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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“I may not be capable of love. I want something romantic.” This line from the diaries of Patricia Highsmith is the central postulation of the new documentary about her, Loving Highsmith, written and directed by Eva Vitija. Highsmith, the twentieth-century writer responsible for the novels Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and the novella The Price of Salt, is perhaps known best as a tough, brooding writer drawn to menacing, manipulative characters, as well as for her confident and full life as a gay woman, apparently nearly unfazed by the cultural hangups of her era. Highsmith left behind a rich literary legacy and a vast archive of marginalia, and Vitija’s …
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One of the important components of mysteries is a sleuth who gets out and about. They need to hear gossip, see what’s going on in town, know the townspeople, and make note of strangers. In my Domestic Diva Mysteries, Sophie Winston is an event planner. She knows all kinds of people from hotel security to restaurateurs and people who attend elegant galas. In my Paws & Claws Mysteries, Holly Miller runs an inn with her grandmother, which keeps her busy meeting visitors and their dogs and cats. But one of the best ways to be involved with the locals and visitors is to own a shop. Because everyone needs to shop. Whether you prefer to spend hours lingering in a bookstore,…
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Have you ever thought about what you’d eat for your death row meal? I have, and let me tell you, it’s not a kale salad. In no way am I dissing healthy food. My daughter works on an organic vegetable farm, and our family eats baked tofu cubes the way other people eat Pringles. But when it comes to food that fills your heart as well as your stomach, most of us want to indulge. Food is a way to connect with what makes us alive—the pleasure of a profound sensory experience that is available only to the living. Sure, there are other ways to animate the human spirit. Dancing with your toddler in the living room. Sniffing the sweet scent of a rose petal. Watching Idris Elba pu…
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When they went around the counter and started down the hall, Sage stopped in her tracks. If the attendants hadn’t been holding her up, she would have fallen to her knees. Young girls, ranging in age from children to gangly teenagers, lined each side of the hallway. They were crowded together by twos and threes in beds and chairs and wheelchairs. Some of the beds were more like carts, with large wheels and handles for pushing, and several of the wheelchairs were made of wood, with rusting wheels and thin armrests, as if they’d been pulled from a Victorian museum. Many of the wheelchairs had long, wooden boxes in place of seats, like coffins without lids, in which girls la…
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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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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Gary Phillips (ed.), South Central Noir (Akashic) “South Central Noir, edited by Gary Phillips, is a remarkable anthology of fourteen original tales set in South Central Los Angeles. The stories are vivid, atmospheric, thought-provoking, and entertaining with angry a dud from the first page to the last.” –Mystery Scene Magazine Stephen King, Fairy Tale (Scribner) “A grand, and naturally strange, entertainment from the ever prolific King…A tale that’s at once familiar and full of odd and unexpected twists—vintage King, in other words.” –Kirkus Reviews Craig Johnson, To Hell and Back (Viking) “. . . those happy …
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Sometimes we want simple. Black hats versus white. Monsters versus humans. Nazis versus…well, everyone else. In a world of crime fiction, where order is upended and moral codes are broken, readers can appreciate a story that draws clear distinctions between right and wrong. Sometimes we want stories where the villains are villains and the heroes are heroes. And sometimes, we want complicated. The tough protagonist with a mysterious past has been a common trope since at least the pulp fiction of the 1920s and the advent of film noir. Over time, the protagonists of suspense fiction became more complex, more haunted, more damaged. It seems only natural that the villains w…
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For about three years, beginning in 1936, Eliot Ness kept tabs on my grandfather Fred P. Stashower. According to information in Ness’s possession, Fred P. Stashower was “an old egg-tossing vandal.” This, I admit, was news to me. Eliot Ness, who rose to fame during the Prohibition era as “the man who got Al Capone,” kept tabs on a lot of people. His private papers, now preserved at Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society, feature a rogue’s gallery of bootleggers, rumrunners, racketeers, and gangsters of all stripes. Scrapbooks from his Chicago days chronicle his storied career as the leader of “the Untouchables,” the legendary team of Prohibition agents who smash…
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No, I don’t mean The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist who wrote his foundational text on military strategy in the 5th Century BCE. What I want to discuss is how films set in wartime have influenced my writing—how the visualization of war and its attendant violence onscreen has made its way onto the written page. I’m eighteen books into the Billy Boyle World War II mystery series, which means my protagonist has seen a lot of fighting and reacted emotionally to what he’s endured, and inflicted. To write this article, I considered which films over the years informed my vision of what the experience of combat in the Second World War must have been like.…
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The average victim of a kidnapping is dead less than 48 hours from the point of abduction. Captivity is an unusual choice for a murderer, both in life and in fiction. It requires resources, introduces variables, and produces a bizarre form of intimacy. What scares us most about captivity-centered narratives is that they break the immediacy and predictability of even the grisliest murders. The corpse is to be expected, the shock is rote. Captivity spools out endless time, interstitial between the disruption of normal life and the end—whatever the end may be. Captivity breaks the clock, and renders horrors we couldn’t have dreamt. I was working my way through college at a …
