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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My novel Ice Angel is set in the Canadian Arctic diamond field, an area where I spent many happy days as a reporter covering the great discovery and diamond rush of the 1990s. In fiction, you create your characters, but a reporter takes them as they are. Luckily, when it comes to diamond exploration, that’s good enough. This is a story about one of them. His adventure says a lot about the mistrust, the competitive obsessions, and the plain craziness of a mineral rush. I never got to interview this particular character, because I lacked the necessary skill: proficiency in husky. In the Spring of 1992, the winter staking rush was over in the Barrens. The Arctic summer was …
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My new thriller Rock Paper Scissors is about a marriage in trouble. But what is it that fascinates writers and readers so much about unravelling relationships? Maybe it has something to do with our desire to love and be loved. We all know the joy of real love, the fear of rejection and the pain of true heartbreak. Living in the Screen Age, we can see what used to remain behind closed doors all day every day, albeit through a filter. Perhaps our fascination with the lives and loves of others, is really about better understanding ourselves. Or, we might just be a nosy and voyeuristic species. In Rock Paper Scissors things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long t…
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David Rizzio Plays Tennis with His Assassins Late Saturday afternoon · 9th March, 1566 Indoor tennis court · Palace of Holyrood · Edinburgh Lord Ruthven wanted him killed during this tennis match but Darnley said no. Lord Darnley wants it done tonight. He wants his wife to witness the murder because David Rizzio is her closest friend, her personal secretary, and she’s very pregnant and Darnley hopes that if she sees him being horribly brutalised she might miscarry and die in the process. She’s the Queen; they’ve been battling over Darnley’s demand for equal status since their wedding night and if she dies and the baby dies then Darnley’s own claim to the throne would be…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ian McIlvanney, The Dark Remains: A Laidlaw Investigation (Europa / World Noir) “Laidlaw… surprises the reader at every turn, showing himself to be literate, intelligent, and thoughtful. McIlvanney’s fans will relish this gritty early perspective on Laidlaw.” Publishers Weekly Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) “Stick a bunch of devious psychopaths together and what could possibly go wrong? Find out in Never Saw Me Coming, a completely original, clever whodunit from a talented new arrival to the world of psychological suspense. Vera Kurian is one to watch!” Mary Kubica …
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I didn’t know “Dark Academia” was a Thing until my younger, much cooler friend showed me some Instagram accounts. “It’s an aesthetic,” she said, recommending that I buy some female Sherlock Holmes / librarian attire. But it’s so much more than an aesthetic. To me it’s a mood, a strangely welcome feeling of claustrophobia, of being trapped in a single location, but a cozy location with dark nooks to explore. When I started writing what would become my debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, I started with the basic premise that it would be about a program for diagnosed psychopaths hosted at a psychology department at a university. I love college novels, and hadn’t seen many my…
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The film industry has long provided a grisly backdrop for authors. A world of rags-to-riches and sudden reversals; glamour and seediness; eccentricity and charm—cinema and its players are perfect fodder for the criminally inclined. And it’s not just Hollywood. Around the globe writers have killed, maimed, kidnapped, or ransomed with abandon the glitterati and their supporting cast. Throughout these novels, certain tropes repeat themselves, regardless of a writer’s nationality. Beautiful starlets who are either innocent dupes or promiscuous mantraps; artistic integrity squandered or sold to the highest bidder; shady financiers and thuggish studio execs; rogue cops and di…
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It was August 1985 and I was a full-time student at the University of Edinburgh. When not studying, I was writing novels. By 1985 I’d written two. One had been rejected but the other had been accepted by a small press in Edinburgh and would be published the following February. I was now at work on a third, a detective story featuring a gnarly middle-aged guy called John Rebus. August in Edinburgh is Festival time and that includes the International Book Festival. William McIlvanney was a guest on one particular day and I was determined to meet him. He was a writing hero of mine, a working-class Scot who had won literary prizes but had also recently started writing crim…
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Over the course of her more than 20-year career—her debut novel, Ralph’s Party, came out in 1999—Lisa Jewell famously transitioned from rom-coms to psychological thrillers. But what really marks her as a writer is her non-plotting, open-ended approach: she’s a perpetual writer-explorer, taking readers along for hair-raising, heart-stopping rides. Her latest novel, The Night She Disappeared, begins with the mysterious vanishing of a young couple, Tallulah and Zach, after a gathering at the home of Scarlett, a local rich girl. Tallulah’s mother, Kim, does what she can to keep the police case active, but the suspense-laden fireworks really kick off when, a year later, new he…
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In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the identity of the potential murderer in the apartment complex is never ambiguous. Confined to his wheelchair near the courtyard-facing casements of his Greenwich Village apartment, our protagonist, L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) believes that the man living in the unit across the way has murdered his wife. There’s no body, there is no evidence. For the dozens of other residents in the complex, there isn’t even any suspicious activity. Only Jeff, who sits at his window all day and night, with his giant long-range-zoom lens attached to his camera, notices enough to begin to suspect this plot. Still, Jeff applies the same method in …
