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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America wasn’t even three months into Ronald Reagan’s first term when Cutter’s Way came out, but no film of the following decade would provide so indelible a metaphor for the nation’s callous transition from post-Watergate, post-Vietnam angst to the cartoonish nostalgia of Morning in America as when the movie’s eponymous hero, Alexander Cutter (John Heard)—a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed casualty of our deadly misadventure in Southeast Asia—drunkenly unloads his pistol into a smiling stuffed animal floating in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Released in March of 1981, Cutter’s Way (originally titled Cutter and Bone, after the Newton Thornburg novel of five years prio…
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Damascus – capital of Syria and the oldest continuous capital city in the world. The ‘City of Jasmine’ is of course sadly bomb damaged and war-torn these days, its two million population in dire straits and so many forced to flee as refugees. But still, the city has a long history from the third millennium BC and not least, a lot more recently, as a plaything of competing Empires with the French and British vying for control. Fertile ground for some good crime writing. Damascus is also a major cultural centre of the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. The master of the pre-war accidental spy genre Eric Ambler wrote The Levanter in 1971. It deals with mach…
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Affairs are perhaps the original literary trope. You can go all the way back to the oldest surviving piece of English literature, Beowulf—or you could go even farther back to the Bible—and you’ll find an affair or two…or thirty-five. Sure, this is a case of art imitating life; people do have affairs. However, I doubt they think about the why of it very much. This is where good literature comes in. They are a great plot device, too, as, generally, affairs don’t end well for the characters involved (anyone remember Fatal Attraction?). Throw an affair into any story, especially in the crime genre, and murders are likely to happen. A lot of time we only learn about them as re…
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It’s no accident that Los Angeles is the ultimate home for unmoored detectives—even on a good day, the Big Orange is a noir maze of jungle U-turns, glamor facades, and keen disconnection. The place also just happens to be the unofficial hurricane eye of the record biz, and it played a central role in the development of 20th century pop every step of the way…from the crackling exuberance of the studio musicals to the bop sweat of Central Ave, Hermosa’s cool jazz scene, the hot wax AM radio revolution of Capitol Records and Gold Star Studios, the teenybopper invasion of the Sunset Strip, and beyond. That’s why it’s no surprise that some captivating novels have been written…
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Ah, school days! The grassy quads, the tang of autumn in the air, the dying screams of murdered classmates. With atmosphere like that, it’s no wonder campus mysteries have been around since the Golden Age of detective fiction. All the greats took a crack at it—Dorothy Sayers in Gaudy Night, Agatha Christie in Cat Among the Pigeons, Ellery Queen in The Campus Murders—and later innovators like J. S. Borthwick, Pamela Thomas-Graham, and Lev Raphael helped diversify the subgenre. But in 1992, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was the first to break out of the cozy mold, becoming a crossover bestseller and changing the face of the campus thriller forever. A lush, melancholy wh…
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Traditional wisdom says that horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin because they rely on surprise and subversion to evoke a visceral reaction—whether that reaction is the hyena-like laugh of a man witnessing an old woman fall down the stairs or his hyena-like screams as her zombified corpse rises to chase him through the streets. But surprise is nowhere near as crucial to both genres as the marriage of outrage and realism. A good comedy or horror must take an outrageous premise and follow it through to its logical endpoint in a way that feels uncomfortably truthful to the reader (or viewer.) To be truly satisfying, comedy and horror must jettison all the devi…
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You probably know a sociopath. Maybe he’s the neighbor you chat with at the mailboxes who always has a funny story. So what if also takes perverse pleasure in shooting squirrels with his BB gun? Or maybe it’s your ex-girlfriend, who seemed lovely at the start but then sent X-rated photos of you to your boss when you broke up with her. Estimates vary, but current research says approximately 1 in 25 people is a sociopath, meaning your average kindergarten class contains one. Why this happens and what can be done about it is a fascinating, vexing puzzle that has inspired both fact-based research and devilish fiction. The core paradox of a sociopath—someone who appears ordin…
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In Dark Music, a murder investigation pairs unlikely allies in a race to uncover a shadowy international conspiracy. The novel is the latest from David Lagercrantz, the bestselling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Today we reveal the novel’s cover and ask Lagercrantz a few questions about his new endeavor and his continuation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Can you identify a particular moment that sparked the idea for Dark Music? When I published my last Millennium novel, The Girl Who Lived Twice, in 2019, there was another whirlwind of publicity: interviews, TV appearances, filmings, signings, and I seemed to be endlessly repeating myself. So when a jou…
