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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Reinhardt led Gelhaus back to the Méricourt farmhouse. The captain peered in and around, muttering as he crouched to one knee by the dresser, running his finger around its blackened edges. His face was heavy-cheeked. He often had something of the hunting dog about him, all morose expression, jowls, and lidded eyes, but he brightened as he spotted the bottles on the floor. He picked up one of brandy, muttering happily as he held the label to the light, then plucked up another of brandy. Reinhardt hesitated, then picked up the Mosel he had seen earlier. Gelhaus nodded approvingly, then gestured Reinhardt outside into the clean morning air, over to a car parked in front of t…
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One and I had a novel, two and I had a sequel, three and I finally felt I could say I had a series. So the occasion of my third Charlie Waldo book, Pay or Play, has me thinking about the works that shaped my own instincts about how to build and sustain a run. Truth be told, I was a child of television, so that’s where my biggest influences lie. I’d had a long career writing TV and movies, too, before I became a serious reader of crime fiction. I was also a child of the 70s, the celebrated decade of Columbo and The Rockford Files. But for me, the 80s were the true Golden Age of TV crime, the decade that changed what and how we watched and laid the foundation for all the…
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Here in New York City everything changes all the time. Ask any New Yorker: if you don’t walk down every block in the city every six months, the next time you get somewhere you’ll find it’s changed it to the point where you’ll be checking your little blue dot to make sure you’re where you thought you were. But very few of us can cover the whole city twice a year. Including me, though I work at it. Instead we count on the fact that though blocks change fast, neighborhoods change slowly. They do change, and sometimes even vanish. What used to be the Jewish Lower East Side has totally gone, leaving behind some buildings now taking on new uses. Little Italy is gone, too, exce…
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Writing about Havana, the city where I was born and lived until my thirtieth birthday, is a pleasurable but sometimes daunting task. I want to use the rich palette of the English language to portray our rhythms, flavors and unique landscapes. A sense of place can be established by describing locations and conjuring sounds and smells, but crafting a dialogue that happens in another language is a balancing act between authenticity and clarity. My dilemma has always been to convey my characters’ Cubanness without boring, annoying, or worse, losing the reader. A few chosen words in Spanish add a more realistic touch to the narrative. Indeed, a dialogue peppered with Spanish …
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I was only nine years old in 1947, when The Fabulous Clipjoint was published, so it was probably another eight years before I read it. I discovered Fredric Brown during my freshman year at Antioch College, and I must have read a half-dozen of his Bantam paperbacks, along with a few hundred other books I tore through back then. Most of the others had at least some claim to consideration as serious literature, which was a phrase that meant rather more to me than it does now, but I don’t know that anything I read was more engaging or entertaining than Fredric Brown’s fiction, and even then I knew that was important. Was The Fabulous Clipjoint one of those early reads? It se…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Spotswood, Murder Under Her Skin (Doubleday) “Just like his mystery-writing ancestor [Rex Stout], Spotswood understands that the detective story should be sound, but spending time with unforgettable characters is paramount.” The New York Times Book Review Elly Griffiths, The Midnight Hour (HMH) “Halloween provides the perfect setting for another triumph of misdirection from Griffiths in this sixth Brighton Mystery.” Booklist, Starred review RV Raman, A Dire Isle (Agora) “Raman continues to channel Agatha Christie in book two of his India-based Harith Athreya series…
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of the year. Check back in the coming days for more of the Best Books of 2021. * PJ Vernon, Bath Haus (Doubleday) The great age of the gay thriller has arrived!!! For so long, gay characters were either either extremely problematic villains or overly respectable charmsters designed to soothe heterosexual audiences, as Vernon writes about here, but lately, gay thrillers are finally allowing queer characters the moral range of, well, real people. In Bath Haus, the perfect exemplar of this trend, restless Oliver knows he should be happy with his long-time doctor partner, but he finds hi…
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Back in the 1980s, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke declared the town “the city that reads.” While that phrase was hyperbolic at best, Baltimore has always been a city that produced, adopted, inspired and aided many excellent writers. A few favorites include detective/ horror pioneer Edgar Allan Poe, essayist/Black Mask founder H. L. Mencken, novelist Laura Lippman, Harlem expat Barry Michael Cooper (who penned the script for New Jack City in the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library), screenwriter Barry Levinson, essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates and former Baltimore Sun journalist/The Wire creator David Simon. However, one name that was always missing from the list of B-M…
