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 write a historical fiction series set in World War Two London. My protagonist is a Scotland Yard detective called Frank Merlin. I place great importance on being historically accurate in my books. I take the view that as I am attempting to transport my readers to a very different time and place, accuracy is a key element to doing that successfully. I am very aware that words like ‘atmospheric’ and ‘authentic’ are among the most commonly used in positive reviews of historical fiction. However, it cannot be denied that there are many books, films and plays that are historically inaccurate but still regarded as successful. Why? And does it really matter? In this internet …
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It was a Monday morning in September, on the beach, when it all began. It is called the beach, for want of a better term, even though nobody can swim there on account of the reefs and the tide, nor relax on it because it is made up of rough, sharp volcanic shingle. The Old Woman walked there every day. The Old Woman was the former teacher. Everyone on the island had passed through her class. She knows all the families. She was born here and she will die here. No one has ever seen her smile. They scarcely know her age. Probably not very far off eighty. Five years previously, she had been obliged to give up the class. From then on she took her daily walk early in the morni…
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In early 2020, I began writing a new story—a domestic thriller with one of the most terrifying premises I could imagine: an armed and masked invader who forces his way into a woman’s home and holds her and her two children captive. It’s an idea that didn’t come out of nowhere. I live for much of the year in Atlanta, and this was a scenario I’d seen all too often on the nightly news, one that happened to people I knew, even. It’s a premise that was firmly grounded in my day-to-day reality—which in my mind, made it that much scarier. But as I was writing it, a dystopian reality began brewing outside my four walls. Anytime I turned on the TV, that was where the true terror …
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Over the last ten years or so there’s been a growing recognition that Don Winslow is after something epic with his crime fiction. Take that word, epic, however you like, and it pretty much applies, whether you’re talking about his sweeping indictment of the War on Drugs (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border, among others), his look at corruption and abuse inside the NYPD (The Force), or the old surf noirs (The Dawn Patrol, The Gentleman’s Hour). Now you can add the more classical variation to that list, as Winslow brings out a new novel charting the clashes of New England organized crime in the 1980s and beyond, while mirroring the movements of Greek epic poetry, …
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Don Winslow has written his last novel. That was the unavoidable takeaway from our latest conversation, which came in the weeks before the release of City of Dreams, the second installment in Winslow’s trilogy following the life and times of Providence’s Danny Ryan. The new book, picking up after a bloody gang war, takes Ryan and company west, orbiting around a splashy Hollywood adaptation of their recent exploits. The story follows a structure tied to Greek epic poetry, conveyed through Winslow’s knowing, streetwise prose, all with a relentless sense of momentum powering toward the next tragedy in the sequence. Which brings me back to that first revelation. Winslow is on…
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For more than three decades, Don Winslow has written bestselling novels about everything from the War on Drugs (with his sweeping Border trilogy) to police corruption (“The Force”) to mafia hitmen (“The Winter of Frankie Machine”). Yet even as he produced these books at an astounding rate, his muse kept directing him back to a sweeping epic set among the gangs of New England in the 1980s and 90s. That epic eventually manifested as a trilogy, concluding with the imminent release of “City in Ruins.” When this latest book begins, protagonist Danny Ryan has become a major power player in Las Vegas. He’s a long way from the Rhode Island gang war that powered “City on Fire,” …
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In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by. Cowpoking through Wyoming, working the feedline, as they used to call it, he’d been the Eastfork Strangler. Not because he ever hung his hat in the Eastfork bunkhouse or rode their fences, but because he’d somehow come into possession of one of their 246 branding irons, and had taken the time with each victim to get that brand glowing red, to leave his mark. For that season he’d been propping his dead up behind snow fences, always facing north. It wasn’t a Native American thing—Da…
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The Harlem Detectives arrived like a thunderbolt. Like a meteor screaming across the sky. I had seen detectives before, but nothing compared to this. Or so I felt when I was introduced to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. They make their appearance at the start of chapter 8 of A Rage in Harlem, the 1957 novel that started Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle, conducting their unique brand of “crowd control” at the legendary Savoy Ballroom: “Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line…
