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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“You know what I mean? You haven’t seen him, but the hairs on your neck tickle against your collar. It makes you shiver. Everything looks normal but it ain’t. It’s like you got a belly-dancer sucking Turkish delight while she blows hot breath down the back of your neck. You don’t mistake that. Maybe it’s an echo to your footsteps. Maybe your subconscious starts to recognize the same pattern of walking: the same guy, in the same shoes, still the same distance behind. But he’s on a loser, because he can’t follow you on the underground. Not if you’ve guessed. Even if you’re six foot two, like me, and you stand out in the crowd. You can lose him.” These are the opening lin…
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___________________________________ Jessie Levy and the Dillinger Gang ___________________________________ During the Great Depression, there were big banks, and desperately poor people, and in between the two, a great vacuum—a vacuum that was quickly filled by the glamorous, devil-may-care exploits of 1930s gangsters like Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger and his men. (Even if the exploits themselves were not actually all that glamorous, it didn’t really matter—once they hit the papers, everyone swooned.) But being a ‘30s gangster wasn’t all fun and games. Dillinger’s men ended up in jail almost as often as they robbed banks, and frequently needed …
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What’s a mystery all about? The ending? Well, of course, you say—the denouement, the unraveling of the clues, the big reveal. If it’s too easy to guess the ending before that very moment, or if the ending doesn’t seem to mesh with the clues provided by the author you’re disappointed with it. It’s a lousy mystery, right? Really? Ever re-read a mystery? Even though you know the solution? (If you’re like me, of course, you can re-read it a year later because you’ve forgotten the solution, but that’s another matter.) But what’s the pleasure in re-reading if the entire pleasure is in the solution dangled like a carrot before you? Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, op…
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I’ve been in the business of killing people for some time now. It started out in medical school: the patient I couldn’t save; the mistakes I made that kept me lying awake at night, staring into the darkness. The art of saving lives isn’t perfect. Complications develop. The body can be fragile and unforgiving. In the quest to cure we sometimes make things worse. Healing and destruction are two sides of the same coin. They don’t tell you this on your first day in the hospital. They slap a white coat on you and tell you to go make a difference. They train you and test you and eventually let you practice on your own. But the outcomes in medicine are rarely certain. Sooner or…
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If it was once possible to claim (as Cyril Connolly sneeringly did) that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of bad art than the pram in the hall’, what does that make your iPhone? It’s easy to think of ways in which it—and the apps you’ve downloaded—make it harder to write than ever, what with the incessant temptation to doomscroll (thank you, 2021) and the ever-present lure of a quick endorphin hit from a Like or a Retweet. At a slightly more serious level, any major sea-change in the way we all communicate also compels contemporary writers to think carefully about the way we tell stories—and about the kinds of stories that we choose to tell. This can happen in subtle ways …
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I was reading a great interview on CrimeReads.com the other day—Paraic O’Donnell talking to Lee Child, genius author of the Jack Reacher novels—and they has this wonderful debate about the unreality of fiction. When I say it out loud, it sounds obvious, but it came up twice. And Lee said: ‘The only two real people in the transaction are the author and the reader.’ It’s absolutely true. Even if I put the Queen of England in the heart of my action—like in the ‘The Crown’ on TV—it isn’t actually her. It’s a fictional appearance by a ghost of a real person. If I put the 16th century Catherine de’ Medici on the page, a woman who history pretty much assures us was an embodimen…
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What is it about trains? What is it about them that fires the imagination, that suggests to those of a certain disposition the possibility of danger lurking behind every seat and in every carriage? There is, undoubtedly, something in the collective experience of a journey that lends itself to storytelling, and then of course the tantalizing proximity to strangers of every stripe. The chance meeting, whether fleeting or prolonged, the accidental brush of hands as the train hurtles around a sharp bend, a casual conversation in the bar car taking an unexpected turn. In a letter she wrote to her friend Marc Brandel in 1985, Patricia Highsmith confessed to thrilling to the id…
