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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I’ll start with the basics: Craig Rice was a woman, and her name wasn’t exactly a nom de plume. Shortly after Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig was born, her artist parents absconded to Europe, leaving her in the care of her paternal aunt (or half-aunt). The aunt, whose married name was Rice, adopted her niece, tacking on yet another name. The future comedic crime author eventually boiled her moniker down to two of its shorter parts, a wise edit for book-signings. All this happened a long time ago. Rice was born in 1908. Her first novel, Eight Faces at Three—this one—was published in 1939. She’s been dead for more than sixty years. As I’ve wrangled with what my job is here…
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When it comes to pinning down the first scream queen, most genre fans can easily find their way to Fay Wray, whose shriek was immortalized in 1933’s King Kong. More dedicated film buffs might go back even further to silent movie stars such as Greta Schröder (Nosferatu; The Golem: How He Came into the World) and Mary Philbin (The Phantom of the Opera; The Man Who Laughs). While all these women left indelible marks on cinema, singling any of them out as the first scream queen makes two assumptions: that the archetype was birthed on celluloid, and that she belongs exclusively to the horror genre. In fact, the woman who can most credibly lay claim to the title was a stage ac…
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Every writer inevitably gets asked where their ideas come from. And every writer has stared into the abyss of the blank computer screen or the empty notebook and wondered in the cold grip of panic—What on earth can I write about this time? And it would be easy—oh so easy—to say, I know! I’m going to write a book about a writer writing a book. After all, I don’t really know about much else. And I spend most of my life thinking about and then actually writing books. I’ve dealt with this issue myself. My newest book, Kill All Your Darlings, is about a writer who has written—okay, actually stolen—a thriller about a murder that turns out to be frighteningly true. And the pu…
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Sometimes the world says, You love this. I’m going to take it away from you. That cruelty can prove a source of inspiration. In September 2004 I moved to Barcelona with my wife and daughter. We lived in an area called Sarrià. Once a village, it was swallowed up by the city when the city expanded in the 1920s, but the streets and buildings date from long before. We rented an eighteenth-century stone house that was actually two small houses, joined together by a covered walkway and a tiled courtyard. It started life as a match factory. There was a ghost—a young girl in a white dress, like a wisp of smoke. I never saw her, though my wife and daughter did. I heard her once,…
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“L’affaire Flactif,” as it is known in France—the Flactif case—was one of the most terrifying murders that France has ever seen. Firstly, because two adults and three children (ages 6, 9, and 10) were literally massacred; secondly, because the motive, which seemed to be rather ridiculous, was in fact extremely complex. If we stuck only to the facts reported by the police and the media, we might believe that David Hotyat murdered an entire five-person family for the sake of a chalet and a few knickknacks (a camera, telephone, DVD, etc.). We would think that it was a murder committed out of jealousy. But here is the rest of the story. Born in northern France to a blue-col…
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Named after an influential psychiatrist who helped bring about the desegregation of Maryland’s psychiatric hospitals, the Clifton Perkins Hospital Center—usually known simply as Perkins—has beds for 350 patients and is usually at capacity. Some of the hospital’s patients have committed serious felonies and are being held for competency evaluations, to see if they have the capacity to stand trial, and some are inmates who’ve been sent to Perkins from prisons or other psychiatric facilities in Maryland because their behavior has been violent or aggressive and they meet the criteria for involuntary commitment. Most, however, have been found incompetent to stand trial or have…
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I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. Dust floated in the beam of the headlights as the car rocked back into park. Riding shotgun, my friend Jaimie peered into the dark woods that surrounded us, confused as to why we were stopping. “This is going to be weird,” I said, “but I promise I’ll explain everything when I’m done.” The phone vibrated in my hand. “I have to take this call.” With a shaking finger, I picked-up. *** It’s hard to keep going after 41 agent rejections. It’s hard to keep going when the people you’re putting your work in front of can’t even be bothered to send a proper rejection. I say that with all due respect to the agents who rejected m…
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Agatha Christie had an astonishing talent for writing detective novels. Her short story And Then There Was None is the world’s best-selling mystery. With over 100 million copies sold, Publications International lists the novel as the world’s sixth best-selling title of all time. But writing aside she was also one of the most adventurous women of her age—and she found her passion for surfing every bit as fervent as her enthusiasm for entrancing murder plots. In the summer of 1924, she and her husband Archie had taken a side trip from their planned round-the-world sailing route specifically to try the surf in Hawaii. This was the leg of their voyage they had been most exci…