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It was a regular day in September. Which is to say it was a regular day within the first few months of the pandemic. I’d been going through a particularly long stretch of no’s. Part of being a TV creator and screenwriter is hearing no. You suffer through hundreds of no’s and you make a living from the occasional yes. At this particular moment in 2020, the no’s were abundant, and not limited to the rejection of screenplays. No, you shouldn’t leave your apartment. No, we don’t know when there will be a vaccine. No, we don’t know where Covid came from. But on this September morning, instead of the usual no’s, I started getting emails with people interested in making a TV sho…
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I’ve always loved, and been comforted by, television, but I have found myself turning to it more and more, as I’m sure many of you have, during the past year. Nothing can make the stresses, exhaustions, or sadnesses of the pandemic go away for good, but television *can* make the days move faster, which is all that we can ask for. Escapism. That’s what I want. Well, actually, what I really want is for my brilliant mother and her amazing close friend (love you, Aunt Chris!) to write and star in a show about two super clever, beautiful, sixty-ish-year-old women who run a PI business together. But if that can’t happen, I want to watch something similar. See, lately, I’ve fou…
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In July 1992, Guido Brunetti arrived as a new protagonist on the mystery scene in Donna Leon’s first novel, Death at La Fenice, which combined her love of opera with her gift for character and her deep appreciation of Venice. Kirkus Reviews called it “deftly plotted and smoothly written,” and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch proclaimed it was “a challenging mystery, a sophisticated drama.” Each year since, a new Brunetti story has appeared, redolent of family and food, exploring the ambiguities of guilt and justice, each at the same high standard Leon established at the start. Transient Desires, published today, March 9, 2021, is her 30th book in the series in 30 years—a rem…
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“Life doesn’t have a narrator – it’s full of lies and half-truths – so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that.” “So fiction really is fiction,” Brunetti asked. Paola looked across at him open-mouthed in surprise. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came. –The Temptation of Forgiveness (2018) \Guido and Paola Brunetti know a great deal about lies and half-truths, and all the other human failings, he as a commissario (detective superintendent) in the Venice police, she as a professor of English literature beset by lazy students and self-important colleagues – but still, after more than twenty years of marriage, they make each other l…
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Growing-up in New York in the 1970s, parts of city had become heroin paradises. Whether the junkies were Vietnam vets who returned to the states with a monkey (addiction) on their back or homegrown hop heads who shot up in public school bathrooms, it was impossible to walk through town without seeing a runny nose, arm scratching, head nodding addict. As a boy dwelling between Hamilton Heights and Harlem, I saw my share of drug casualties hanging out in the middle of the block, standing over trashcan bonfires, lurking in doorways, slouching on Riverside Drive benches or roaming wild eyed in the pursuit of cash, smack and a place to get high. It wasn’t always easy to avoid …
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During a key scene early in Nicholas Ray’s romantic thriller In a Lonely Place (1950), our hero, brilliant but volatile Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), presses a starry-eyed hat check girl—whose strangulation a few hours hence will place Dix under a cloud of suspicion that won’t lift until he’s already sealed his dire fate—into service by having her recount the plot of a novel she’s just finished reading and which he’s been hired to adapt. This scene is one of several meta-layers that helps set In a Lonely Place apart from other LA-set noirs, with Dix’s casual disregard for the book he’s tasked to translate to screen mirroring that of director Ray…
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Dorothy L Sayers was my gateway author to the world of crime fiction. I’d read the Sherlock Holmes stories earlier on, but that superlatively singular creation of Arthur Conan Doyle did not lead me any further. Holmes was unique, existing in his own universe, and there he remained. Not so with Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. The Wimsey family motto is “As my Whimsy takes me,” and Sayers’ whimsy took me right through her books and then onto Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and other authors writing in that great tradition. My Billy Boyle World War II mystery novels are often set in Great Britian, but it is not the Great Britian of the Golden Age of crime…
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As soon as I started writing The Body Double, I seemed to discover doubles everywhere—in literature, movies, and even the tangled world of internet conspiracies, where they believe your favorite celebrities might not be who they seem to be. The appeal of the double self as a narrative force is clear—a second self to whom we can pin the worst of our behavior, or who, conversely, might be living our dream lives. Here are some of my favorite doubles in the twisted world of mystery fiction and (slightly) beyond! The Double, by Fyodor Dostoyevski Dostoyevski’s classic tale of a man pursued by his own likeness was one of the first books I remember encountering with a double…
