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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Like many young readers, I first encountered the literary device of the unreliable narrator in J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. I remember feeling frustrated and confused by The Catcher in the Rye, which I read on my own one summer. Now, I blame my frustration mostly on the fact that I read it independently, away from the benefits of classroom discussion that might have been envigorating or at least clarifying. But at the time, I decided I hated being lied to or mislead in fiction, did not have any interest in a protagonist who wasn’t going to come clean to me from page one. But when I picked up The Perks of Being a Wallflower a few years later, the similar deployment o…
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People often ask me if I planned out my Gaslight Mystery Series, which is now—with the publication of Murder on Madison Square—25 books long. The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! In the first place, how could I have ever imagined my series would go on for so long? I was thrilled when my publisher asked for 3 books on my first contract. My series will be at least 3 books long! Maybe 6 if I’m really, really lucky! Can you imagine anyone thinking, “Well, I’d better plan for what’s going to happen twenty or more books from now just in case the series goes that long.” How often does any series go on that long? So no, I didn’t plan, but I was lucky enough to have created characters in…
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Yesterday, we ran the first part of an epic roundtable discussion with 38 nominees for the Edgar Awards on the state of the crime novel. Today, in part two of the discussion, authors talk genre classics, publishing industry issues, crossover proliferation, and of course, what to add to your TBR list. Keep an eye on the site on Thursday evening for more Edgars coverage. __________________________________ Molly Odintz: If you could pick one classic crime author to recommend to new mystery readers, who would it be? __________________________________ Naomi Hirahara (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Clark and Division): I’ll have to select my go-to—Chester Himes…
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Soon Wiley’s debut novel, When We Fell Apart, is sublimely haunting and will linger in your mind long after you turn the last page. After a young woman disappears in Seoul, her ex-pat boyfriend searches for her, and in the process, for himself. Ahead of the book’s publication, Soon Wiley was kind enough to answer a few questions over email. Molly Odintz: This is your debut, but it doesn’t feel like a debut—the writing is so sophisticated. What’s your writing process? Soon Wiley: First off, thanks for the high praise! Like a lot of writers, my first foray into fiction was with the short story form. During my MFA program, I was incredibly fortunate to have some excellent …
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Something happened on my way to writing my next novel, The Fervor (Putnam): it became personal. The Fervor marks the first time I’ve written a main character with the same ethnicity as mine, Asian American. I had no idea what a different experience this would be. Like my previous historical horror novels, The Fervor has multiple POV characters. The main character is Meiko Briggs, a Japanese woman who was sent by her family to America to wed a Japanese man in the Seattle area. (In the years before the war, there were 30 Japanese men for every Japanese woman on the west coast and a thriving matchmaking business back in Japan.) Her life is upended when she falls in love an…
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In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. In the following passage, she examines Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place and the cultural perception of a link between returned veterans and criminal behavior. ___________________________________ Upside-Down Cases Among the most disturbing “upside-down” cases of postwar noir is Dixon Steele, the serial-killer protagonist of Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place, published in 1947 and adapted, with considerable…
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Howdy, crime friends! It’s that special time of the year when crime writers, publishers, and critics dress up in their best evening wear and head to the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square on Thursday, April 28, for the 76th Edgar Awards, hosted by Mystery Writers of America. Ahead of the award ceremony, as has been our tradition here at CrimeReads, I sent out questions to all the nominees and special award winners for a wide-ranging discussion on the past, present, and future of the genre. I’ve divided the responses into two parts—below, you’ll find a more craft-oriented part of the roundtable, while tomorrow’s post will include takes on genre and industry concerns. S…
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I am a lifelong lover and obsessive consumer of all kinds of genre fiction in many mediums, from the original Star Trek series to yakuza and samurai films, from JG Ballard’s sci-fi nightmares to PG Wodehouse’s sparkling farces. But if there is one genre form that attains a kind of Platonic perfection, the genre of genres, I believe it has to be the mystery, specifically the detective story. In The Wild Life, the newest novel in my Bouncer series, Joe Brody, a strip-club bouncer who sidelines as a fixer for New York’s mob bosses, is given a new kind of assignment: detective. Sort of. A number of the city’s most sought after sex workers have disappeared and the bosses fear…
