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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A few weeks ago, I directed the television clicker to a Dateline NBC program. Of course, it was about crime! My spouse wasn’t in the mood for a crime show and complained that there was entirely too much crime genre coverage on TV in general. I responded that there was, in fact, a good reason for its frequency. Television has adopted the old newspaper adage—if it bleeds, it leads—as a programing directive. The plain and simple reality is that Americans have a penchant for crime shows and have for a long time. Dateline NBC began in 1992, while Cold Case Files goes back to 1999. My personal favorite, Forensic Files, debuted in 1996. It is still going strong! The Menendez br…
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Why Godot Wouldn’t Come With a clear head, I turned my attention to Beckett’s interviews and memoirs, and tried to clarify his dry and mysterious answers, word by word. By ‘memoirs’, I mean anecdotes related by people who knew him. When Waiting for Godot was first performed in London in 1953 and Peter Woodthorpe was cast as Estragon, he was twenty-two and studying chemistry at Cambridge University. He impressed even Beckett with his performance. During rehearsals, they attended a party and left it at the same time. They were both going in the same direction, so they shared a cab. Woodthorpe said to Beckett, ‘Everyone’s marching to a different drummer. What’s Waiting for …
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Let’s get something out of the way: what exactly do we mean by the term “locked-room mystery”? It’s a phrase I’ve seen used incorrectly in the past to refer to works in the similar but distinct “closed circle mystery” subgenre. What sets locked-room mysteries apart from the rest is an element of impossibility. As a matter of fact, I tend to use the term synonymously with “impossible crime,” meaning a story in which a crime (usually murder) is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. Often these stories have an ambiance of the eerie and macabre, with apparently supernatural occurrences and foreboding atmosphere. However (and this is crucial) the whole thing is u…
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Earlier this year, when my second novel was published, an interviewer asked me which writer, alive or dead, I’d like to meet and under what circumstances. I wanted to say Susie Steiner in a pub somewhere in Cambridge, England, where Steiner’s novels are set. In my mind, I imagined it would be an opportunity to be in the presence, even for a short time, of the author who created detective Manon Bradshaw. I knew I’d need to be on my toes. From her social media and interviews, she came across as smart, brutally honest, and unlikely to suffer fools. In the end, though, knowing of her grave illness at the time, I decided the choice was inappropriate and named someone else. No…
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As someone who stormed through Succession, White Lotus and Big Little Lies with their jaw permanently attached to the floor, I will quite happily confess that I am a sucker for portrayals of ‘how the other half lives.’ Gossip magazines, documentaries, reality tv shows, and, of course, dark fiction: we as a society have an unquenchable thirst for lifting the lid on the lifestyles of the super wealthy, and we tend to have a particular vigour for when those super wealthy behave super appallingly. This is exactly the theme I touch upon in my novel, Out of her Depth, in which Rachel, an unassuming girl from a nondescript London suburb, lands a Summer job in the hills of Flo…
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“London” You only have to say the word, and like a powerful spell, an entire world is instantly conjured. If you happen to have visited, you’re probably picturing red buses, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and those guards with the funny hats. You may be picturing all those things anyway, even if you’ve never set foot in London just because you’ve seen it a million times on TV and in movies and so it all seems so familiar. Or maybe the spell conjures a different London for you, a city of fog and shadows, where horse drawn hansom cabs clip through crooked streets and men in top hats and capes make their way beneath the flickering glow of gaslights, the tips of their silver-to…
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I’ve been really enjoying Dark Fantasy this year—my theory as to why? As the world gets worse, magical thinking gets more potent, and as we lose faith in the future and the concept of innocence, fairy tales get more twisted. But you don’t need to be a nihilist to enjoy Liz Michalski’s Darling Girl—just a person interested unpacking the creepiness behind Peter Pan, a story about a boy kidnapping a girl and making her take care of him as his mother-wife. In Darling Girl, Holly Darling, the granddaughter of Wendy, has harnessed the power of Neverland as a youth serum for a beauty company, but the secret to the formula is her sickly daughter, the product of rape by Peter Pan.…
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When I was in my twenties, I traveled the world as if nothing could ever go wrong. I slept in an African beach hut for six months with twenty total strangers, took a crew job in Australia on some boat with a dad and two random male backpackers. I don’t say this proudly; it’s astonishing I even survived. What I will say, though, is that it’s given me a sharp eye into the world of travel thrillers. I’m now basing my writing career on my lifetime’s disastrous choices, and there’s limitless material to be had. It’s a glorious primetime, too, for stories of adventure. We’re all craving a little travel as we emerge from the dark, tight enclosure of the pandemic. We’re renewing…