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We are living through an epidemic of wrongful convictions. As I write, almost 2,500 wrongfully convicted men and women have been exonerated, totaling more than 21,000 years lost. Conservative estimates are that only one to two percent of all convictions are of innocent people. That’s an impressive success rate, and it’s comforting to think that our criminal justice system incarcerates the correct person 98–99 percent of the time. However, this is not good news if you are among the one to two percent. Think about what that means in actual numbers. There are approximately two and a half million people incarcerated in the United States, which means there are thousands of…
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Art reflects life, none more so than in literature, IMHO. And I’m pleased to report that cozy mysteries are no exception. Sure, this delightful subgenre still adheres to many of the rules that initially defined it. A plucky amateur sleuth; a hook such as a bookstore, craft shop, or, in my case, winery; a setting with a small-town vibe and close-knit community; and, of course, a puzzling mystery. And longtime readers continue to find a gratifying escape, a warm and fuzzy feeling along with a sense of justice, the subject matter never growing too heavy, with any violence or heated romance happening offscreen. But modern cozies are very much a capital-T thing. I talked ab…
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One by one, I examined the photos sprawled out on the table in front of me. They were divided into three sets, each a standard forensic collection of overviews, midranges, and close-ups. In the first set, labeled “Danny 9.21,” the setting of the overviews painted an almost idyllic scene in the quiet Nebraska countryside. But the landscape was only for context. The real focus of the pictures was the small body hidden within them, partially covered by tall grass growing along an unpaved road. The midrange photos were even more unsettling. These depicted the lifeless male victim—a child or young teenager—bent backward in an unnatural slump. His wrists and ankles were bound w…
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Her stepbrother’s voice isn’t as soft as the hypnosis recording, but when he counts down slowly—five, four, three, two, one—an image comes to Rylie: a boulder, gray in the moonlight. The one she fell from. And then she’s back in the memory. It’s all coming back to her and she’s there, lying on the ground next to the boulder—rocks are digging into her arm from how she landed. She scrambles to her feet, feeling dizzy. A few feet away is a coyote, watching her. Another is at the edge of the boulder. They seem . . . especially large. Their paws look dark, almost cloven. She crouches down and grabs a loose rock. Just in case. Then she steps back. Another step. She feels col…
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best crime nonfiction books. True crime has been going through a monumental shift in tone and topic over the past ten years. The genre has turned away from sensational storytelling in favor of victim-focused narratives, examining murder not as the purview of brilliant psychopaths, but as, instead, a failure of policing to protect the most vulnerable communities from harm. There’s also a renewed focus on crime in the context of history, where criminalization was a mechanism of social control, not a way to protect individuals from harm. Finally, you’ll see several titles on this list that use illicit trade as a lens on the semi-lega…
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Classic thrillers have a real virgin/whore problem. A quick glance at the canon, and you’ll find plenty of wide-eyed ingenues—the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca comes to mind. But where would our ingenue be without her foil, the femme fatale—Rebecca in Rebecca? Even the more complex depictions of women rarely go beyond a woman who appears to be one and is actually the other (think: any Hitchcock blonde). So when you want to find a thriller about a mad woman, your options tend to be relatively contemporary. That is, unless we reconsider what a thriller is in the first place. In a recent interview, I—along with six other debut authors—had to define the genre. My definit…
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For eight seasons and almost 200 episodes, “Mannix” was the epitome of the TV private investigator. Sure, there have been cool P.I.s (Craig Stevens’ “Peter Gunn” with Henry Mancini’s theme music, full of smooth menace) and affably hot P.I.s (our boy Thomas Magnum) and cerebral consulting detectives (“Sherlock”) and the most charming, hard-luck P.I. on the California coast (“This is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message …”) But as far as a play-it-straight-down-the-middle investigator who could take a blow to the head and come back swinging, nobody topped Mike Connors’ “Mannix.” And the show had a hell of a theme too, by Lalo Schifrin. “Mannix” is more t…
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During my long writing career, I’ve spoken to many groups, and when it gets to the Q&A part of the program, I can usually count on being asked at least one of two very common questions. Probably the most common one is, “Where do you get your ideas?” This question always comes from readers who aren’t also writers (aka Normal People). Storytelling can be a mysterious process if you weren’t born with the storytelling gene, and it’s easy to understand why people would ask this question. I don’t know if they’ve identified the storytelling gene on the DNA string yet, but I know it exists. It also seems to be hereditary. I can actually trace it in my own family tree. My …
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A pale sun was shining outside, and Martin hadn’t bothered to clean up the breakfast dishes. Instead they’d gotten dressed and gone out to the yard. It was nearing noon now, and they had been out for two hours. Martin had cleared the tools they never used from the shed, raked the frostbitten, half-rotted leaves from the lawn and the garden beds, and shored up a collapsing wall of the compost bin. A thick, evenly white layer of clouds covered the sky. “Are you hungry?” he asked Adam, who was at the play kitchen, making snail soup with pine needles and glitter. “I’ve got food right here.” “Are you sure you don’t want something besides soup?” “A little. A bun. I want a b…
