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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Desolation. A murky recognition of a perilous past. Demons—both literal and mental. Countless signposts of Gothic Literature are in lock-step with the queer experience, making the metaphors both simple and poignant. The murky waters of the countless stagnant ponds that populate our favorite works in the subgenre can easily represent the muddy family relationships that litter the landscape of the queer community, hiding unknown skeletons. It’s not hard to see all those once grand plantation homes, framed by massive moss-draped oaks, long ago abandoned and left to rot, as standing relics of the hetero-normative expectations placed upon most young queer people—societal expe…
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In a novel, an effective setting transports the reader, immersing them in the narrative and creating a believable physical environment where plot can flourish. Like the Carolina marshes in Where the Crawdads Sing, the drought-stricken Australian outback of Jane Harper’s The Dry, or the archaic Parisian building in Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment, a richly drawn, distinctive setting not only anchors the story, but also has a pervasive influence on the mood, themes, and tone of a novel. The setting of a novel, whether in the context of place but also time, or more usually both, is not merely background. In the most compelling novels, setting, character and plot are inextr…
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Almost a century ago, as he prepared to cover a dramatic double murder trial for the New York Daily Mirror, name-brand newsman Damon Runyon compared the attendant hype to that surrounding a big boxing match or a World Series game. “It wasn’t merely a metaphor,” Joe Pompeo writes in Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime (William Morrow). “A telegraph switchboard used two months earlier during the world heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney had been installed in the courthouse basement, with a staff of twenty-eight operators at the ready.” It was 1926, and more than four years had passed since the b…
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Damon Runyon dubbed him “The Brain.” To F. Scott Fitzgerald he was the vulgarian Meyer Wolfsheim. To the sports, grifters, gyps, and conmen who wanted to work with him, he was “the Big Bankroll” or “the Big Jew Uptown.” To those who knew him well, he was A. R.—Arnold Rothstein. Born the second son of a prosperous, devout Jewish family in 1882, he rebelled against everything his father tried to teach him, particularly gambling. It was simply forbidden and that made it even more seductive to the young man. He had an innate understanding of numbers combined with competitive fire. Games like pool, poker and dice came easily to him. As a young man he was slim, athletic, and …
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The inspiration for my new book, Murder in Westminster, was developed years ago watching detective shows with my mother. She loved Murder She Wrote, but it always baffled me how the villain almost got away with his crime until the last few minutes of the program. Time and commercial breaks were on their side. Moreover, the body count in these mystery shows kept increasing as these fictional detectives gathered clues. Didn’t the killer realize that Colombo, the persistent policeman who badgered the culprit to confess, would keep investigating? Had they missed every madcap episode of Matlock where the country lawyer and amateur detective gathered evidence and forced the g…
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It feels nearly impossible to effectively eulogize Jean-Luc Godard, the giant of French cinema whose films and writings helped establish the 1960s movement known as the French New Wave and changed the course of cinema forever—and who, after doing that, continued toying with form, style, text, and technology in countless film projects for the remainder of his life. He died on September 13th, 2022, at the age of ninety-one. I think it’s fair to say that Lit Hub is extremely indebted to Godard; so must be any institution which is enthusiastically preoccupied with stories that explore and experiment with narrative, form, timelines, and genre, as well as stories that interrog…
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Lunatic fans! Teens run wild! Unlikely assassins! Twisted twins! And that old favorite, trouble in paradise! September is a festival for thriller fans, with many delights to sample. Don’t fill up on bread—let’s get straight to the main course. Meg Elison, Number One Fan (Mira) Elison’s premise is a little rocky: a popular fantasy novelist, Eli Grey, gets into a car she thinks is taking her to a speaking engagement. Assuming the car has been provided for her, she accepts a drink from the driver and wakes up in his basement. Light on family and friends who would miss her, Grey is left to her own wiles to figure out who her captor might be and what the motivation is for…
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I’m sitting in a room that has an abundance of plastic flowers. There are two mugs of tea on the glass-topped, round dining table, and the plastic wrap around its wrought iron frame is still unpeeled. I’m in Priyanka’s apartment––one she shares with two other girls. They are escorts, who, not too long ago, worked in a brothel in Shonagacchi, Kolkata’s largest red-light district and purportedly Asia’s too. I’m calling her Priyanka because Priyanka Chopra is her favorite actress. There is a large cut-out of the actress, from her early, comparatively less glamorous days, pasted to the wall next to the door. When you enter this apartment, Chopra, in a magenta saree, welcomes …
