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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Raymond Chandler had a complicated relationship with Hollywood. If you’re inclined to dig around there are any number of interesting and sometimes shocking anecdotes about his time working around movies, and he certainly left behind a litany of quips on the subject. (“Its idea of ‘production value’ is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away.”) My own personal favorite has a slightly lighter air than most of the matter on offer. It’s the now legendary, possibly apocryphal story about William Faulkner, hired for a script adaptation, desperately trying to work out the plot of The Big Sleep and inquiring of Chandler which of his ch…
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When it comes to classic and traditional mysteries, the old manor house in a remote part of England is a classic of the genre: isolated, often impoverished, and filled with suspicious characters. It’s easy to picture Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot unmasking a murderer in the parlor, surrounded by suspects. In fact, English manors, villages, cities, and boarding schools are fodder for many a modern mystery, with present-day British authors having just as much with the settings as their historical counterparts. But British authors aren’t the only ones who love a creepy moor or crumbling manor house. Authors writing whodunits from the United States seem just as likely t…
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I’m far from being the first ex-lawyer to turn fiction writing. While my book Prima Facie is a book of fiction that definitely focuses on the law, other lawyers don’t always deal with the law specifically. Lawyers do, however, tend to interrogate ideas and systems in their work. What is it that an ex-lawyer brings to their writing that feels so exciting? All writers are unique in their preoccupations and stories, but to my mind they seem to incorporate into their work the way lawyers are trained to think about story and information. All lawyers (and specifically criminal lawyers) are trained to go beneath the story on the surface and to reflect on how and when social sys…
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I think about murder a lot. No big surprise, since I write murder mysteries for a living. But I’ve been thinking about murder for a lot longer than I’ve been writing it. Since I was old enough to pull a well-thumbed paperback off my grandmother’s bookshelf. Detective fiction has been my comfort food since I was a child. And my preoccupation with murder hasn’t stopped at fictional ones. If my audiobook library can be believed, I spent a large chunk of the 2010s consuming true crime podcasts and documentaries about long-caught serial killers. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the why of it all. Why the preoccupation with murder? Why was I reading Sherlock Holmes at eight…
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Ah, series. Most readers love them, and most writers love to write them. We get to know the imaginary world we’ve created, and it is fun and rewarding to slip back into that headspace and get caught up on what our protagonist has going on. I don’t believe most authors set out to write a series that lengthens from three or four to eight or more. We start out with what we know, then readers demand more so we happily oblige. Of course, we all hope the work we’ve put into planning out that series will be rewarded with avid readers, but what elements cause readers to care enough to keep reading? I decided to take a look at my favorites and why I love them. The Detective…
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When I set out to write my first mystery, I knew two things: 1) There would be dogs—my admittedly lofty ambition was to be “Julia Spencer-Fleming with dogs”; and 2) The dogs would not be golden retrievers. Why not? Because everyone writes about golden retrievers. Goldens are one of America’s favorite dogs, ranking #3 in popularity in the AKC’s list of 195 breeds. Only Labrador retrievers and German shepherds are more popular—and you wouldn’t know that by looking at our entertainment, as goldens predominate on TV and film and in books. From to Air Bud and Golden Winter to Homeward Bound and Marley & Me, the media are gaga about goldens. To be fair, they are nice dogs…
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“Belle Mer” means “beautiful sea” in French, and it is not only the title of this short story, but also the name of the oceanfront house where the main character goes for summer vacation. The house name evokes the peace and tranquility of a summer idyll, yet belies how suddenly contentment can veer into terror, with the need to face the darkest secrets a person can keep. When I was young, my grandmother would sing us an old song called “By the Beautiful Sea”. It has affected my whole life. Our family spent summers at her beach cottage, and on most of the vacations I’ve ever taken, I’ve sought out beaches and oceans, rocky coastlines, salt water bays, and tidal pools. No …
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I was a little kid the first time I saw Frankenstein. It was the 1931 version with Boris Karloff in the role of the monster. On Chicago station WGN after 10 p.m., there was a show called “Creature Features” that opened with Henry Mancini’s theme from the film Experiment in Terror and a TV announcer reading this poem: “Gruesome ghouls and grisly ghosts Wretched souls and cursed hosts Fog rolls in and coffins slam Mortals quake and full moons rise Creatures haunt and terrorize …” That’s all I remember of that part. I also remember that most of the giant-bug-giant-lizard movies shown back then seem rather innocent by the standards of teen-slasher films of today. (I e…
