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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The late 1980’s TV series, Moonlighting, starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis has become notorious for more than its detective duo’s crime solving. Viewers loved the witty banter and the romantic tension between former model Maddie Hayes and private detective David Addison, but once the couple finally consummated their relationship, they—and the series—lost their spark. Romance novels usually end with “happily ever after,” too. It’s assumed that readers only care about the courtship, and not about the challenges faced by a couple navigating commitment and/or marriage. But are crime novels subject to the same rules? Series novels give authors the perfect opportunity …
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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…
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I have spent most of my professional career in Silicon Valley. In my 25 years in tech, I’ve worked at everything from a two-person, seed-stage start-up, to a 40,000-employee, publicly-traded company. Mostly, I’ve worked at companies somewhere in-between those extremes—venture-backed tech start-ups that have raised millions of dollars in financing but are still private companies. The reality of these private, venture-backed companies is they operate largely without oversight. Most of the time, this is fine. Certainly, the companies I have worked for have all been managed ethically and legally—with the notable exception of MCI, which had the misfortune of being acquired b…
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When elegant Nora Charles, trailing her dog Asta, trips and sends herself and her bundle of Christmas gifts sprawling to the speakeasy floor in a perfect stroke of comedic timing, The Thin Man shifts from a movie with all the hallmarks of a hard-boiled detective drama to something a bit more frothy and fun. Murder is still at the heart of the story. But with the addition of the glamourous leading lady, a cute wire-haired terrier, witty banter between Nora and her retired-detective husband Nick, and cocktails… lots of cocktails… the 1934 film becomes, dare I say it, almost cozy. I was struck during a recent re-watching of the classic film by how much it blends elements of…
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In his eulogy of Caroline Blackwood, Jonathan Raban wrote that more than any optimist he’d ever known, “Caroline the pessimist made the world a happier place to be in because she could make mocking music of its terrors”. Indeed, her books are concise, mordant essays on evil. Similar in a way to Patricia Highsmith’s, but Blackwood has never garnered quite the same attention. Now that I’m familiar with her work, this bewilders me. Why isn’t Caroline Blackwood—rather than being obscurely referenced by Paul Thomas Anderson in an interview once—a household name, right up there with Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and all the authors Stephen King thanks for “building his…
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When I was looking for the perfect setting for the Tea by the Sea series, I didn’t have to think very hard. Cape Cod was the natural choice. In any sort of mystery novel series you need a fairly constant turnover of people. Victim, villain, numerous suspects, all popping up and being mysterious. Popular tourist locations provide that turnover, giving the author a completely different set of people, motives, red herrings and all the rest for each book in the series. To take advantage of a tourist location, it helps if the amateur sleuth is in the tourist business in some way. My protagonist’s grandmother owns a B&B on Cape Cod Bay. Good variety of guests there. My…
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I stood there like a waiter left hoping for a tip. “I was actually hoping to speak to you a minute, Mr. Danby.” He was slow to turn. “’Bout what?” “I’m looking for work.” “Ain’t got any, pal. Sorry.” “You sure? I’m probably better than any guy you got right now.” “A steam tramper from Duluth? Shit, pal, you probably ain’t better than my sister.” The giant that came in with Danby slapped the table so hard the bottles jumped and clinked. The kid had spittle running down his chin. I waited until they were done laughing and said, “I don’t know your sister, Mr. Danby, so I can’t comment on that. When I said I was probably better than any man you got, I was looking at wh…
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I am not known as a young adult author, but I have published two novels about an adolescent character. Travis Hollister is, in the first book, 12 years old, and in the second, nineteen. The novels, Sweet Dream Baby and Night Letter, are really one story, or the stories of two years in Travis’s life, with a gap of six years separating them. My subject here is voice, which is distinct, I believe from style. Style is a grammarian’s notion. Voice is a writer’s concern. Voice is the sound of a human being speaking, and it’s a performance that can include, I believe, the sound of a character’s thoughts. In my teaching, I have used the term, “voicey,” to describe novels, us…
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Cara Black and Tara Moss have some of the best-dressed characters in crime fiction around, so we thought it would be fun to set them up in conversation together to discuss the art of dressing for a life in crime. Their conversation was just as wonderful as we expected, and below you’ll find a wide-ranging discussion on everything from the Little Black Dress to what to wear while in hot pursuit. Cara Black’s latest Aimee Leduc mystery, Murder at the Porte de Versailles, was released by Soho Press on March 15th; Tara Moss’ latest, The Ghosts of Paris, releases today from Dutton Books. Thanks to Cara Black and Tara Moss for participating in this conversation and providing us…