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But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. —Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu On the night of July 27, 1990, Ed Friedland came home from a long day at work to find his wife bound with handcuffs and viciously slain on the dining room floor. The couple’s ten-month-old adopted son, found in the nursery at the rear of the home, was unharmed but distraught after being left unattended for hours. Ed called 911 to report the murder. The police arrived minutes later and dutifully commenced their investigation into this unspeakable crime. Even though Ed had no prior crim…
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Someday, I will write all this down. For now, I prefer it in my head, where it’s mutable and fresh as clay. I prefer to remember this story between one bright moment and the next of an increasingly crowded life. It’s not an old story yet, and I am still figuring out what it means. I used to be an archivist at the Historical Society of Northern California. The society is in the basement of a building on Market Street, a basement whose generous toilet was always on the edge of overflowing, and which had mice but not rats. The rooms were really designed to be storerooms. I had an office, by virtue of my seniority, which was just off the main workroom and fifty feet from the…
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Excerpted From “Mystery Meat: A Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. Adventure” by Kevin J. Anderson: The giant fly was frantic as she buzzed into the offices of Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations. Her long translucent wings vibrated like stained-glass windows made of Saran wrap. She clutched her top two sets of articulated arms in dismay. “My maggots are missing!” she wailed, then accepted a tissue from Sheyenne, our receptionist (and my ghost girlfriend), so she could dab away tears from her multifaceted eyes. I shambled into the front office when I heard the loud buzzing sound, and I could immediately see that this human-sized insect needed our help. As a zombie detective, I’…
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A supertanker in trouble is a singular event. It requires the attention of naval fleets, coast guards, international marine agencies, and governments across the immediate region, as well as in the homelands of its crew. That’s not to mention those with a financial interest: the shipowners, cargo owners, bankers, and insurers backing the voyage, and a diffuse crowd of brokers, lawyers, traders, agents, and investors from London to New York, Dubai, and Singapore. If the Brillante Virtuoso sank to the sandy bottom of the Gulf of Aden, the financial blow would be substantial. Most obviously, a vessel with a nominal value of $55 million would be lost. The $100 million of oil …
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“Raymond Chandler once wrote that a dead man was the best fall guy in the world because he never talked back. I begged to differ.” —Cleo Coyle, The Ghost and the Haunted Portrait Years ago, I read The Ghost of Captain Gregg and Mrs. Muir by R.A. Dick, the pen name for author Josephine Leslie. The book was a bestseller in 1945. Two years later, Hollywood adapted the story into a now-classic film, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, featuring Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, and one of Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores. Two decades later, a new generation discovered the story via a 50-episode television show. The book was wise, the film moving, the TV series entertaining. What influ…
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What’s it like to see your debut novel, Suburban Dicks, come out the same year you turn sixty? Pretty cool. What’s it like to wonder why you waited thirty-five years to write it? Pretty vexing, I’ll admit. But the source of that vexation is complicated. I am a comic book writer. I have written lots of other things, but I am best-known (where I am known at all) and have had my greatest success on that platform. I made my bones in the late `80s through the mid-90s, during a time of tremendous quantitative success and questionable qualitative output. I was party to quite a bit of both of those categories. I came of age in an industry that had just begun to fight back again…
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Somehow, after publishing a dozen and a half historical novels, including two successful Victorian mystery series, I’ve found myself at the age of 54 a thriller writer. Nobody is more surprised by this than I am, I promise you. The truth is, I’m a complete chicken when it comes to thrillers. I like my murders cozy, served up in a poisoned teacup in a tidy country village with a redoubtable English spinster sleuthing out the solution while she knits baby blankets as fluffy as her hair. I like eccentric spinsters and locked rooms with gentle death administered in a toxic teapot or a spoonful of sinister jam. Anything involving blood or gore, and I’m out. At least I was unt…
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THE ALL-AMERICAN RALSTON FAMILY AND THEIR IDEAL SUMMER HOME Photo essay in Life magazine, July 1932 Dr. Phillip Ralston of New York City and his wife, theater star Faye Ralston, have certainly mastered the art of good living. And they have quite a lot of lives in their care! The doctor adopted six of his children in 1915 while working in England during the war. They welcomed their seventh child, Max, four years ago. The doctor and his wife spend most of the year in New York City and the older children board at school. In the summer, they come together in their private paradise in the Thousand Islands region. It is called Ralston Island now, though it was formerly known…
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Like little wreaths of funeral flowers, death crowns mark the passing of a loved one. But death crowns – seen as comforting to some, ominous and otherworldly to others – are not ordered up from a florist shop. Just where death crowns do come from is a mystery, and an unsettling one at that. If you’ve never seen a death crown, or angel crown for the more religiously inclined … well, that tracks. I’ve only ever seen a few and those were behind glass in an exhibit of death and funeral folklore at the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville. There’s no entry for death crowns in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, which at 1,864 pages is the most authoritative source on Appalac…
