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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Want to talk about one of the strangest, if not the strangest American crime film to emerge in the first half of the 1970s? Then, let’s talk about Michael Ritchie’s neo-noir Prime Cut, as it turns fifty this year. It would be going too far to describe it as a neglected classic, but it is a fascinating film about a divided America that, as a result, finds obvious echoes today. Prime Cut’s at times surreal nature is signalled in the opening credits. To a Lalo Schifrin score, deliberately engineered to sound like calming elevator muzak, we follow a cow being slaughtered and fed into the mechanised process of creating hot dogs. At some point, one of the male workers adds what…
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In January 1958, Elijah Muhammad sent a cablegram to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of the United Arab Republic, on the occasion of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference hosted by the Egyptian government in Cairo. Elijah, who had been taught by Master Fard that Blacks in America were an “Asiatic” race, had already formally endorsed Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal in public statements and his newspaper columns. In Nasser’s stand against the British, French, and Israelis, the Nation saw a reflection of its own fight against white supremacy in America. In his letter, Elijah wanted Nasser to recognize these parallels too. “As-Salaam-Alikum.” He began the lett…
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From the recent declassification of archival documents, to the high stakes, to the clear delineation between good and evil in the war between Allied and Axis powers, the popularity of WWII-set fiction endures. Writing fiction allows authors to imagine dialogue and fill in the blank spaces left by incomplete records, but to be able to do so with authenticity, they draw heavily on memoir, autobiography, and biography. In researching the real-life superheroines Virginia d’Albert-Lake and Violette Szabo, for Sisters of Night and Fog, there were many riveting works of nonfiction by and about the women and those in their networks. These accounts were a tremendous help in under…
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Riddle me this: I am that which when completed never stops Guards cities, and caves, confuses dimwitted cyclops. Always exciting to turn over but hard to place right, It can have four legs, then two legs, then three legs at night. It turns ravens into writing desks, when neither’s like the other, And reminds you that the old surgeon is really just his mother. What am I? (Yeah, it’s a riddle.) (In more ways than one.) I’ve been thinking about the ontology of “the riddle” since seeing Matt Reeves’s new film The Batman, which offers a total retelling of the story of the Caped Crusader and his struggles to fight crime in Gotham City. This time, he faces off against t…
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At first glance, it seems like the oddest possible pairing of artists and material: actor Robert Downey Jr. and writer/director Shane Black, the motormouth duo behind the cult noir film “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” joining forces yet again for a screen adaptation of the Parker novels, written by Donald E. Westlake under his Richard Stark pseudonym. If you’re unfamiliar with those novels, the underlying premise is brutally simple: Parker is an ice-cold thief who meticulously plans his scores; when things go wrong (and they usually do), he’s just as methodical in killing whoever made the mistake of betraying him this time around. He doesn’t say much, and when he does, he keeps i…
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I began hosting my podcast Making It Up because I’m fascinated with the origin stories of other writers. In planning my show, I knew I didn’t want to interview authors and simply ask the standard stock questions. Rather, I wanted to have free-flowing conversations and hear about the experiences of other writers on their own terms. I would prepare no questions (which, okay, is more lazy than strategy). My goal was to treat each guest like I just met them at cocktail party, pulled them into a corner, and listened to them with all my focus, asking questions only as a reaction to what they were saying. Fifty-plus conversations later, this strategy is working well. I’ve had d…
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Each year, the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) publishes an anthology of crime stories united by a central theme. This year, the theme was “Crime Hits Home.” Ahead of next week’s Edgar Awards, the contributors to the MWA anthology were asked to reflect on the anthology’s theme. Their answers, below, are as surprising and intriguing as one would expect. Keep an eye on CrimeReads in the coming days for more MWA content. Ovidia Yu, “Live Pawns” The theme of “Home” right now makes me think about refugees and how much is left of your identity when the sanctuary you think of as “home” is taken away from you. I also wanted to write about Chinese people—like me—who’ve only …
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I wasn’t a Nancy Drew fan as a child. Nancy’s life was so remote from mine that I couldn’t connect to it. She was wealthy, her widowed father respected her ideas, she went off on her own with her friends to solve crimes and came home to parental praise. I grew up with parents who were widely and deeply read. When they were calm and sober their conversation was witty and erudite. Those days were infrequent: they were prone to rages that were frightening in their violence. My four brothers and I both endured such scathing criticism when we offered opinions that we retreated into silence, and when we spoke, it was in whispers. Also unlike Nancy’s, mine was a circumscribed …