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I think it’s safe to say that becoming an expert in Shakespeare’s plays presents difficulties. What would “expertise” entail? Does you need to know every consistency and inconsistency in all the versions of every play cobbled together in the First Folios (pluralized because all the extant versions are also slightly different)? What about wordplay rooted in local pronunciation of the era, which sounded a little like current English in areas of Ireland or England’s West Country? Should you know the etymology of every single word—if Shakespeare didn’t allegedly coin it—and everything that word alluded to at the historical moment in which each play was written, a date that’s …
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“More diversity? No. Enough already. Just let me write my book about a dude in a hat shooting another dude in a hat.” I can already hear the screaming, and it sounds like a painter asking to have colors removed from their palette. Fine, do charcoal if that’s what hikes your kilt, but no whining if you discover you’re writing boring books. “Roll it back, what is this ‘neurodiversity’ you want me to sign onto?” Okay, I’ll pretend you don’t have Google. In 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer came up with the term as a new way to look at what had once been seen as neurodevelopmental disorders. Instead of pathology, she saw diversity in the way brains work, and that it…
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For the lonely and longing, nothing is as sweet as the dream of a stranger who comes to the rescue and makes everything all right. Perhaps that is why otherwise sensible people open their heart, souls—and wallets—to perfect strangers online, hoping it will lead to a better tomorrow. Before the dawn of the internet, it was the newspapers that connected people through personal ads, a practice that started to flourish at the height of the 19th century. The result might be disappointing, however, as not all placing personal ads are honest—and some are even dangerous. For a serial killer, finding adequate victims can be challenge. Ideally, the victim is a stranger that cannot…
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The third lake felt inhabited. Or like it once was. Or maybe it was just that whoever used the service drive came here often enough to leave some energy behind. “Deliverance,” Amelia said. But that was silly. They weren’t in the backwoods of Tennessee. And besides, that’s what everybody said when they were in a canoe and felt a little weird about their surroundings. There shoreline was crowded with tall pines that rose from dark-green shrubs. The water was murky, as if the mud from the lake floor had come up to see who had cleared the tunnel. “I can’t believe my uncle never told me about this,” James said. But Amelia thought she understood. Given the grandeur and bea…
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The Boston public school system is a mystery to me. I grew up in a small community. One elementary school, one middle school, one regional high school. You stood at a corner, the bus came and took you where you needed to go with the rest of the neighborhood kids. Boston, on the other hand . . . Public schools, charter schools, international schools. Forget local geography, such as Mattapan. From what I read, a high schooler could attend any public school in the city of Boston, using some crazy application process that probably made engaged parents want to shoot themselves and disengaged parents . . . well, that much more disengaged. Given such madness, high schoolers di…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Trial (Minotaur) “Inspired by the larger-than-life Mitford family and a real-life murder, Fellowes delivers a ripping-good read.” –Booklist Allie Reynolds, Shiver (Putnam) “Deep in the breathtaking winter bleakness of the French Alps, revenge—and perhaps even murder—is most definitely afoot…This suspenseful debut thriller by a former freestyle snowboarder contains both style and substance.” –Kirkus Reviews Lisa Gardner, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “Fans of this incredible author, police procedurals, timely immigrant stories, strong determin…
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Patricia Highsmith first met Kathryn Hamill Cohen at a party hosted by Rosalind Constable in New York. Kathryn, an ex-Ziegfeld girl, was twenty-four, beautiful and from a moneyed family. Her husband, Dennis, founded the Cresset Press (later an imprint of Bantam Books) which would eventually publish UK editions of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Kathryn had an impressive professional life of her own. Following her early years as an actress, she read medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge, and, before being employed as a hospital physician, she worked as a personal assistant to Aneurin Bevan, the British Minister of Health who was instru…
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Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841. A gruesome double-murder has taken place in a home along the Rue Morgue (a fictional street in Paris). Several witnesses heard several voices, but no one can agree on what language one of the speakers may have been using. Several clues linger about, each more baffling than the next. The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading…