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Natural disasters are the drama queens of weather. Actually, that’s not true. They’re inherently terrifying and are accelerating because of climate change—so much so that to call them “natural” may actually be a misnomer. CO2 is at its highest atmospheric level in two million years. The earth now loses 1.2 trillion tons of ice annually. Extreme weather is widely considered to be a direct consequence of climate change and scientists are certain this is the result of human activity. If that’s not enough to frighten someone, nothing is. Is it any wonder depictions of severe weather make their way into art? Particularly art that evokes dread and fear? I hope to explore this…
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Around seven thirty on the evening of Thursday, September 14, 1922, two nights before Edward Hall’s body was found beside an unidentified female corpse, on a lover’s lane outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey, the phone rang at 23 Nichol Avenue, a Victorian mansion where Hall had lived with his wife, Frances, for a little more than a decade. One of the couple’s maids, twenty-year-old Louise Geist, paused her work in a bedroom on the second floor and scurried across the hallway to answer the call. A woman on the other end of the line asked for the reverend. “Is that for me?” Edward called out from the bathroom. “Yes,” Louise replied. “I’ll be out in a minute.” Louise …
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Shortly after my discharge from the US Marine Corps in 1979, I returned to my home in Ireland and joined the Irish Republican Army. Sometime after that, I was ordered back to America by the IRA leadership to acquire weapons. When I got to Boston, I was introduced to republican sympathiser called John Connolly, an old man who hailed originally from County Galway. John didn’t have a criminal bone in his body, but after living a lifetime in Southie (the local vernacular for South Boston), he knew who some of the major criminals were. The IRA needed money, guns, and false driving licenses to buy more guns. Law-abiding citizens are a poor source for these items. If my mission …
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If I’d been told in advance about the blood sacrifice, I would have made up an excuse not to attend the bachelorette party. I wasn’t too enthused about going in the first place. I resented group activities, especially ones where everyone else involved seemed delighted to participate. It made me wonder if I was just a miserly curmudgeon for not wanting to shell out my hard-earned income on someone else’s idea of a good time. Did no one else find it all ridiculous? The engagement party and the bridal shower and the bachelorette weekend and the wedding week. “I’m going to end up dropping five K on someone else’s wedding,” I complained to my mother over the phone as I packed…
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On some fundamental level, HBO’s Irma Vep was a seven-episode meditation on the allure of a woman in a catsuit. Director Olivier Assayas based the show on his 1996 film of the same name, and both film and series dig into our longstanding obsession with sexy women criminals on the screen. Both film and series are also about filmmaking: each depicts an attempt to remake Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial Les Vampires. Feuillade’s serial, at least in part, owes its place in film history to its indelible images of Irma Vep, its ravishing anti-heroine, slinking her way across the rickety rooftops of Paris. In both Irma Veps, this femme fatale is a complex sign that embodies …
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Yasmin Angoe, They Come At Knight (Thomas and Mercer) “A second round of action-packed, high-casualty intrigue for professional assassin Nena Knight. A lethal tale of an all-but-superhero whose author promises that ‘in this story, there are no heroes.’” –Kirkus Reviews Rijula Das, Small Deaths (Amazon Crossing) “[Rijula] Das’s searing debut centers on the plight of sex workers in contemporary Calcutta, India…This devastating novel is in turn touching and painful to read. Das, a Bengali-to-English translator, is definitely a writer to watch.” –Publishers Weekly Erica Blaque, Among Wolves (Polis) “Readers will f…
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The Lakes, the northwestern English county of Cumbria and close to a thousand square miles of pristine countryside. A popular holiday destination, perfect for a late summer getaway, a chance for Crime and the City to recharge away from the mean streets. When you think of the English Lake District and literature you probably recall the Lakes poets—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. Romantics, often joined by their friends and lovers Dorothy Wordsworth, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas De Quincey. And somewhat later Beatrix Potter and her cast of cuddly characters. Peace and quiet, the rolling hills, mountains, and the beautiful lakes t…
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One of my favourite scary movies is The Changeling. George C. Scott stars as a famous composer who relocates from New York to a small town after his wife and daughter die in a tragic car accident. Desperate to remove anything from his life that reminds him of his family, he rents a turn-of-the-century Victorian manor. The move is eventless, until he comes across his daughter’s favorite ball; it’s blue and red with a white strip down the middle. He hides it away in a desk and slams the drawer, crippled with grief as he cries himself to sleep. Odd sounds begin that night. At first, he thinks it’s only air in the pipes, but then other strange occurrences continue in the foll…