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If you’ve a bad, bad past It finds you out at last. —From “A Bad, Bad Past” (Lyrics by Clifford Orr) Introduction The practice of “drag” or cross-dressing—i.e., performatively adopting the dress and manners of the opposite sex—is familiar in detective fiction published between the First and Second World Wars, where, with devious and often deadly courses in mind, men may mum as women and women as men. Likewise, at all-male Ivy League universities in the first quarter of the twentieth century, young men decked out in drag commonly performed female roles in college theatricals—albeit strictly for comedic, rather than criminal, purposes. While drag acts, as it were, conti…
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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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The original opening credits of “Lou Grant,” the late-1970s, early 1980s TV series about the newspaper business, are of a particular time but also timeless. The credits montage for the first season shows a bird sitting in a tree, trees being chopped down and turned into newsprint, the reporters and editors of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune gathering news and writing stories, rolled-up newspapers being thrown into puddles and onto roofs and, finally, the newspaper being used to line the floor of a birdcage. The life of a newspaper – and a newsroom, for that matter – is very different now than in 1977. To be sure, print editions are still produced and delivered, some…
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I was tired at work the next day, because I’d stayed up later than I should have, working on the Book of Cold Cases. The bus had been ten minutes late, I’d dropped my bus pass, and I’d gotten to work out of sorts. I was on autopilot. Our office was in downtown Claire Lake, and our patients were mostly rich, or at least well-to-do—Claire Lake on the whole was well-to-do, a town of chic kitchen specialty stores and French bistros laid out along the ocean shore. The spectacle I saw from the safety behind my Plexiglas was never that of people digging their nails in for survival, doing their best to get through every day. Instead it was of- ten the foibles of the rich, the on…
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Eli Cranor is a writer’s writer. That’s a complicated tag to hang on someone and it comes with all kinds of implications and suppositions, so let me get this straight up front, too: He’s written the debut novel of the year: Don’t Know Tough (Soho Press). When your friends ask what book you’re reading, and you know that what they’re really asking is for you to tell them about something that they can get excited about, something they can tell other people in their life about and together all of you will enter into some kind of communion over this new, wonderful, unsettling thing – that book, this year, is quite likely to be Cranor’s new one. It should be anyway. It is for m…
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Solitude is a favorite hobby of mine. I’m a true introvert and turning into a bit of a hermit as the years go by, so I can entertain myself for days on end without the need to speak to another human. But even I find isolation to be such a shivery and delicious building block of suspense. The feeling that no one can help you and, in fact, they might not even be able to hear you? Ooo, that gives me goose bumps. But between cell phones and cars and the internet, isolating a protagonist isn’t as easy as it used to be, and bad situations aren’t so scary when you know the character can call 911 at any time. So how to amp up that feeling of a character being utterly alone with …
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My first exposure to How to Steal a Million, William Wyler’s 1966 caper film starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, was via anecdote. I was at a party at a professor’s home in September of my senior year at college, chatting with some graduate students when one brought up what she believed to be the sexiest moment in movie history, the scene in How to Steal a Million where Audrey and Peter’s characters meet for the fist time, when he’s stealing a painting from her house in the dead of night and she catches him. He freezes and lowers the frame he’s holding, staring at her the whole time. “When he looks at her over the painting he’s carrying! Those blue eyes!” But this …
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What is a “monster”? What is monstrosity? The definition depends upon who is doing the defining. The etymology of the word “monster” is complicated. “Monēre” is the root of “monstrum” and means to warn and instruct. Saint Augustine proposed the following interpretation, considering monsters part of the natural design of the world, deliberately created by God for His own reasons: spreading “abroad a multitude of those marvels which are called monsters, portents, prodigies, phenomena . . . They say that they are called ‘monsters,’ because they demonstrate or signify something; ‘portents’ because they portend something; and so forth . . . ought to demonstrate, portend, pre…