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I love heist stories. I love fantasy heists, I love general fiction heists. My novella, Comeuppance Served Cold, features a heist. Heist books, films or television shows, I love them, and I’m not alone. Why love a heist? One reason is competence porn. Fantasy or general fiction, book, film or series, heists involve people at the top of their skill set—or who used to be—with circumstances that test them strenuously. Heists also satisfy the “quest” craving, since they map almost perfectly onto the quest plot. Something valuable must be acquired or disposed of. A group of people from different communities join forces, face obstacles, probably endure at least one betrayal, …
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The question we have been asked more than any other in our career as pro podders is ‘why are women so obsessed with true crime?’. And the numbers do stack up, we at RedHanded have been in the criminal fixation game for nearly five years, and we still boast an audience heavily swayed in the female direction. Eighty-two percent swayed, to be exact. So, the question is worth asking, but the truth is, true crime and the commercial consumption of it is nothing new. As far back as 1888, Victorian media moguls cottoned on sharpish to how much faster they could sell their papers if they recounted the latest rippings of Britain’s most famous Jack. This business strategy is still …
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Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery that binds me still— —from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone” Having completed just forty years of what was without question a most stormy life, Edgar Allan Poe took leave of this realm early Sunday morning, October 7, 1849. Nobody knows precisely why. Indeed, like so many aspects of his life, his death has been the topic of endless debate, conjecture, speculation, guessing, and second-guessing. Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him durin…
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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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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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This summer will mark the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the most gruesome crimes in Milwaukee’s history. No doubt this grim anniversary will spark some reflections on the crimes and will inevitably renew interest in the man responsible for them. But I hope this year will also provide opportunities for us to think about how and why it is that 30 years on, Jeffrey Dahmer remains a household name—a kind of American celebrity, even—when few Americans could tell you the name of just one of the men he murdered. The media made this man famous, but we’ve not done much, if anything, to discourage them. Upon reflection, it’s obvious the case belongs in the long, disturbing t…
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Over the course of the pandemic, we (the royal, anxious, self-isolated we) watched a lot of horror movies. More than usual. In fact, Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s chilling pandemic thriller from 2011 was one of the most streamed movies of 2020. This data generated a few headlines of course, because why on earth would we (the collectively sad and terrified we) want to micro-dose on fear in the middle of a waking nightmare? There’s a thing that people say—usually to themselves just before a rectal exam, but also sometimes to other people going through a tough time: the best way out is always through. Meaning, among other things, that life’s challenges can’t be avoided, on…
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A couple years ago, I found myself on a serious Shirley Jackson kick. I devoured as many of her short stories and novels that I could find—including the elusive The Bird’s Nest—Ruth Franklin’s excellent biography A Rather Haunted Life, and of course, the movies. The Haunting circa 1963 was fabulous, to be sure, but my favorite of all was Mike Flanagan’s modern reimagining of The Haunting of Hill House. I remained on tenterhooks for the entirety of the series, but one particular scene at the end of episode five—if you know, you know—had me nearly climbing the walls with sheer terror. One thing you should know: I am what is commonly referred to as a “scaredy cat.” And yet,…
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I don’t really love Halloween, but I love one of its main characters. I love Dracula. I don’t even care about vampires but I care about Dracula, and, not to presume that the readers of this site are particularly attuned to the oeuvres of any one of its writers, but if you have noticed a glut of Dracula content on CrimeReads throughout the past few years, especially around this season, it’s probably because of me. I love Dracula, from Transylvania to London and back again. So, if you’re looking for something to watch this Halloween weekend, I ask you to look no further than Halloween’s undying great-great grandfather. But which Dracula movie should you choose? There are l…