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In 1893, Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, visited the Chicago World’s Fair and advocated for the closing of one exhibition: the “danse du ventre”—the belly dance. (Excerpted from Amy Sohn’s The Man Who Hated Women.) ___________________________________ By the time Ida Craddock traveled to the World’s Fair, there was plenty of sex information for progressive, curious young people. The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which coined the terms sadism and masochism, had been translated into English a year earlier. In 1894, Havelock Ellis, an English psycho…
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The “coming-of-age” novel is its own multiverse of stories, spanning genres from fantasy to romance to adventure. Varied though these novels may be, they are generally underpinned by the universal themes of self-discovery and a fall from grace. The difficulty of finding your way into a rigid society is always in the ether too, authority of one kind or another looms large and a protagonist will either succumb to the tight space of adulthood that is on offer, or find a way out. The “coming-of-age” novels that have elements of mystery or the supernatural are my personal favorites. They are like fairy tales for grown-ups where the notion of the end of innocence is taken to e…
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I’m going to warn you right now. If you’re Stephen Miller or someone who agrees with that kind of hardline, nativist bullshit, you’re going to hate this piece and all the movies on my list, as they’re all empathetic to the immigrants they portray. Like the best war movies tend to be anti-war movies, the best immigration movies are usually critical of the treatment of those people that are desperate to better their situation. Always remember that when powerful people are trying to convince you that powerless people are the threat, they’re lying to you. There’s going to be someone out there saying to themselves, “Aren’t all movies about unauthorized immigrants crime fil…
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I’m a crime writer. And that means, like most crime writers, I frequently write about murder, and murderers. But only once (well—only once, knowingly) have I encountered a killer in real life. His name is Ian Huntley, and on the 4th of August 2002 he murdered two 10-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in the English village of Soham, Cambridgeshire. At the time I was a news reporter, sent to cover the story of two missing children for the morning news show I worked on, and I interviewed Huntley, caretaker at the local secondary school, live on the programme on Friday the 16th of August. It wasn’t just me he talked to; he’d participated in numerous press inter…
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Mount Elbrus, 21 August 1942 The joint twenty-three-man team rose early, an hour before dawn. These were elite mountain troops, some from the First Mountain Division, the rest from the Fourth. Led by Hauptmann Heinz Groth and Hauptmann Max Gammerler, both veterans of countless alpine ascents, they brewed coffee, struck camp and set off for the last steep kilometres that would take them to the summit of the highest peak in Europe. With them, they carried the Reich War Flag, as well as a pair of divisional standards. Both Gammerler and Groth knew that the rest of Army Group ‘A’ were doing less well below them, moving at snail’s pace through the mountains, plodding south t…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (Flatiron) “Razorblade Tears is superb. No doubt, S. A. Cosby is not only the future of crime fiction but of any fiction where the words are strong, the characters are strong and the story has a resonance that cuts right to the heart of the most important questions of our times.” Michael Connelly T.J. Newman, Falling (Avid Reader / Simon & Schuster) “One of the year’s best thrillers . . . This novel is like the films Die Hard and Speed on steroids . . . Newman keeps up an extreme pace from the first page.” Library Journal Tess Gerritse…
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Like many people watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on September 27, 2018, I found myself crying at her description of the assault she had experienced and the psychological aftermath—what she called the sequelae—of that attack. Many women reported reliving their own traumatic experiences as they listened to Dr. Ford. I am fortunate enough not to have experienced sexual assault or rape; the person I cried for as I heard Dr. Ford describe the claustrophobia, panic attacks, and anxiety that she experienced for years was my mother. My mother slept with the light on her entire life. She shook when I took her to the doctor and had such bad claustrophobia that she n…
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I’ve been reading thrillers and mysteries for as long as I can remember. I’ve made a list of books that have stayed with me, and they’re roughly in the order I read them. These novels not only entertained me, they taught me how to write. I didn’t know that at the time, at least not consciously, but now I can look back and say these are all books that influenced my style, plot, and the dark humor I love so much. The Partner by John Grisham I’ve read a number of Grisham books, but this is the one I’ve reread countless times. Patrick is a lawyer who has stolen a lot of money from a client and now lives in hiding in South America. At the beginning of the book, he’s found.…
