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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“Conspiracies are melodramatic, my dear, especially when they’re made by rich people with too much money and time on their hands.”—The Smiler with the Knife, Nicholas Blake * Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in July 1939 with a Mephistophelean beard and a clutch of potential projects. The facial hair was an artifact of Five Kings, a wildly ambitious synthesis of Shakespeare plays that had closed in Philadelphia. John Houseman, then Welles’s producing partner, wrote that “as a final token of defiance, Orson announced that he was retaining his beard and would not shave it off until he had appeared as Falstaff on a New York stage.” The affectation provided additional ammu…
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__________________________________ From Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith. Used with the permission of the publisher, Fantagraphics Books. Copyright © 2020 by Barry Windsor-Smith. View the full article
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Quiet Time, my first mystery, was a fictionalized version of the brutal murder of a suburban housewife. Not just any housewife, but Betty Frye, on the eve of my marriage to her son. Back in 1973, he and I were college students at CU in Boulder, practicing karate and living together on the Hill. The morning Betty was murdered, I spoke with her; hours later, I saw her killer. Her death made me a crime writer. Quiet Time was my lab for learning fiction craft. The manuscript underwent twenty-odd drafts, each more heavily fictionalized. I wasn’t imaginative enough to invent brand-new characters, though I did change the killer. And the ending was entirely made up, since in rea…
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From the moment I began writing fiction, I knew my stories would be fantasies. I’ve always read widely and enjoyed a variety of genres, but I hold a special place in my heart for magical stories that feel as though they might just be real. A childhood love for C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle led me, as an adult, to authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Hoffman, and Neil Gaiman. My debut novel, The Memory Collectors, is firmly grounded in our world, with a little bit of magic woven throughout. It tells the tale of two women with a shared gift: they can sense the emotions left behind on objects. Each of them is haunted by events in their pasts, and when they meet, the…
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How can a mystery weave a tale about the human psyche? Can the unravelling of plot and the unravelling of human desires occur simultaneously in a story? Those questions were humming away in the background of my mind as I set about writing my debut novel. For authors who write to explore the human condition, they’re often pressing concerns. Characters may need a plot, but plot also needs character—I wanted to tie a story of crime into a tale about the messiness of human psychology, the complexity of private grudges, and all the joy and anguish of foiled desires. Diving into motivation helped me to bring it all together. A look back through literature shows that stories a…
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“The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.” Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground I was reminded of Sean Duffy’s poetic take on the beauty of a Belfast riot recently while the rubble of the previous night’s endeavors smoldered on the stree…
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He walked, feeling his body fill with blessed tiredness. Vyrin knew every root, every hole on this path, and he looked forward to seeing the pasture on the left, fenced by rowan trees—the berries would be ripe in color by now—and then he would encounter the sweet, gentle chimney smoke from the farm. The walk both tired and invigorated him; his recent fears seemed silly. I guess I really am old, he thought. I’ve become neurotically fearful. He could see the cathedral from the last turn. It stood on a stone outcropping that divided the top of the valley. The yellow façade, framed by two bell towers, continued upward from the vertical plane of the cliff. This church was mu…
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When Putnam and the Ludlum Estates asked me to write The Treadstone Resurrection, all I knew was that it was a spinoff series that drilled deeper into the shadowy world of Operation Treadstone. For those unfamiliar with the Ludlum Universe, Operation Treadstone was the covert CIA program that took Jason Bourne and turned him into a genetically modified assassin. A man capable of killing without hesitation or remorse. My contribution was to create a new hero. A protagonist who’d give readers a Bourne-like experience, but not a Bourne rip-off. At first glance, it seemed pretty straightforward. In fact, as I began developing my protagonist, a former Treadstone operative …
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On a dreary April morning in 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless, his nose smashed in a dried blood covering his forehead. An autopsy, coroner’s inquest and murder investigation followed. Two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested. The community of Sumas was shocked, unable to believe that the harmless young man, physically handicapped and orphaned, was capable of killing anyone, particularly Marshall, who had treated him like family. Two lengthy trials followed——the first ending in a hung jur…