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Over the last ten years or so there’s been a growing recognition that Don Winslow is after something epic with his crime fiction. Take that word, epic, however you like, and it pretty much applies, whether you’re talking about his sweeping indictment of the War on Drugs (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border, among others), his look at corruption and abuse inside the NYPD (The Force), or the old surf noirs (The Dawn Patrol, The Gentleman’s Hour). Now you can add the more classical variation to that list, as Winslow brings out a new novel charting the clashes of New England organized crime in the 1980s and beyond, while mirroring the movements of Greek epic poetry, …
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Dick Lipez—who published as Richard Stevenson, his first and middle names—spent the last days of his life listening to Ella Fitzgerald, receiving family and friends at the Berkshire home he shared with his husband of 32 years, the artist, Joe Wheaton, responding to emails and phone calls from more distant friends, and kicking around ideas for a new book. He died on March 16, age 83, from pancreatic cancer. He was my friend of many years and fellow gay mystery writer. I’m publishing one of his last books, Knock Off the Hat at the end of April through Amble Press. Dick’s first mystery, Death Trick, published in 1981 introduced the world to Donald Strachey, a gay PI based i…
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The appearance of E.C.R. Lorac’s Two-Way Murder as a British Library Crime Classic represents a landmark in vintage detective fiction publishing. A novel by a well-regarded female author is finally seeing the light of day after being ‘lost’ for more than sixty years. The Crime Classics series has achieved astonishing success around the world, as long-neglected books have returned to print in highly collectible new editions with lovely period-style cover artwork. A very wide range of books originally published between the 1920s and the 1960s have found an enthusiastic readership in the twenty-first century. But Two-Way Murder is the very first novel in the series that has …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alma Katsu, The Fervor (G. P. Putnam) “Katsu has no peer when it comes to atmospheric, detail-rich historical horror, but this volume is more unsettling than anything she’s written yet, because its demons attack readers uncomfortably close to home. A must-read for all, not just genre fans.” Library Journal, starred review David Gordon, The Wild Life (Mysterious Press) “In the caper tradition popularized by Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block, Gordon uses humor to good effect… Delightful misadventures include a wild chase on a yellow-and-orange Ducati motorcycle and a luxury car h…
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My love for twists started at a young age when I cracked open my first Lois Duncan novel. I couldn’t believe the thrill I could get from reading a book, nor how exciting it was to follow along with a story while making my own predictions as to how it would end. Then I started encountering the ‘knock you off your feet’ twists in books and in film. You know? The twist that leaves your jaw hanging open, that has you questioning how you didn’t see it coming, or how the writer pulled it off. I’ve always been a reader that picks up on the clues carefully laid out and the red herrings that were tossed in to pique my suspicion, so when a twist comes along that I don’t see coming,…
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On March 11, 2020, I was at the gorgeous Kitchener Public Library for an event. My debut, Woman on the Edge, had just published in the United States a week earlier, after hitting #1 on the Canadian bestseller lists. After two decades of writing book after book and countless rejections, my dream of being a traditionally published author had come true in ways I could never have imagined or expected. I felt grateful, excited, and full of hope and joy. The Coronavirus had been all over the news since January, and things were getting worse. I’d hesitated about attending an in-person event but decided if we were all “socially distant”—that new expression we were all uncomforta…
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As everyone who reads this website doubtlessly knows—to the point that it might not even be worth saying—there is nothing in this world more delightful than a murder mystery set in the English countryside. Especially if that mystery takes place during the spring, especially if the sleuths on the case are plucky amateurs, especially if there is some sort of riddle at the center of the whole thing. It was with joy and hope in my heart I began watching the new miniseries, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, a show written and directed by Hugh Laurie for the streaming service BritBox, adapting Agatha Christie’s 1934 comic mystery of the same name. In this rollicking novel, the centr…
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April’s international titles are all distinguished by stunning writing and a noir sensibility, and include, unusually, two nonfiction titles. This month, take a journey from Mexico to Ukraine, France to Lebanon, Chile to an unnamed East Asian country, for a perfect reminder that the particulars of setting may be quite specific, but obsession, greed, envy, and need are shared the whole world over. Fernanda Melchor, Paradais Translated by Sophie Hughes (New Directions) In the luxury community of Paradais, two teenagers, one rich and overweight, the other poor and working as the community’s gardener, drink together and bond over their shared obsession with a woman in th…