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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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Books adapted from movies don’t have a sterling reputation. They’re often viewed as slapdash cash-grabs by writers-for-hire, despite some notable examples to the contrary—for example, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (written concurrently with the screenplay) and Alan Dean Foster’s “Alien.” Now Quentin Tarantino is providing his own twist on this odd genre with the novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the 2019 movie he wrote and directed. The story follows fading Western-movie star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and his stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, drinking and talking and lur…
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If du Maurier re-invigorated the Gothic house with modern passion and intrigue, Agatha Christie turned it into something of a three-dimensional game-board in which to reconfigure characters and objects to act out the varied plots of her seventy-six novels, 158 short stories and fifteen plays. Not all of these took place in large old English mansions; her settings evolved over time to include modern houses and apartments, as well as trains, pleasure boats and archaeological encampments. She became the bestselling author of all time, and her characters emerged from the page onto stage, television and film. But it is for popularizing the ‘murder mystery’ set in a specific pl…
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In 1950, George Blake, a British MI6 agent, was taken prisoner by the North Korean army. By the time he was returned to Britain, three years later, he had been converted to the Soviet cause and was acting as a KGB double agent. He was caught in 1961 and sentenced to forty two years in prison. He was serving his time in Wormwood Scrubs prison, in London, in 1966, when he decided to escape. ___________________________________ All this time Blake had been waiting anxiously inside the prison wall for Bourke to throw him the ladder. As time passed he began to give up hope. He claims to have waited ‘a whole hour, which turned into an eternity’. He later recalled thinking: ‘N…
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I stood there dumbstruck. A sadsack clutching his parka and briefcase—empty except for a half-eaten bag of Twizzlers—and stepped backward to allow those dismissed from the jury pool to flow past as they’d just been allowed to return to their regularly scheduled lives. Had the bailiff really called my name? But I’d done everything correctly. I’d laid it on thick as syrup when the lawyers quizzed me. Though not an attorney myself, my father is one, taught real estate law for decades and had been dean at a prestigious law school. My wife, an executive at a healthcare organization, was also an attorney. And I’d spent a dozen years at a litigation-support company creating da…
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The moment Noel Moore stepped through the front door and put his bags down, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. It was a couple of hours past midnight, so the house was supposed to be quiet, but on top of that stillness was an unease that told him things were not as he’d left them. The bottom floor was a maze of interconnecting rooms full of furniture and fixtures that his wife, Mindy, had picked out with their interior designer. He stepped around overstuffed couches and wingback chairs as he wove through the formal living room, then the dining room, the family room, and the kitchen. Nothing seemed out of place in the darkness. Everything appeared as it should ha…
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When I was growing up on Long Island in the seventies, New York City loomed in the distance as a large and dangerous place. The city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, the subway cars were covered in graffiti, and the local papers teemed with headlines about the explosion in urban crime. Rape, robbery, murder—all were at an all-time high, and the Son of Sam stalked the streets, shooting couples in the dark. The NYPD even released a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” with a drawing of the grim reaper on the cover, complete with helpful tips like “Stay off the streets after 6 p.m.” and “Avoid public transportatio…
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“Then he began speaking about himself, and already, to Smiley’s eye, he seemed quite visibly to be shrinking to something quite small and mean. He was touched to hear that Ionescu had recently promised us a play in which the hero kept silent and everyone round him spoke incessantly. When the psychologists and fashionable historians came to write their apologias for him, he hoped they would remember that that was how he saw himself.” —Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré “So how did you get the idea?” asked all eight billion human beings on Earth (or what felt like it) when I let slip that I have a book coming out. Not complaining, of course, it’s nice when a sp…
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In the Unlikeable Female Characters podcast, feminist thriller writers Kristen Lepionka, Layne Fargo, and Wendy Heard talk about female characters who don’t give a damn if you like them. This week, Layne interviews debut novelist (and her former Pitch Wars mentee!) Heather Levy about sex, drugs, chronic pain, and her gorgeously dark psychological thriller Walking Through Needles (out now from Polis Books). From the episode: HEATHER: I wish I could enjoy less-dark things. But I just don’t. LAYNE: Yeah, sometimes I feel like I need a break from it. I read a lot of romance novels and lighter things in my free time. But when it comes to writing, I’ll have these ideas, an…
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