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If you’ve a bad, bad past It finds you out at last. —From “A Bad, Bad Past” (Lyrics by Clifford Orr) Introduction The practice of “drag” or cross-dressing—i.e., performatively adopting the dress and manners of the opposite sex—is familiar in detective fiction published between the First and Second World Wars, where, with devious and often deadly courses in mind, men may mum as women and women as men. Likewise, at all-male Ivy League universities in the first quarter of the twentieth century, young men decked out in drag commonly performed female roles in college theatricals—albeit strictly for comedic, rather than criminal, purposes. While drag acts, as it were, conti…
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“He’s dead! He’s dead!” Dougie Tennant was squatting on the ground near his petrol pumps, rocking back and forth. Hamish moved to Dougie’s side and folded his lanky frame to kneel on one knee beside his friend. “Calm down now, Dougie. What’s going on here? Who’s dead?” “In the car!” Dougie wailed. “Dead!” “Don’t worry, Dougie.” Hamish stood slowly, patting Dougie on the shoulder. “We’re here now. You’re safe. Everything’s going to be fine.” Hamish looked over at Dorothy, then nodded towards Dougie. She took his place beside the distraught mechanic, speaking slowly and quietly, soothing and calming him. Leaving Dorothy to deal with Dougie, Hamish walked round the back …
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In June of 2022, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law known as The Sullivan Act which made it a felony to carry a concealed weapon without a license. Sullivan, ruled the court, violated the Second Amendment by making it “virtually impossible for most New Yorkers” to possess firearms unless they could demonstrate a specific need to own a gun. Writing the majority opinion for New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas insisted that going forward, gun regulation must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition.” Never mind that the law had been in place for more than a century. The end of Sullivan might not have s…
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Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile comes out today. The film will likely be criticized (what Christie adaptation isn’t, among us die-hard fans?) for deviating from the book (in no universe is Poirot’s mustache meant to look like that.) While I don’t personally believe that a Christie adaptation must be strictly faithful in order to be good, I hope the film’s release will lead people to read the source text, because Death on the Nile is one of her best detective novels. It has a diabolical, ingenious murder, but it is also one of her most heartfelt and emotional books. It is one of Christie’s keenest investigations of psychology and mo…
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Since Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), the brilliantly mustachioed detective has been a mainstay of whodunnit TV and film. It doesn’t take a sleuth to figure out why: Christie wrote Poirot into 33 novels, two plays, and more than 50 short stories, meaning there’s never been a shortage of source material for Hollywood to adapt. Poirot’s latest cinematic case is Death on the Nile, the sequel to 2017’s middling Murder on the Orient Express. Once again helmed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, Death on the Nile mimics many of the same beats of Christie’s 1937 book of the same name, right down to the Karnak, the luxury steamer…
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As D-Day approached, German soldiers, sailors, and airmen who liked to smoke self-rolled cigarettes would have felt themselves most fortunate to pick up a free pack of Efka cigarette papers, with their familiar drawings of palm trees and pyramids, that someone had left behind on a café table or on the seat on a train, or to discover a pack they had completely forgotten about buried deep in the pockets of their greatcoats. But when they opened them, instead of the expected fifty cigarette papers, they found ten tightly folded sheets of thin paper. On opening these sheets, the members of the Wehrmacht found excerpts from a manual titled Krankheit rettet (Illness Saves), aut…
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Debts play a prominent role in crime novels. Someone owes someone else money, and if they don’t pay it back on time…well, you know what happens. A threat. A beating. A body part removed. And then— As readers, we understand the lengths the debtor will go to either avoid the punishment or to make the debt right. Beg, borrow, plead, bargain, steal. We can relate because we’ve all had debts to pay. It’s the American way of life. Hell, the government owes over thirty trillion dollars. That’s more than 91k for each citizen in the country. Not to mention mortgages, car payments, credit cards. Student loans. Yup, I went there. I said it. Student frickin’ loans. Twenty-f…
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March 1976 Josephine Wright could have kissed the ground, she was so glad to arrive back at her house in West Mills, North Carolina. She looked at her watch. It was seven o’clock. She had been on the road from Harlem since eight o’clock that morning. Typically, the drive took only eight hours. And that allowed for congestion on the George Washington Bridge and the bumper-to-bumper traffic one could count on while passing through D.C. But today there had been a bad automobile accident as Jo entered Delaware. She had crept at a snail’s pace for nearly an hour. “Home at last,” Jo said, allowing herself to enjoy the stillness in her car. For a moment, she sat looking at the…
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