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Bela Lugosi spoke before a Los Angeles crowd of over two thousand people in August of 1944. The Hungarian-American Council for Democracy (HACD) sponsored the mass rally to urge the Roosevelt administration to end immigration restrictions for Hungarian Jews and to pressure the collaborationist Nazi regime that controlled Lugosi’s homeland to protect those that remained. He had no way of knowing the effort did little good. The SS, with the direct aid of Hungarian fascists, had already deported nearly half a million Jews to death camps in Austria and Poland the previous month. Lugosi described the plight of Hungary’s Jews nearly a quarter of a century after he fled his nati…
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What do you call twenty-five skydiving lawyers? SKEET! If you haven’t heard this one, I bet you’ve heard another or have a good lawyer joke that you love to tell. Have you heard the one about the lawyer that… the list is endless, and no one loves to tell lawyer jokes more than lawyers! Before I began writing legal thrillers, I asked myself why we love the law and what brought about our fascination with lawyers, civil conflict stories, and those involving people in trouble with authority. I went in search of the origins of the genre and found a rich history of chills and thrills. I also discovered something particularly interesting about how people view lawyers through th…
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During his lifetime the American theater director, drama teacher, attorney and amateur magician Henning Cunningham Nelms published but two detective novels under his pseudonym Hake Talbot: The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944). (Sadly his initial essay in the crime genre, written around 1940 and titled The Affair of the Half-Witness, never found a publisher and now seems unlikely ever to be recovered.) The Hangman’s Handyman was, like Rim of the Pit, well-reviewed at the time of its publication, yet the former novel faded soon enough from the memory even of mystery aficionados. However, Rim of the Pit clung tenaciously to fame by its gruesome horned fing…
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Hanging on a rack in a local department store, a sweater can be seen as nothing more than an innocuous piece of everyday clothing. But a sweater worn by Aileen Wuornos gives an insight into the psychological and physical torture she put herself through while on death row. As well as believing the guards were going to steal her eyeballs postmortem, Wuornos was convinced that they were perpetually trying to make her sick by keeping her cell exceptionally cold (an accusation the guards always denied). She wore the same sweater almost every day to try and stay warm. Male inmate clothing, female inmate clothing, and female clothing worn by male inmates. The collection of Bran…
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Tisanes, hot chocolate, a pint, gin and gingerbeer, a strong cup of tea: it’s simply not a Christie mystery without an array of beverages at the ready. As a longterm Christie devotee, during re-reads, certain aspects of her usage of beverages kept asserting themselves. Whether it’s head honcho Poirot or a minor character murdered in the second chapter, what each character chooses to drink says something discernible about personality, class and historical context. Christie’s most famed detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, certainly had their liquid preferences. “Hercule Poirot sat at breakfast in his small but agreeably cosy flat in Whitehall Mansions. He had enjoyed his …
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The 1920s was a decade of strict social hierarchies, with huge divides between wealthy elites and poor workers, bias against immigrants, racial segregation, and laws against homosexual activity. But the free-for-all nightlife of the Jazz Age was built around embracing everything naughty, illegal, and new. This meant that at night, many of those strict hierarchies came toppling down. Prohibition was created by the Eighteenth Amendment, and it ended the nationwide production, import, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages… in theory. In reality, it was easier to get a drink during Prohibition than it was after. When liquor was illegal, it was unregulated, and speakeas…
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Recently, for the first time since they started making movies together in 1984, we’ve been able to guess what each Coen Brother might bring to their cinematic partnership. The Brothers, Joel and Ethan, who have collaborated constantly since their debut feature Blood Simple, have spent the last few years making films apart. Joel made the fascinating, heady nouveau-expressionist adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021 and (in addition to a propulsive documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis), Ethan made Drive-Away Dolls, the droll crimey road-trip lesbian buddy comedy which hits theaters this weekend. The Brothers, who are even more secretive about their process than they are a…
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Americans love the freedom of the open road, or so the public-relations campaigns would have you believe. Endless advertisements feature the latest automobiles roaring along a sun-dappled highway, often to a popular rock song of yesteryear. Countless movies, books, and television shows celebrate the automobile-centric milestones that supposedly define American life—the gift of the first hand-me-down junker, the wise choice of that minivan that can fit your growing family, and, finally, the acquisition of the ultra-expensive car (“You’ve made it. You deserve that Mustang.”). There’s a grittier side to all of that, of course. In American noir and crime fiction, the car is …
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