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If you were to read my biography on my website or the jacket of my latest novel, The Binding Room, you would learn that I am a Criminal Defence lawyer who lives in London. For almost twenty years, I’ve been defending people who have been accused of crimes that even the darkest corners of most people’s minds would reject as pure fiction. The majority of people assume, rightly or wrongly, that my legal experience would place me in the best position to put me in the mind of a criminal. I wouldn’t say that they were right, but my legal career has placed me in a unique position. One of the first things I learnt as a young criminal lawyer was to make sure that I always was th…
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Real life criminals might frighten us, anger us, even disgust us, but one thing they rarely if ever do is bore us. Sometimes they even play out our fantasies: who hasn’t daydreamed of quietly putting a shiv into the pain-in-the-ass boss or pulling off a successful heist and retiring to a life free of financial burden? Real life criminals also pick at the scab of our terrors: torture, murder, kidnapping, and other violent invasions of our lives. The bravado of crime is pretty heady stuff, grab-you-in-the-chest-and-rip-out-your-heart stuff. And yet, as every journalist knows―and lives by the famous dictum: If it bleeds, it leads―we can’t get enough of it. Why? Here’s one…
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What would it be like to travel back in time? That depends on whether you’re ready for it. If you’re hopping into a time machine, you’d likely have a chance to prepare yourself, and that’s certainly the comfortable way to go. But imagine being flung back in the blink of an eye. One minute you’re in our world, and the next, you’re in another time period. It would be terrifying and overwhelming. In fiction, though, the narrator is the one tossed into the chaos. We don’t need to worry about how to find food and shelter, how to survive and thrive, how to avoid being thrown into a jail cell or a mental institution. We don’t need to figure out how to lace a corset, how to fin…
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Small towns are rife with stereotypes—most of which are well-deserved, justly earned, documentary-like observations. Comforting familiarity, slow pace, and the charm of knowing several generations of the same bloodline give certain people an ease that cannot be achieved in more sophisticated, sprawling environs. We generally like the idea of a small town with its quirky neighbors, stories everyone knows, quaint—if not hokey—parades and celebrations. In contrast, there’s also the concept of the backwards small town, the rural area from which all people worth their salt are trying to flee. The escape from which is romantic and esteemed. Of course, no one wants to live amon…
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Y’all. I’m tired. My tank is nearing ‘E.’ As for many of you, too much is going on, and it’s exacerbating a co-existing condition of always being tired. It’s hard to be creative when you’re exhausted, when your gears are grinding, when all you want to do is binge cookies, fries and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Amirite? Lately, I’ve been saying ‘no’ to things that take too much effort. Writing essays takes a lot of effort, even for prolific writers. Especially for prolific writers. We are trained monkeys, private dancers, wizards with tricks up our sleeves. But I have no more tricks. My feet hurt and I don’t wanna dance. But then, again: I’ve written 100,000-word drafts. What…
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“Helltown. The nickname fits this place perfectly,” said Norman Mailer as he peered out at Long Point and the Provincetown harbor from the third-floor study of his home at the east end of Commercial Street. Sitting at his desk, he also had a pristine view of the Pilgrim Monument, the 252-foot granite tower looming like a colossal sentry in the distance. To Mailer, the town in July was “as colorful as St. Tropez on Saturday morning and as dirty as Coney Island come Sunday night.” But it was autumn now, and the leaves were dead. The town was dead too. Mailer had just returned from Chicago, and he was all alone in his five-bedroom, 5,800-square-foot brick fortress, w…
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It’s a familiar scene. Aglow with a post-coital sheen, the girl tucks a sheet delicately (modestly) over her chest as she smokes a cigarette, her disheveled, masculine partner hiking up his too-tight jeans just in front of the partially closed door. Her name is Tammy or Tonya or Trisha, something cute, but by this point you’ve already forgotten it because what matters is that she’s done The Thing, which means sometime in the next few minutes, or the next few pages, she’s going to die. Or how about this one— She’s a good girl, kind and obedient and virginal, which is why she’s found herself ensconced in a courtship with an older, mysterious man. After a small wedding ce…
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Secrets are fascinating, especially when they simmer in the pages of a file that only the privileged few ever get to see. A confidential file can decide the fates of people or overthrow nations. It can catch a killer or a spy. Government agents have risked all to protect or retrieve these files—especially in fiction. Intelligence services and secret police agencies around the world, especially in authoritarian countries like the USSR and East Germany, made ordinary citizens the subjects of secret files, proof the government was watching them. My fascination with secret files came early. I was 20 years old, an intern at the State Department in Washington, assigned to the …