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Turns out that if you think someone might murder you, you’ll want to keep your house clean. This isn’t one of those “wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident” warnings. Although that is good advice. This is about truths I’ve learned over a few decades of covering crime scenes and murder trials, usually filling in for Douglas Walker, our newspaper’s longtime criminal justice reporter. Others are gleaned from the experiences of other reporters covering crime here in Muncie, Indiana, the so-called typical small American city and subject of three true crime books Walker and I co-wrote, most recently The Westside Park Murders. Remember that Robert Fulghum book “Al…
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‘The Way of the Gun’ Was a Nihilistic Rebuke To Everything Cool in Nineties Crime Cinema
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Crime fiction (and crime film) has always had an uneasy relationship with the violence it portrays. Every creator knows that a large portion of their audience slaps money down for a full helping of murder and mayhem—and yet, so many go out of their way to insert a bit of moral finger-wagging into the narrative. Sometimes this appeal to morality is overt, as in the original “Scarface” (1932), when director Howard Hawks was forced to add scenes in which characters condemned the gangster lifestyle; in others, it’s slightly more subtle, as in the innumerable mysteries in which a detective ruminates on the evils that humans do—after a couple hundred pages of describing those…
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The Puzzling Life and Uncertain Death of Heinrich Feldmann, A Spy in the First World War
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The Great War—what we now call World War I—was fought on such a massive never-before-seen scale that it stretched the governments, systems, and civilizations of every nation caught up within its swirling vortex in unprecedented ways. It forced them to think and act in ways they’d never before imagined. Their intelligence gathering services were no exception. One unique factor which played into the war was the geographical location of the Netherlands, who managed to remain neutral through the entire conflict. Perched across the North Sea from Britain, bordering Germany and German-occupied Belgium, and but a few days march from the Western Front, it sat at a strategic junc…
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In Paul Vidich’s latest novel, The Matchmaker (February 2022), an American woman working as a translator in East Berlin in 1989 discovers her husband missing, then discovers that he was an East German spy who targeted her for marriage as operational cover. She agrees to help to help the CIA investigate the Stasi spy chief who ensnared her in his “Romeos” network. Here, we have an exclusive first look at the book’s cover and a conversation with Vidich about his growing body of work, the ethics of espionage, and the allure of spy fiction. Where do you see your books in the canon of spy fiction? What interests you about this genre? My books explore the moral landscape …
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Much has been written about the style and mood of William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971). Commentators are fond of identifying influences ranging from Costa-Gavras’ Z and the Maysles brothers work, to the more recently noted Kartemquin documentaries of the 1960s. There’s been a great deal of talk about long takes, overlapping dialogue and the film’s “gritty” verite style generally. What’s so interesting to me, however, is how the elements of cinematography and sound establish the important formal elements of the police procedural in The French Connection. The scenes unfold in a manner so completely artful and seamless that we forget we’re watching a Hollywood co…
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Welcome to the CrimeReads Streaming Guide, where we spotlight a very specific category of crime movies we think you should be watching right now. ___________________________________ It’s September! Autumn may not have officially arrived, and Labor Day hasn’t happened yet, but still… autumn is just around the corner. Autumn, for me, is about Robert Redford. I don’t know why, but when the air gets chilly and the leaves get crispy, I want to watch a Robert Redford movie (even more than I usually do, which is often). Maybe it’s because he wears the color brown so well? I don’t know. You’d think that his sun-bleached hair would fit the aesthetics of summery movies, but his o…
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A Viking is a raider from the sea. During the Viking Age, roughly 750 to 1050, Europe was plagued by such pirates in their swift dragonships. The Vikings were traders and explorers, too. They were farmers, poets, engineers, artists—but their place in history was carved by their swords. “From the fury of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us!” wrote a French monk around the year 900. They “ransacked and despoiled, massacred, and burned and ravaged,” wrote another, who witnessed the Viking attack on Paris in 885. In Ireland in the mid-800s, a monk praised the safety of a storm: Bitter is the wind tonight, White the tresses of the sea; I have no fear the Viking hordes Will sail…
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At first glance it seems self-evident that valuable artifacts that were looted as spoils of war or plundered by our colonial ancestors should be sent back to where they came from. No one would argue with the notion that art stolen by the Nazis from countries they occupied during World War Two should be restored to its rightful owners, so why not treasures snatched by colonial powers? Repatriating the cultural heritage of nations that were robbed is part of a long process of restorative justice for past wrongs that Western powers are approaching in a variety of ways. Morally, it has to be the right thing to do. But where do you draw the line? In the mists of antiquity, or…