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We all think of Sherlock Holmes as a rational thinker, a scientist, a man who uses remarkable powers of inference, deduction and observation to extract the truth from a tangled mass of facts. Holmes brings the rigor of scientific thinking to crime solving—a new idea in the nineteenth century, but now standard practice. Of course Holmes is every bit as much as artist as he is a scientist. But artists create. What, exactly does Holmes create? You won’t find daubs of cerulean blue paint on his frock coat. “Data, data, data! I cannot make bricks without clay!” says he. His art material is this data, this clay—the details, the facts of the case which he has observed or ferr…
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Hello, movie fans. The 93rd Academy Awards will take place this Sunday, April 25th, at 6:30 EST (and you can watch them on ABC, if you, like most of us, will not be at the literal ceremony). Going to the movies is still pretty iffy, but luckily, all of the Oscar noms are streaming via one service or another. We’ve assembled a handy roundup of all the crimey movies nominated for Academy Awards, for your viewing pleasure, this weekend and beyond! Promising Young Woman, dir. Emerald Fennell Nominations: Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Actress, Best Editing Summary: We missed including Promising Young Woman on our roundup of the …
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Imagine an idyllic, sunny Greek island surrounded by a deep blue-green Aegean sea, bordered in long sandy beaches, filled with vast fertile plains, sporting a backbone of rugged green mountains, and peppered everywhere with villages, towns and ruins running back to antiquity. All that, plus terrific locally raised food, warm and welcoming people, reasonable prices, and a history predating Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. Question: Would you like to visit? Answer: Who wouldn’t? I think it’s safe to say that in response to observing that brief Q&A a famous Danish Prince would say, “There’s the rub.” Of course, dear Hamlet is right, because it is within the irresis…
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In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage month, we’re highlighting the incredible array of crime books and thrillers by Asian-American authors publishing in 2021, so you can keep reading these stories all year long. JANUARY-APRIL Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Dutton) “Malinda Lo turns her masterful talent toward an under-covered period of San Francisco history. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is by turns gut-wrenching, utterly compelling, and deeply tender. I loved Lily fiercely, and you will too.” —Rebecca Kim Wells, author of Shatter the Sky Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed (Grove Press) “With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Com…
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As I type this, a new film has been released which offers a backstory into the motivations of the Disney villainess Cruella de Vil, a character who needs no introduction (or even, some might say, explanation) but has been given one anyway. I haven’t seen this new film, Cruella, which stars Emma Stone and sets itself up as a pseudo-prequel to Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians film from 1996, which starred Glenn Close as the diabolical, piebald, puppy-stealing termagant. I probably won’t see the new film (simply because I’m not very interested in Disney’s live-action remakes and such), but I’m not writing this to knock it. All I can say about it is that I’ve noticed that,…
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Though often described as an island Malta actually comprises three inhabited islands, Malta, Gozo and Comino. Few archipelagos can have been fought over as much—invaded, occupied, bombed and put under siege—than Malta. Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, the Knights of St John, Normans, Aragonese, French, the British and the Nazis. As so often geography is destiny for Malta, sitting at a crossroads in the Mediterranean equidistant between southern Europe and north Africa. The Maltese language reveals its cosmopolitan history—Maltese borrows from Sicilian, Arabic, a little French influence, and a bit of English thrown in too. Now part of the European Unio…
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“Can I come in?” asked Fazio. “Yeah, come on in. So you’re only getting back now?” “Chief, would you believe it if I told you I didn’t even have time to eat lunch?” “Where were you?” “Still at Trincanato’s.” “Did something happen?” “First, two of Spagnolo’s kids came. Spagnolo was the worker who hung himself. But the guards didn’t want to let them into the hangar.” “Are they minors?” “No way! One’s thirty, the other’s twenty-eight. Both without jobs. Sacked. At any rate, things could have got out of hand if we hadn’t been there . . .” “And then what?” “And then, when the prosecutor and Dr. Pasquano were done and the body was taken away, Giurlanno, Spagnolo’s old…
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A new year, a new you, and a whole new set of books to read! Check out the site later in the week for our full preview of the most anticipated titles of 2022, but in the meantime, here are 10 essential crime novels coming out this January. These will make you think, make you cry, and distract you from whatever you need distraction from (i.e., the entire world right now). You’ll notice we got pretty literary this January. It’s cold and we’re reading long books, okay? Sara Stridsberg, The Antarctica of Love (FSG) Stridsberg’s evocative new novel is a portrait of a young woman and her violent death, a powerful story that ripples through time and across generations and so…