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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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“Dark academia is the only kind I know,” a professor friend told me recently. While writing my novel, The Bequest, which begins at a fictional Scottish university, I was inspired in part by my own experience as a PhD student in History, and even more by books like The Secret History. As it turns out, the legacy of Donna Tartt’s debut novel extends far beyond literary circles. Over the past few years, the aesthetic known as Dark Academia, often associated with The Secret History, has become one of the hottest and most pervasive trends on social media, a veritable subculture featuring storied institutions of higher learning, autumn leaves, Gothic architecture, dark décor,…
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As the holidays approach, we’re all looking forward to those big family gatherings. You know what I mean, right? When your large, adoring, boisterous family gets together in love and good will, and it’s all laughter, acceptance, and joyful support. Oh, wait. What’s that? Your family gatherings aren’t like that? They’re fraught with dysfunction, seething with buried secrets and lies, and hidden rivalries? Well – join the club. When we first meet the Maroni clan at the beginning of my twentieth novel SECLUDED CABIN SLEEPS SIX, on the surface everything is glittering and idyllic. Wealthy and successful Hannah and Mako have the perfect sibling relationship, loving and suppor…
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I remember when I first learned that Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes and heels so their feet would fit the glass slipper. Or the first time I read Bluebeard and discovered—alongside his bride—what hid behind the closet door. I realized that many of the fairy tales I grew up on had been altered to hide their claws and teeth and gruesome violence. And yet how our society is built upon such tales. We hunger for them, just as the fairytales are built on hunger—for food, for love, for power, for vengeance. When I was gathering research for my fantasy novel, A River Enchanted, I sifted through pages of Scottish fairy lore, fascinated by the old folktales as well as…
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In the early 1900’s, physicist Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. While the intricacies of Einstein’s theory of relativity might seem daunting, at its core it is actually quite simple: There is no absolute reference point for time and space. Rather, we measure everything in relation to something else. Did one specific point in time come before or after another specific point in time? Where does a particular space sit relative to other spaces? What does it mean for a space to change over relative points in time? To me the real-world connection of space and time is nowhere more apparent than in preserved historical properties. When I was a young child livi…
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Crime! Mystery! Suspense! Oh, my! If this were Oz, crime/mystery/suspense writers would have paved the yellow brick road with vivid descriptions bathed in subtleties; they would have released clues as needed to move the story forward; they would have built in a side path or two that led to a blind alley; and, in the end, they would have lifted the curtain to reveal the Wizard hiding in Emerald City. Pulling back that curtain exposed hidden truths in L. Frank Baum’s story. Yes, truths! Oh, my! Packaged in many ways, truth is the backbone of every story that satisfies the reader, no matter if we write murder mysteries, thrillers with its many subgroups, historical suspense…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Guillermo Martinez, The Oxford Brotherhood (Pegasus) “An intellectual thriller that can be much enjoyed even by those whose grasp of mathematics is limited. If you like your detective stories gore-free, with a strong crossword-solving element, this is for you.” The Times (UK) Paige Shelton, The Burning Pages (Minotaur) “Historical Burns references add spice to a complex series of intertwined mysteries.” Kirkus Reviews Amanda Eyre, The Lifeguards (Ballantine) “Arresting . . . Like a cool lake on a hot day, this story hits the spot.” Publishers Weekly Stacie Murphy, The …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Deon Meyer (transl. K.L. Seegers), The Dark Flood (Atlantic) “A fast-moving South African police procedural . . . The plotlines are tightly knitted together, and the story ends with a nifty twist. A well-crafted blend of suspense, culture, and humor. Meyer is terrific.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review Elle Marr, Strangers We Know (Thomas and Mercer) “…the increasingly tense plot takes turns the reader won’t see coming. Marr is a writer to watch.” Publishers Weekly Laura Jarratt, Two Little Girls (Sourcebooks Landmark) “This heartfelt story grabs the reader from the very sta…
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When writing my debut novella, Something Is Always Happening Somewhere, my goal was to make readers feel the sort of haunting, full-bodied mental and physical anguish I felt while grieving the loss of my mother, father, and grandmother. And based on some of the Goodreads and NetGalley reviews I’ve been getting for the book so far, which range in sentiment from “this was a beautiful depiction of grief,” to “I didn’t feel as a reader I need more misery. I was glad to finish reading in the end,” it seems like maybe I achieved that goal. I lost my mom in 2013, my dad in 2017, and my gramma in 2018. That’s my core family right there, all gone in a relatively short span of tim…
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