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It’s always interesting to learn about the hobbies of geniuses. The late Stephen Sondheim famously had two: the cinema (two of his musicals, A Little Night Music and Passion, were adapted from films), and crossword puzzles (he wrote the puzzles for New York magazine for a year). But Sondheim was also a big fan of crafting whodunits. He started planning murder mystery games for his friends in the ‘60s. Playwright Anthony Shaffer based Andrew Wyke, the ingenious, murderous plotter in his play Sleuth, on Sondheim. (At one point, the play was entitled Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?, but Sondheim suggested Shaffer change the title because not enough people would know who h…
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl (Atria) Zakiya Dalila Harris’ scathing debut, The Other Black Girl, was inspired by the author’s chance meeting with another Black editor at the publishing company where she worked, the novelty of that experience sparking an inventive psychological thriller that pillories the extraordinarily white world of NYC publishing. Nella Rogers couldn’t be happier when another Black woman starts working at her prestigious publishing company, but she quickly finds the other woman’s extreme code-switching off-putting. Meanwhile, someone’s been l…
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Once while in college I woke to something shadowy sitting on my chest. It was so heavy that I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Through my shock I saw it was a blackbird, its wings flapping fast in front of me, covering my face. It was feathers and dust and darkness and underneath it I felt paralyzed. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. Out of desperation I started to say a Hail Mary and then the bird lifted from my chest and I sat up in bed. The window beside me was shut. I wasn’t suffocating. I was in a room with five other “sisters” at a sorority house; basically the least terrifying place you could imagine. And yet I had been close to death, I was convinced of that. The b…
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There’s a reason the romantic subplot is a mainstay in mystery/thriller. It can give the reader a break from the non-stop death-defying action, and it lets us see another side of our hero. Or maybe there’s no real relationship involved – our Jane Bond might just be picking up a hunky henchman for a quick roll in the hay, or two characters have more of a prickly love/hate connection going on. Either way, a sex scene is a chance to mix up the action and add new stakes. “Sex scenes are devised to nudge a character in a different direction and change the trajectory of their journey,” says Tessa Wegert, author the Shana Merchant series of mysteries – and yes, Tessa says we’ll…
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Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino is set on a street of shops in Tokyo, not too different from the street where Newcomer takes place. What do Higashino’s books tell us about Tokyo and the people of Japan? I spoke with two of Higashino’s English-language translators, Giles Murray and Alexander O. Smith, about how the world in Higashino’s crime novels reflect the real Tokyo—how it feels, how it operates, and how it’s changing. Giles Murray was born in the United Kingdom, lives in Tokyo, and has translated various works of Japanese fiction and non-fiction, notably by Tetsuya Honda and Keigo Higashino. Alexander O. Smith was born in the United States, got his degrees at Dart…
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I know, I know, this list is so 20th century it’s embarrassing (although maybe we’re now far enough into the 21st century that the 20th has at last taken firm shape in our imaginations). Perhaps I was just more interested in reading about a century characterized by sweeping historical changes, rather than novel diseases, or perhaps there were just a lot of really good books out this year and I can’t read everything, ok? For whatever reason, the books below lean heavily interwar and midcentury, yet diverge significantly in what they choose to explore and reinterpret from these eras, as well as which silenced voices they bring to the fore. These books also range all over th…
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A respectable book might’ve cost a dollar, but so-called dime novels could cost even less than a dime. These sensational stories of romance and adventure were written in a direct style for the less-sophisticated working classes increasingly cramming into industrializing cities—though Abraham Lincoln and Henry Ward Beecher were also said to be fans. The books were a publishing-industry phenomenon from the Civil War to World War I, when they were superseded by even more lurid pulp-fiction magazines. Myriad factors gave rise to the dime novel in the mid nineteenth century. Reform movements had raised literacy rates, and new technologies made printing faster, easier and chea…
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The key to pulling off a good con is to keep things moving briskly—pause for too long to collect your thoughts or give extra information and you’ll end up showing your marks exactly how you’re playing them. Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s splashy new film about a shifty carnival huckster-turned-famed mentalist, doesn’t follow its own guidelines about pacing or economy; it is too slow and too long—clocking in at 150 minutes—and by the end of the film, you’ll have counted enough of its seams to confuse it with a striped big-top tent. But this isn’t so grave a sin, because the film isn’t trying to trick its audience into thinking it’s something it’s not; ultimately, t…
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