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When I set out to write a thriller in which my protagonist was in mortal peril no later than the end of the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to include something about the Enigma machine, the encoding device used by the Axis during World War II, and about the successful British effort to break the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code which took place at Bletchley Park. Like most people, I didn’t know much about Bletchley or Enigma twenty-five years ago when I became friends with a British woman named Mavis Batey. We bonded over our mutual interest in Lewis Carroll and met at several conferences. Then I discovered Mavis had been at Bletchley—not as a secretary or a transcrib…
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Bouchercon is once again upon us. For the first time since the pandemic began, the crime fiction conference is happening in person, with one of the CrimeReads editors already here and typing this in their Minneapolis hotel room. Ahead of the convention, we asked nominees for the Anthony Awards to answer a few questions about the most pressing issues facing the world of crime literature. Below, you’ll see 17 writers reflect on the past, present, and future of the genre, for a fascinating discussion that runs the gamut from highly amusing to immensely relevant. Thanks to the folks who contributed, and best of luck at the awards! __________________________________ WHAT DOE…
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Both readers and authors of crime fiction are likely to be drawn towards “bibliomysteries,” a word which is unlikely to be found in a dictionary, despite supplying the title for a fascinating monograph by the legendary American editor, publisher, bookseller, and bibliophile Otto Penzler. Penzler readily accepted that the term is apt to be defined in a subjective way, and said: “If much of the action is set in a bookshop or a library, it is a bibliomystery, just as it is if a major character is a bookseller or a librarian. A collector of rare books…may be included. Publishers? Yes, if their jobs are integral to the plot. Authors? Tricky… If the nature of their work brings…
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I love messy women. I always have. There’s just something so compelling about a female character trying to fix her life when it, or she, is in shambles. When I wrote my debut novel Other People’s Secrets I had this kind of character in mind, but with a weirdo twist. The hero is a dumpster baby who grows up in a world struggling to understand who she should be. This lack of a family history helps enable her to become a bit of a booze-soaked disaster. A truly chaotic and messy person who is forced to confront herself before she can solve the mysteries that are eating away at her hometown. I created my character, Baby, because I’ve always, always wanted to see more female …
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So, the world closed in on us, right? And while lockdown may have had less of an impact on writers than it did on office workers, chefs, or elementary school teachers, it did mean that those of us who need a crowded coffee house to focus, or who depend on travel for research (honest, it’s entirely for work!) found a lot of doors slammed shut in our faces. The book I’d intended to write was to take place in Paris and the Dordogne. I had been to both places before, and I thought I might be able to fake it, but I knew I’d have trouble when it came to the things that matter—the sensory elements, the geographic oddities that aren’t apparent until you walk the city streets, th…
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Continuing our coverage of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson’s hotly anticipated sequel to his 2019 whodunnit Knives Out, we are thrilled to report that the film now has a teaser trailer AND an official poster! Johnson tweeted out both this morning. The poster is nice and simple, while the trailer (although a teaser) promises a little less niceness and a little less simplicity: The film, which is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, which takes place from September 8th to 18th, 2022, will be released on Netflix this holiday season. View the full article
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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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In June 1934, when a war with Germany seemed a remote prospect, one of Philip Conwell-Evans’s English colleagues found himself in a Berlin suburban garden having dinner with Heinrich Himmler. Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite unit created as Hitler’s bodyguard, and already one of the most powerful men in Germany, Himmler would later be responsible for the conception, direction and execution of the Holocaust. The English colleague was Ernest Tennant OBE, a businessman, decorated Great War veteran and amateur butterfly collector. Their host was Tennant’s closest German friend, Joachim Ribbentrop. A politically and socially ambitious businessman, the forty…
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While Pupetta sat in prison for killing her first husband’s assassin, her guards had to play traffic cop to the many suitors who clamored to visit her. Love songs and poetry were written about this brave and beautiful murderess, and she reveled in the attention she says helped her bide the time. Pupetta shuddered when I asked her about raising a baby in Naples’ notorious Poggioreale prison. She was allowed to keep him in her dark corner cell until he turned four. I told her about my own children, both sons, and she asked to see photos of them. As I scrolled through some old ones I kept on my phone, she seemed grandmotherly. I explained to her that my children were rais…
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