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On January 21, 1958 in Belmont, Nebraska, 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather shot and killed 14- year-old Caril Ann Fugate’s mother and stepfather, and stabbed and beat her two-year-old baby sister to death. In the eight days that followed, seven more people would die along the route of Starkweather and Fugate’s sex-fueled teenage crime spree, including two fellow teenagers—Robert Jensen and Carol King—whose murders would eventually land Charlie on death row, and Caril in a Nebraska penitentiary for life. It looked like a 1950s version of Bonnie and Clyde: two young criminals on the run, fed up with the straight and narrow of school and small town jobs, looking to ride int…
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When I was in high school, a friend invited me for Sunday services at the church where her father was pastor. There was much that intrigued me (including the fact that her mother had been “saved” in this church—and could never again wear pants). It didn’t occur to me to ask what religion they belonged to—I jumped at the chance to visit a place I’d secretly come to associate with belonging and authenticity. You couldn’t really be Black in my all-Black Long Island neighborhood unless you went to church—period. My block formed the north side of a cul-de-sac loop, where the houses were green and evenly-shingled and pleasant; on the south side, the homes seemed shabby and unmo…
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I began hosting my podcast Making It Up because I’m fascinated with the origin stories of other writers. In planning my show, I knew I didn’t want to interview authors and simply ask the standard stock questions. Rather, I wanted to have free-flowing conversations and hear about the experiences of other writers on their own terms. I would prepare no questions (which, okay, is more lazy than strategy). My goal was to treat each guest like I just met them at cocktail party, pulled them into a corner, and listened to them with all my focus, asking questions only as a reaction to what they were saying. Fifty-plus conversations later, this strategy is working well. I’ve had d…
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The term Cascadia conjures images of thick green forests, lush ferns that could swallow a small car, creeping pea-soup fog, windswept bluffs with crashing ocean waves far below, and buckets upon buckets of rain. Those forest are filled with wild animals, some of them of the folklore variety. But the bioregion of Cascadia is so much more than rain-soaked coastlines, extending from southern Alaska to San Francisco, then expanding east to claim all of Washington, and most of British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, and even a bit of Montana. There’s some rolling farmland and high mountain terrain thrown in for good measure. It’s a diverse region where the flora and fauna make it a l…
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Despite a backdrop of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions threatening travel plans to Iceland, I was able to catch up with Louise Penny, author of the popular Three Pines traditional mysteries starring Inspector Gamache. We talked over breakfast at the Hotel Saga in Reykjavik one Saturday morning during November’s Iceland Noir conference. Given the conference line-up, it felt right that nature would go out of its way to greet the stars. How often will you find Richard Armitage, Dan Brown, Neil Gaiman, Lisa Jewell, C.J. Tudor, and Irvine Welsh all sharing the same space, along with many fine authors working a range of genres*. But there’s more: The day before we met Loui…
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It was the summer I left rehab. I was officially six weeks “clean” of alcohol and was taking my first baby steps back into the real world, when I looked down at my phone to see 11 missed calls. My heart sank. The number listed was an ex-addict from my former rehab—a brilliant young doctor named Liz* who had checked in for alcohol and cocaine addiction. This couldn’t be good. Dread pooling in my stomach, I called her back. She answered on the first ring. “I’ve relapsed,” Liz sobbed. “I’m devastated.” I listened sympathetically, as she outlined her shame and despair. In a society where children are taught to pass or fail, Liz’s take-home was clear. She had failed at recov…
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The appeal of loss-of-innocence narratives lies, I think, in the way they invite us to experience a character’s seismic changes as they unfold—and in the way they can call up in vivid detail our own pasts. I suspect it was inevitable I would write a novel like Pet, that takes as its jumping-off point a deeply charismatic, glamorous woman who taught at my Catholic school. Every girl in my class wanted to be her, and every girl wanted to be her pet. This larger-than-life figure stayed with me for decades, and my memories of the intensity of our feelings around her sparked my story of manipulation and betrayal narrated by 12-year-old Justine. Child narrators can be tricky t…
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There’s a lot of Irish female crime-writers. Liz Nugent, Jane Casey, Andrea Mara, Andrea Carter, Amanda Cassidy, Catherine Kirwan, Sam Blake—to name just half of the Irish crew who assembled in a town in the north of England last month for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival or ‘Harrogate’ to its friends. We met at the entrance to the Old Swan Hotel, festival HQ and the spot where Agatha Christie hid out for eleven days back in 1926, to take a group photo. I count fourteen faces in it, but that wasn’t even all the Irish female crime-writers at that particular festival, let alone sitting on the bookshelves today. Ireland is a country of five million people,…