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Gilded Age New York City was much more than Fifth Avenue mansions, Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, and Delmonico’s. Life for the elite and the very wealthy might be a dizzying whirl of formal and costume balls, nights at the opera, and debutante presentations, but beneath the glamour and the glitter lay a world no one except religious reformers wanted to acknowledge. Even they only described in the most general terms the plight of desperate women and girls whose sole means of earning a meager living was in the city’s brothels and on its streets. When I began writing the Gilded Age Mystery series (Kensington Books), I knew that in addition to showcasing a pair of legal investi…
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Screenwriters are taught: “Do not write what you cannot see.” And this is why, after a career of writing screenplays and directing films, I wrote a crime novel. A screenplay is a blue print, drawn with action and dialogue, something that exists in a slippery space, to inspire a director to film, to suggest actors fulfill characters, for a production designer to envision set dressings and costumes and hair designs that likely were not even on the page. You can’t write about what’s inside someone’s head because, well, you can’t see that. You learn to write only what people say, and what they do. Don’t direct the movie by suggesting how someone is sipping tea while loading…
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I started writing fairy tales after my daughter was born. I already had a son, but I found giving birth to a daughter to be a different experience altogether: it made me think even more deeply about what it meant to be a woman and, most importantly, what sort of woman I hoped my daughter would become. This, of course, made me reflect upon what sort of role model I wanted to be and how I would raise her. I was raised, like most women, to be a “good girl”. This was decades before parents had books like Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls to read their daughters at bedtime and, although my parents were both feminists, they were also steeped in traditional gender values and no…
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Sexual betrayal, violence, theft, family rivalries: they’re all fertile ground for plots of psychological thrillers: what I hadn’t realized until it happened to me was that there’s another crime that can inspire the kind of rage and hatred that leads to murder. Friendnapping. Having your best friend stolen from you right before your eyes. It seemed like such a good idea. I was going away for a long weekend to a beachside hotel. I’d be working a lot of the time, but I’d have parts of the day and evenings free. I invited my best friend, Ruth, to come with me, knowing she loved the beach and would be fine spending time on her own while I was working. A few days before we w…
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Around the year 2000 I had an idea for a book about British aristocrats who aided Hitler during WWII. I sent the idea to my agent who replied with a scathing letter that nobody was interested in WWII, and it was disgusting to show people having an easy time in the British countryside when so many were suffering on the Continent. So, I put the idea aside. Many years and a new agent later, I found it again and decided it would still make a good story. I shared it with my current agent who loved it. It was snapped up by Lake Union (Amazon’s women’s fiction line) and came out as IN FARLEIGH FIELD. It has since sold half a million copies. Since then, I have written THE TUSC…
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The Canadian Paradox Some places in the world are what they call “low-trust societies.” The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid, and people, rightly, fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the “high-trust societies,” conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high. With that in mind, given what we know about the following two countries, why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Joe Queenan, writing in Forbes magazin…
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In 1990, when I was in law school, my Jessup International Moot Court team won the award for writing the best legal brief in the world. Proud and honored, I remember thinking that if I could accomplish this, I bet I could write a novel as well. Writing as a means of creative expression had always intrigued me, but I considered that pursuit far above my abilities. So, I spent the next two decades practicing law but also studying the craft of writing, working on a manuscript in my spare time. In that time, I learned that being a lawyer brought with it some important advantages when it came to writing mysteries and thrillers, but it also brought enormous obstacles that had t…
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Many a mystery novel featuring an amateur sleuth places a librarian in that role. With good reason—outside of law enforcement, no profession lends itself to the role of detective more readily. Librarianship requires a combination of temperament and education that produces a professional with a powerful curiosity and the skill set to satisfy it, no matter how obscure the fact we seek. Though often written off as unassuming, cardigan-wearing bookworms, our jobs require traits more often associated with our hard-boiled colleagues in the investigation business. We do good research. Go ahead—try us. But be warned: strolling up to the reference desk and prefacing your question…
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