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When I set out to write Frightmares, my upcoming Young Adult horror novel, I wanted to channel the fun, freaky feel of a 90s slasher movie. I wanted my readers to find their favorite elements of those movies in its pages, while still delivering surprises, jump scares, and satisfying twists. I was not, however, writing an actual slasher movie; I was writing a book, and deploying tropes in written fiction means using a different set of tools to satisfy that slasher movie craving. Apart from the cover, various design elements, and the occasional sketch or illustration, authors rely on words instead of visuals. Enter an element any horror story would arguably be lost without—…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rachel Howzell Hall, We Lie Here (Thomas and Mercer) “What’s most special about the book is the array of complex characters…The dialogue is sharp, observant, and emotional without ever straying into sentimentality, and the mystery of who is targeting the Gibson family manages to stay compelling despite many twists and turns…This captivating domestic thriller will keep you on your toes.” –Kirkus Reviews Aggie Blum Thompson, All The Dirty Secrets (Forge Books) “In a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, simmering secrets hide in plain sight. Heart-stopping danger will make you ra…
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According to Scottish crime fiction author Denise Mina, Glasgow— her hometown where she lives and works and gets around as a pedestrian and a bicyclist—is a city of brutal frankness where a thick skin is a necessity of life and it’s very hard to feel special. “Glasgow,” Denise says, “is a place where people come up and talk to you, … my whole career has been people walking up to me in the street and saying, ‘I read your last book. And I thought it was shit. And this is what you did wrong.’” And, at least according to Denise, that’s okay because “everyone is a central character in Glasgow.” A perfect example of this Glaswegian-as-central-character occurred during a recen…
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Munich – capital of Bavaria with over a million and a half people and where the annual festival sees about three times as many steins of beer consumed at Oktoberfest. One of the world’s most livable cities according to some indicators but, of course, not without its crime writing…. Let’s jump straight in with Hans Hellmut Kirst’s Konstantin Keller series of detective novels set in Munich in the 1960s and featuring a retiring detective inspector. The trilogy was published in English translations as Damned to Success (also as A Time for Scandal, 1973) subtitled A Novel of Modern Munich, A Time for Truth (1974) and Everything has a Price (1976). Kirst is still best known fo…
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There’s an episode of Columbo I really like to watch. The first episode of the second season, “Étude in Black.” John Cassavetes guest-stars as a conniving orchestra conductor who murders his piano-virtuoso mistress after she threatens to go public with their affair, jeopardizing his marriage to Blythe Danner and the related funding he receives from his mother-in-law Myrna Loy. James McEachin’s in there, as is Pat Morita. As is often the case with Columbo villains, Cassavetes almost commits the perfect crime except for a small dumb error, and he would certainly still get away with the whole thing if any other detective were on duty. Like most episodes, this one is around a…
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How much we love the “perfect murder.” (Talking fiction here. Right?) It means many things to many people. Just getting away with murder doesn’t make it perfect—by that definition, every murder that does not result in a conviction would be “perfect.” No, we need more than that. A murder so immaculately planned that nobody is even charged? So perfectly committed that it doesn’t even look like murder? So diabolical that someone else takes the fall? An impulsive killing hastily but brilliantly covered up after the fact? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I love all those different variations so much that I couldn’t choose just one—I put all of them in my new novel, LOOK CLOSER, a dom…
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Mystery novels are both timeless and popular because the reader is a participant in the action more so than in other genres—just as the detective or investigator is trying to figure out whodunnit, the story always implicitly challenges the reader to solve the crime first. But what if in addition to discovering things about the crime, you were also discovering things about a new and speculative world at the same time? My debut novel, The Peacekeeper, is a murder mystery set in the present day in an alternative history in which North America was never colonized. Specifically, it is set in an independent Ojibwe nation surrounding the Great Lakes. As we follow our detective,…
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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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In my new Maggie D’arcy mystery, The Drowning Sea, Maggie, a former homicide detective, is trying to relax and take a vacation. She’s out of a job and spending the entire summer on a gorgeous and remote West Cork peninsula, where she and her boyfriend and their children plan to get to know each other and decide if Maggie and her daughter should move to Ireland in the fall. When a body washes up at the base of the cliffs, she’s thrust back into her old line of work. I’ve always loved the trope of the professional detective who goes on vacation, but is pressed into service when the discovery of a body interrupts the leisurely rhythms of a recreational trip or restorative h…
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