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John Hunter, a notable 18th century surgeon, wrote a case study about an unnamed doctor who carefully, intentionally nicked his genitals with a scalpel, then bandaged the cut with matter taken from the sores of one of his patients, a man with gonorrhea. The unnamed doctor then developed symptoms of gonorrhea and syphilis, so he concluded that they were one disease. He was wrong. The patient had both. Modern readers, blessed by the benefits of elementary school sex education, know that gonorrhea and syphilis are caused by different bacteria with different symptomologies, but this knowledge couldn’t have come to us without medical pioneers like John Hunter. One can also g…
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I was 22 when I was shot in the leg by the IRA in 1976. I was an officer in the Ballymurphy IRA and, as a volunteer army, we didn’t always get paid, so money was scarce. One day I was drinking in a pub with another volunteer and we ran out of money. So we went to my friend’s home, grabbed his son’s toy Lone Star gun, and robbed the first place we came across. Our take was something like thirty pounds, which we had drunk up in no time. Needless to say, the IRA knew within an hour or so that my friend and I were the culprits. Rather graciously, they waited until we had sobered up before addressing the matter. Now, the IRA doesn’t really do “mitigating circumstances,” and w…
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“Think Downton Abbey meets Sneakers, but in World War II!” That’s how a Hollywood bigwig might pitch the story of Bletchley Park, a remote English country manor stuffed with codebreakers, all laboring under dire secrecy to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes. But Bletchley Park’s extraordinary achievements are no Hollywood screenwriter’s fever dream; they’re real…and would never have happened without thousands of extraordinary women. A university campus, a Wonderland, “the biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain”: BP, as it was casually known by insiders, resembled all three. A Victorian country house chosen for its remote location and its railway proxi…
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Three years ago, when I ranked 100 Sherlock Holmes performances in an article for this very website, I had thought that I had landed upon the most challenging project I’d ever undertake at CrimeReads. Watching countless film and TV adaptations, attempting to ascribe value to various interpretations of the character, attempting to force a logical ranking out of them all… for weeks, I wrung my hands over it, and, when it was over, I washed my hands of it—and the notion of putting together any similar list ever again. And yet here we are. Here we are again. The list which you are about to read is a ranking of the 85 film and TV performances of Sherlock Holmes’s esteemed col…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Sarah Pearse, The Sanatorium (Pamela Dorman Books) Sarah Pearse’s atmospheric thriller involves a naive hotelier destroyed by his own hubris when he attempts to turn the ruins of a sanatorium into a swanky new destination for travelers. First, his architect vanishes. Then, the staff start disappearing. And then, an avalanche traps the rest of the staff, to be picked off one by one. Lucky for the rest of the hotel’s trapped denizens, there’s a British cop visiting, and she’s determined to hunt down the attacker, even as the weather rages outside and threatens to obliterate the entir…
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After a very, very long year, the Edgar Awards are once again upon us. 2021 marks the 75th year that Mystery Writers of America will celebrate the best crime and mystery writing, and while 2020 was an abysmal year by any other metric, it was a stellar year for great new books. In what’s become a tradition here at CrimeReads, our editors partnered with MWA to organize a giant roundtable discussion between the Edgar nominees, and we received responses from over 30 authors, each with their own fascinating take on our beloved genre. The Edgar Awards Ceremony begins at 1 PM EST on Thursday, the 29th, via Zoom. You can read the second part of this discussion, focused on the cha…
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My recent novel, Blood Will Have Blood, was driven in part by my fascination with protagonists who find themselves in dire exigent circumstances, facing predicaments where recourse to conventional protocols and laws simply fails. Sometimes dialing 911 isn’t an option. One of my favorite movie examples is Cape Fear (the original, with the inimitably noble Gregory Peck). Here is an officer of the court, an upstanding man of laws, stalked by Robert Mitchum’s vengeful ex-con, whose mayhem cuts through any notion that societal restraints can keep the order of things. How starkly this reality eventually strips Peck of his norms, leading this good citizen down a decidedly dark p…
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Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. (Friedrich Schiller) *** I used to play cards for a living. For almost a decade, on the virtual tables of disreputable gambling outfits or celebrity-endorsed multinational behemoths; in glass-partitioned exclusive rooms in casinos in Las Vegas, Montecarlo, and Macau, and in mob-run back-alley joints in my hometown of Rome, Italy. The game of poker dominated my twenties with the intensity of a first love. It played out, for the most part, against the expressionistic backdrop of the late aughts Great Financial Crisis. And like all first loves, it left…
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