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When you think of the British agent with a license to kill, seducing his way around the world, keeping the rest of us safe, you likely don’t think of children. This is probably a good thing since the source novels are most definitely of their era, rife with casual sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and rape. While the films do a little better in some of these areas, they’re not exactly blameless. It’s for these reasons that perhaps the idea of a teenage Bond isn’t something that instantly springs to mind as a great idea. Yet, as you’ll see, it’s been a long sought after market that the keepers of the Bond legacy have repeatedly tried to reach, with varying degrees of s…
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It’s almost impossible to think of E.L. Doctorow as underrated. His third novel The Book of Daniel propelled him into “the first rank of American writers,” in the words of New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and the sensational critical and public reaction to his follow-up book Ragtime ensured that he would stay there. He won major prizes for his novels, including two PEN/Faulkner Awards and a Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2013. He received criticism for how he fictionalized historical figures, and not all his books were critical or commercial successes. But by the time Doctorow published his final novel Andrew’s Brai…
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David Joy is the author of the novels The Weight Of This World, The Line That Held Us, When These Mountains Burn, and Where All Light Tends to Go, which will be made into a film directed by Ben Young, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Robin Wright. This installment of Shop Talk ventures well off the beaten path. That makes a lot of sense, considering David lives way up in the mountains of North Carolina. So far out, he had to drive twenty miles just to call me via Zoom. He’d also gotten tied up with some ducks the day before, which seems like the perfect spot to kick this thing off. Eli Cranor: Tell me about these ducks? David Joy: There’s a guy had a bunch of these Peki…
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There’s nothing quite like sinking into a long-running book series, knowing you have multiple adventures in which to watch the characters grow, and the mysteries unravel, and the romance blossom. Series allow authors to delve deeper into their characters—both primary and secondary, to establish complex subplots, and build expansive worlds, to truly immerse the reader in a new universe. However, once I began doing research for this article, I discovered that truly long-running series—those that last for a minimum of ten books—are far fewer than I’d anticipated. And narrowing the field further to examine only my subgenre of historical mysteries—those set in the past when t…
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Growing-up in New York in the 1970s, parts of city had become heroin paradises. Whether the junkies were Vietnam vets who returned to the states with a monkey (addiction) on their back or homegrown hop heads who shot up in public school bathrooms, it was impossible to walk through town without seeing a runny nose, arm scratching, head nodding addict. As a boy dwelling between Hamilton Heights and Harlem, I saw my share of drug casualties hanging out in the middle of the block, standing over trashcan bonfires, lurking in doorways, slouching on Riverside Drive benches or roaming wild eyed in the pursuit of cash, smack and a place to get high. It wasn’t always easy to avoid …
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best nonfiction crime books. * Mark Arsenault, The Imposter’s War: The Press, Propaganda, and the Newsman Who Battled for the Minds of America (Pegasus) A lively, engaging history of the lead-up to WWI and German efforts to infiltrate and influence the American media, hoping to discourage the country from throwing in its lot with Britain and France. Arsenault zeroes in on the era’s complex games of espionage and propaganda, focusing on one newsman in particular, John Rathom of The Providence Journal, who became a crusader exposing German plots, but who had a secret history and secret sources of his own. M. Chris Fabricant…
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Dear miss Howie I saw a picture in the family circle and liked the looks of you. Thought I would like for you to correspond with me. I am single not been married but would like to if I could find the rite girl ha ha. Maybe that you. I hope it is. Please write to me. Send picture of your self and I will do the same. I would like to come up and see you if that all rite with you. I have been in Dakota a few years now and liked it all rite. How is crops. They look good here. I am 43 years old and have brown eyes and dark haire and weigh 175 and 6 feet tall. Write. Tell me all a bought your self. I will cease now. …
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There’s something about a coming-of-age book or film that gets me every time. It’s the yearning, I think. I love the wistful, romantic feelings they inspire, and how they crystalize what is usually a gradual, drawn-out process into a definable moment in time. Coming-of-age stories are about endings—of youth, or innocence, or simply the person you once were—endings that tilt toward a new beginning. They represent a growing awareness of one’s belonging in a darker, more complicated world, so it makes sense that a crime might be the triggering event in such stories. When I sat down to write Pay Dirt Road, I wanted to capture the feeling of being young and aimless. My protag…
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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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