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Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal snuck a final look at his notes before the cameras rolled. Trim, early forties, with piercing blue eyes, van Rosenthal was an anchor for Nieuwsuur, a highly popular news show in the Netherlands. He had been a correspondent for the network and had reported from all over the world, including six years in Washington covering the Obama presidency. He spoke fluent English and had a reputation as a dogged interviewer, and he knew he would need to be on his game for the guest now dialing into the studio. Van Rosenthal had dealt with Julian Assange before, once spending a maddening week in Iceland, where WikiLeaks had a temporary base of operations, t…
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One of the great joys of discovering a skillfully constructed novel is the story’s ability to put the readers inside the skin of the characters. We get to live in the place and time in which the fictional world unfolds. In the case of Frances Crane’s The Turquoise Shop, readers travel back to the 1940s and a small town in northern New Mexico filled with pleasantly quirky folks and a pair of murders to be solved. Novels give us the gift of seeing the world through new eyes, the eyes of strangers or, in the case of a series, the eyes of characters we’ve come to know. Well-crafted books entertain and, if we are in the hand of a writer of Crane’s caliber, teach us somethin…
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At some point, I quit true crime. I quit because I’d lived too close to one. In 2003, my father murdered his girlfriend, her teenage daughter, and committed suicide. I was twenty-seven years old. As his oldest surviving heir, I inherited his crime scene of a house. And the cars that littered the lawn. The Petri dish of a swimming pool. The stink of decomp. Blowflies. Nightmares. For seventeen years after my father’s crimes and death, I worked on a book about it—my memoir, No One Crosses the Wolf. Psychologist Carl Jung suggests we occasionally cross “the swampland of the soul”—we should consider our darknesses from time to time. A life examined, and all that. But Jung d…
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Why do some murder mysteries sell more copies than others? There are countless possible explanations. I’d like to focus on one: the impossibility of the murder. Perhaps the most recognizable example of an impossible murder is the locked-room mystery. But there are infinite possibilities. At the heart is a murder that, based on what the reader knows coming into the novel and at least in the early pages, seems utterly impossible based on the known laws of science and first impressions of the characters. So why do impossible murders sell? I have a few theories. #1: They blend genres Stories featuring impossible murders go beyond the well-worn paths of police procedurals. T…
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed (Pamela Dorman/Viking Books) “The mysteries are complex, the characters vivid, and the whole thing is laced with warm humor and—remarkably, considering the body count—good feeling. Your next must-read mystery series.” –Kirkus Joel Shulkin, MD, Toxic Effects (Blackstone) “A riveting adventure…Memorable characters and a chilling plot are certain to keep the reader turning pages deep into the night.” –Leonard Goldberg Hailey Piper, No Gods For Drowning (Agora) “Readers will be in horror heaven with this mesmerizing, original, and breathtaking debut.” –Library Journal Susa…
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Let’s be honest, few of us will age as well as Florence. Central Italy, the Tuscan capital, the birthplace of the Renaissance, perhaps more great art per square foot than any other place on earth. Local authors Dante Alighieri and Niccolò Machiavelli gave us visions of hell and a guide to how to be duplicitous but always victorious. You’d have to work hard to find a more beautiful city of over a million people. And of course there’s some great crime writing too. Let’s start in the medieval urban marvel that was Florence, the city state. DV Bishop’s Cesare Aldo books. City of Vengeance (2021) takes us back to the winter of 1536. A prominent Jewish moneylender is murdere…
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–Featured photograph by Maggie Wrigley My long love affair with Brooklyn began years back when I, a Harlem born and breed kid, took acting classes at a storefront drama school in “do or die” Bed-Stuy back in the blaxploitation ‘70s when I was a 12-year-old kid who thought I might get hired to play Diahann Carroll’s son or perhaps perform the nice kid part before the protagonist became a ruthless criminal. I missed the call when they were auditioning kids for The Education of Sonny Carson, but I did write a play about a plane being hijacked for the class to perform, which put me on different creative path. Years later, in 1981, I attended the Brooklyn Campus of Long Isla…
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Eventually, my inner Charlie came up with something. As my dad used to say, “I’m going to do something, even if it’s wrong.” I decided I wouldn’t wait around for Felix to finish his business. I coasted into May Town right before noon, parked near the bank, and walked across the street to the donut shop. There was a red open sign made of curlicue neon in the large display window. As I watched, it went out, and one that said closed came on. By eleven a.m., the donut crowd thinned so much, Saucer Donuts wrapped things up. I knew that much from reading about them online. I hadn’t made as good a time driving over as I had hoped to. The door was not locked. When I went insi…
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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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What happens when a well-known children’s book author switches genres after decades of writing fantasy and historical fiction for middle grade and young adult readers? Kathryn Lasky the award-winning children’s book author is doing just that. As the author of Guardian of Ga’Hoole the New York Times bestselling series that was turned into a Warner Brothers film The Legend of The Guardians directed by Zack Snyder, she is now writing an adult mystery Light on Bone (Woodhall Press). The story is set in New Mexico and features Georgia O’Keeffe as an amateur sleuth. ___________________________________ The first thought that sometimes comes to some people’s minds might be, ‘W…
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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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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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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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