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Whenever longtime New England friend Maryanne pays a visit to the Tampa Bay area of Florida, we always arrange for a get-together, however brief. When Maryanne announced that she’d be staying at the nearby town of Gulfport, we agreed to meet for lunch at her hotel—the historic Peninsula Inn. It happened that I was in the planning stages of a new paranormal mystery, and had come up with a loosely-structured plot involving a young woman who inherits a haunted Florida hotel. Turns out the Peninsula Inn is haunted—by a gentle ghost named Isabelle—along with her little ghost cat. It took only a few minutes on the Peninsula’s wrap-around front porch for Gulfport to become a s…
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September brings an outstanding line-up of new crime releases showcasing the breadth of the genre and the variety of talented approaches to the world of crime. With new works from established voices and plenty of debuts, September also provides further proof of an ever-expanding and evolving genre. Whether you’re looking for shocking twists, historical thrillers, or fair-play mysteries, here are twelve new releases perfect for finishing out the summer. Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) Vera Kurian’s extraordinarily entertaining Never Saw Me Coming is one of a few books in a new trend I’m calling “yoga pants noir,” in which hot girls in athleisure wear are …
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Television history may not recall the second week of September 1974 as indelibly momentous. Yet for fans of small-screen private eye series, it most certainly was. On Friday, September 13, NBC-TV’s The Rockford Files premiered, featuring James Garner. That was just one night after competitor ABC launched another Southern California-set gumshoe drama with a well-known lead and lofty ambitions: David Janssen’s Harry O. The former program went on to five and a half seasons of public acclaim (plus eight TV reunion movies), and in 2002 was ranked No. 39 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Best Shows of All Time.” While a previous Janssen crime series, The Fugitive, scored even bett…
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Agatha Christie once said that, “the best way of getting down to work is in a very bad hotel where there is nothing else to do but write, for there are no distracting comforts to indulge in, no good meals or interesting guests.” If anyone was an expert on the best way to “getting down to work” it was the Queen of Mystery—although I doubt that her version of a “bad” hotel would come close to mine! It’s not surprising that many of Christie’s novels were written in, or inspired by, hotels. She was a passionate traveler and in 1922, Christie took a ten-month voyage around the British Empire with her first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, as part of a trade mission to pr…
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In October 1881, the chief commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, George Talbot, received an intelligence report that Patrick Egan was in town. “His business most important. . . . Received a very large sum of money from America according to some new arrangement. . . . I am assured that the money alleged to have been brought by Egan is altogether independent of the weekly receipts and it is supposed to be over £5.000 [about $600,000 today].” Talbot’s source was almost certainly Superintendent Mallon, who had learned from a reliable informer in November 1880 of the emergence of a secret society calling itself the Mooney Volunteers, after Thomas Mooney, the Iris…
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We can all identify the final girl early in any slasher story. She’s the bookish one. She dresses conservatively, she takes her responsibilities seriously. If it’s the eighties, she’s probably just gone camping at the wrong place, or signed on to work at an unlucky summer camp, and if it’s the nineties then she’s probably already dealing with some trauma, has some issue this confrontation with horror can make her deal with, and if it’s the 2000s or later then she’s in a time loop, she’s up against the ancient ones, or maybe she’s even the slasher herself. If it’s the seventies, though? If it’s the seventies, then she’s Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween, w…
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Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) is widely considered a cinematic masterpiece. Not only do we follow as L.A. detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) chases ultra-disciplined thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) across the city, but we also dip into the lives of characters tangential to that pursuit—wives, daughters, hustlers, marks, cops, and criminals who are often fully realized despite having relatively little screen-time. Like many masterpieces, “Heat” didn’t emerge fully formed. You could argue that much of Mann’s cinematic career up to that point was a rehearsal of sorts, allowing him to work on character and story points. This progression begins in 1981, when Mann rele…
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The book smelled old. It must have been sitting on the shelves of the secondhand bookstore for a long time before I bought it. The title was enigmatic: With the Italia to the North Pole. What was the Italia? And who was going to the North Pole? The author was just as mysterious. Who was Umberto Nobile? I was looking for a mystery to solve—and now I had found one. When I opened the stiff pages of the ninety-year-old volume to try to find the answers, I felt a slight draft on my hand. An equally old and irregularly cutout newspaper clipping slipped out of the book and fluttered to the floor. The faded headline of the story answered some of my questions. It read: “Bound…
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