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When Allison tells people she is a forensic scientist, “they don’t really understand. Everyone’s watched CSI, and they think they know every- thing about it. I try to tell them it is not as glamorous, and it doesn’t happen in fifteen minutes. Because a lot of people have the misconception that a crime occurs, and within two days they find the suspects and within a week and a half they are convicted and in jail. And it just doesn’t happen that quickly or easily.” Contrary to the popular image, forensic science is not a glamorous job. Despite the crimes involved, the work resembles that of bench scientists or laboratory technicians. When dusting the whorls of a finger- p…
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Many years ago, as a freestyle snowboarder competing at halfpipe, I spent five winters in the mountains of France, Switzerland, Austria and Canada. I was obsessed with the icy white world at the top of a mountain and always dreamt of setting a novel there. Beautiful yet deadly, with their cliffs, crevasses and avalanches, the high mountains seemed a perfect setting for a thriller. Year later, as I sat down to try to write one, a news headline caught my eye. Climbers in Saas Fee, Switzerland, had spotted a hand and two shoes protruding from a glacier. Rescue teams were called in and uncovered the body of a man who’d gone missing thirty years earlier. This sort of grues…
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While the site of the infamous Borden murders has long been available to visit for those interested in the darker side of Americana, it’s now up for sale with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own one of the most well-known murder scenes in history (We assume the blood’s been cleaned up since). Lizzie Borden’s sensational trial and never-determined culpability will live on the American imagination no matter what physical artifacts remain of her life, but it’s always nice to know that historic structures are getting preserved. According to the house’s listing, “This is an unbelivable[sic] opportunity to own and operate one of New England’s top tourist attractions. Enter…
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Because we were all stuck inside for most of last year, it feels easy to suggest that television took on new meaning for us—most simply, as something to actually do (inside). I don’t know, though, if this is especially different from how television normally functions for many of us; we have always looked forward to episodes, counted down until premieres, and we certainly have been binge-watching whole-series for years. But, yes, in 2020, television may have felt more soothing to many of us, for breaking the pervasive monotony or calming our nerves or distracting us. Or informing us! This year, we watched strange-community-fostering shows like Tiger King, and streaming-se…
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“‘I have never liked fog,’ said Miss Marple.” ——At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie The history of mysteries and detective fiction includes several instances of authors and characters falling victim to dementia. If the intersection of detective fiction and dementia is so striking, it’s because they’re like a matched set of mirror opposites. This essay looks at four examples. In the classic sense, a mystery begins with a puzzle or number of unexplained circumstances. Typically, at the outset, someone is killed. The killer and the motive for the murder are unknown, and the circumstances for the crime are shrouded in mystery. As the story unfolds, a detective sorts t…
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As we enter the second year of the pandemic, we’re launching a new monthly column to bring awareness to the great titles you might have missed the first time around. These new-in-paperback titles are some of the most exciting mysteries and crime novels around—plus, they won’t break the bank! Gytha Lodge, Watching from the Dark, Random House Trade (1/5) “Readers will enjoy the fast pace, red herrings, and intriguing characters in this British police procedural–slash-psychological thriller.”—Booklist Hank Phillippi Ryan, The First To Lie, Forge (1/5) “A taut, propulsive plot with twists that will take your breath away…book clubs will gobble up The First to Lie.” —Sa…
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Novels are a very macro endeavor packed with micro details. They’re the literary version of those slightly spooky yet somehow charming matryoshka nesting dolls. Plot, setting, and characters: they’re equally crucial elements that must all be individually successful, then join in a perfect confluence in order to tell a compelling story. The sum is always greater than its parts. I call this notion many things: the Holy Trinity, the Golden Triangle, the Magic of Three. A Sisyphian task? Sure, but what isn’t in life? And the longer you’ve been doing anything, the more instinctively things come together in just the right way. Part of the fun is pushing that boulder up the hil…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