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I have a recurring dream of dark spaces. I’m in a large house, always with a different layout. My journey through the rooms invariably brings me to a cave-like basement that seems never to end—a warren of small chambers full of jumbled objects, each space more sinister than the last. I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that caves, basements, and crawl spaces are our ways of visualizing the dark places within our own minds. That’s why they’re perennially popular settings for fiction genres in which everything hinges on the revelation of terrible secrets. Basement dungeons are, of course, a mainstay of serial killer tales. But even when nobody gets locked up in the da…
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If you’re a mother, you’ve probably been called a ‘superhero’ at one time or another. The analogy is much used, and for good reason. According to the dictionary, a superhero is ‘one who possesses abilities beyond ordinary people, and uses them to protect human life’—and what are mums if not that? As far as superpowers go, we may not be fending off laser beam attacks or other such unrealistic feats but, hello, we grow people inside our bodies. We push them out in a tumble of arms and legs and tiny fingernails, and our breasts become food. We endure the kind of sleep-deprivation often favoured by expert interrogators, and operate for years in a constant state of hypervigil…
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Where were you in the spring of 1987? What were you up to? If you were Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Susan Dunlap, Betty Francis, Sara Paretsky, Charlotte MacLeod, Kate Mattes, and Nancy Pickard, you were at Sandra Scoppettone’s place, plotting the creation of Sisters in Crime, with a founding commitment to “helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction.” Why plotting, you ask? I’m being facetious. While it’s obvious now to our 21st-century sensibilities that parity, at a minimum, in any professional space is vital, the creation of Sisters in Crime was met at the time with acrimony in some quarters—not to mention derision, denigration, and denial. Plotting was t…
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When Michael Mann’s “Heat” was released in 1995, it was immediately lauded as a masterpiece of the heist genre. The cat-and-mouse game between master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and manic detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) had a novelistic sweep, encompassing not only cops and robbers but also their families. In the succeeding quarter-century, its reputation has only grown, with numerous crime films attempting to mimic its complex heists and novelistic sweep. But have any of those succeeded in matching the original? Let’s look at four that come pretty close. “The Town” (2010) “The Town,” Ben Affleck’s Boston-set crime epic, isn’t quite a beat-for-beat rema…
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When people speak of women’s power, they tend to think of three things. Political influence. Financial clout. And of course, sexual power. Three things that have one thing in common: these things generally serve a capitalist patriarchy, in which – with a few exceptions – a woman’s value is closely tied to her desirability. In fiction, women characters tend to follow a similar trend. Young women still dominate in almost every genre; and although we expect more independence and drive from our fictional heroines than we once did, most protagonists are young, while older women occupy secondary, often domestic roles. Older women are mothers, grandmothers, their power passed o…
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Recently I came across a message on a Facebook Book Club, of which I’m a member, that read, “Hi bookworms, I am looking for thrillers/mysteries with likeable protagonists. Although I love this genre, I feel there is lots of books where characters are just unpleasant human beings. In lots of cases, I cannot empathize with them.” I followed the thread with great interest. I was intrigued—and, I will admit it, somewhat surprised—by the number of other people who commented that they too struggled to empathize with various killers, extortionists and sexual predators. They commented, in the same posts that they felt that in thrillers where they disliked characters they found th…
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The great artist Charles Addams, whose masterful cartoons and illustrations bedeviled the pages of The New Yorker from 1932 to 1988, drew two movie title sequences in his lifetime. He, the creator of the characters known as “the Addams Family” and a known master of the lighthearted-macabre, was tapped to provide illustrations for the opening to the 1963 horror-comedy The Old Dark House (which was a remake of the 1932 James Whale film The Old Dark House). More than a decade later, in 1976, he was recruited to illustrate a title sequence for the film Murder by Death. This sequence was being designed by Wayne Fitzgerald, one of the twentieth-century’s greatest and most prol…
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Charles Manson’s Body, Or, How I Ended Up Paying For the Notorious Cult Leader’s Funeral
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When I was 29 years old, I pushed Charles Manson’s corpse into an incinerator. There’s something mean about cremation, to make a body completely useless. “Ashes to ashes” is just a metaphor for the quantum universe, not a recipe. We aren’t really made of stardust. Manson once said, “Sanity is a small box; insanity is everything.” Maybe funneling his ashes into a little carton would somehow restore sanity to the world. * He died in November, the month of gratitude. In 2017, Charles Milles Manson, or “Charlie,” expired in Bakersfield’s Mercy Hospital after eighty-three years on Earth. He had been transferred there from the California state prison in Corcoran, where he …
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