ‘How long is it since we…?’ I shrugged. ‘1965.’ ‘Yes, but … surely we must’ve seen each other since then.’ ‘Couple of times in the street maybe. By chance. Have you been in Bergen the whole time?’ ‘More or less. And you?’ ‘Yes, at any rate since 1970.’ ‘Six…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 490 views
I can’t remember when I first heard of Mike Hodges’s seminal 1971 British gangster film, Get Carter, but it was long before I finally managed to see it late one night on cable television in a hotel in Prague in the late 1990s. And it was several more years until I was able to track down a copy of the then relatively rare source novel of the film, Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home, published in 1970. Until the last half decade or so, Get Carter as the book would subsequently be retitled and how it will be referred to it in this piece, along with Lewis’s eight other novels, were all out of print and little known. This is despite the praise heaped on them by luminaries such …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 421 views
Psychopaths lie, manipulate and they kill. We’re unlikely to invite them into our homes and offer them a seat at the dinner table. Our families are unlikely to be jumping up and down and planning their wedding outfits if we announced our engagement to a Hannibal Lecter wannabe. We indulge in True Crime documentaries and the serial killer memes are rife on our social media timelines. Psychopaths are everywhere. They infiltrate every moment of our lives. Our demand for the psychopath’s story on our tv screens, bookshelves and group chats shows no signs of abating. Psychologists have given our love for psychopaths a name. Hybistrophilia is a sexual interest in and attractio…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 420 views
Let’s face it. Growing up isn’t easy even in the best of circumstances. And whose circumstances are ever truly ideal? Maturing under the intense pressures of the world around us is challenging enough. But what if the things that fill us with dread and fear when we’re young become the stuff of real-life nightmares? What if we harbor guilty secrets that follow us into adulthood? The books that spoke to me during my own fraught, complicated journey of adolescence were always tales of mysteries and psychological suspense (I still love this genre). Stories about kids like me, or somewhat like me, maturing under extraordinary conditions really resonated. I would read far into …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 493 views
Stephen King, the master of horror, is also a big crime reader… * ARIEL S. WINTER First-novelist Winter stunned readers with his mammoth 180,000-word debut, The Twenty-Year Death, which tells the story of a disintegrating marriage as told, successively, in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Stephen King called it “bold, innovative, and thrilling,” writing “The Twenty-Year Death crackles with suspense and will keep you up late.” DONALD E. WESTLAKE “A book by this guy is a cause for happiness,” King wrote about the man who, under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” wrote the dark-as-dark-gets Parker novels and inspired the name of the mur…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 381 views
I don’t know why the 1993 thriller movie The Fugitive sets one of its most dramatic chase sequences in and around Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Probably just because it’s cool, it’s a cool scene, there’s nothing more to it than that. I do think it might be over-reading to suggest there’s some sort of allegorical connection between the story of Dr. Richard Kimble, the falsely-accused prison escapee hunting for his wife’s murderer, and the story of Saint Pádraig, the fifth-century Christian bishop who turned walking sticks into trees and fixed Ireland’s alleged snake problem. (And who was probably a fraud on the pest-control front, honestly, since there were zero sn…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 385 views
Just west of Holcomb, Kansas, on the lonesome wheat plains In Cold Blood begins with, stands the world’s largest slaughterhouse. It was the first thing Bonnie and I found when we went looking for the Clutter farm, on a June day so hot it felt like we were being ironed. Earlier, in Albuquerque, I’d typed Holcomb into my phone, and the directions led us here. If the Tyson plant had existed when Capote came to Kansas, his book would probably start with the abattoir at the edge of town. Subtlety was not his strong point. I stopped the car at the gates of the facility, where signs prohibited trespassing. The building ahead was long and beige and bland, as if designed to hide …
Last reply by Admin_99,