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 first novel, Dust and Shadow, is subtitled An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. In it, Sherlock Holmes tries with every ounce of his sinewy being to both apprehend London’s most notorious serial killer and to prevent further graphic slaughter of innocent (so to speak) women. I wrote this because I have read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries so many times since I was ten that I wouldn’t be surprised if an ocular specialist found “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” emblazoned in tiny script on my retinas. While heavily historically researched, by definition Dust and Shadow is completely derivative. It’s an ode to the Great Detective and the Good Doctor…
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Patricia Highsmith first met Kathryn Hamill Cohen at a party hosted by Rosalind Constable in New York. Kathryn, an ex-Ziegfeld girl, was twenty-four, beautiful and from a moneyed family. Her husband, Dennis, founded the Cresset Press (later an imprint of Bantam Books) which would eventually publish UK editions of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Kathryn had an impressive professional life of her own. Following her early years as an actress, she read medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge, and, before being employed as a hospital physician, she worked as a personal assistant to Aneurin Bevan, the British Minister of Health who was instru…
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When I was six, I wrote a story called “An Adventure of the Past.” A fast-paced thriller (written in multiple colors), the story goes like this: a knight tries to save a lady accused of witchcraft, is given four days to prove her innocence, instantly falls in love and proposes, she says yes, they get arrested for witchcraft and burned at the stake, and their ashes live happily ever after. Whew. It’s the closest I ever got to a happy ending. All the stories I wrote as a kid were quite dreadful and sad. There was one about a bunch of animal friends trying to find the sea. A lot of them curled up and died along the way. There was another about a wistful girl who was actual…
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Near the end of his enthralling 2019 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe recalls the frustration he felt while trying to solve a cold case that had stymied detectives for almost fifty years. His main concern? That those who knew “the whole truth of this dark saga”—the 1972 kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of ten—“would take it with them to their graves. Then, just as I was completing the manuscript, I made a startling discovery.” His digging essentially solved the case. If Say Nothing confirmed that he’s among the finest true-crime storytellers working today, Keefe’s new book suggests he…
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Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA tells an epic story that almost nobody knows. An American reporter living in Southeast Asia, Winn introduces readers to Wa State, which has spent a half-century building a thriving economy centered on heroin and methamphetamine. Wa State is in Myanmar, but with a population of 600,000 and an authoritarian regime that collects taxes, operates schools and polices its borders, it’s essentially independent. There are lots of lurid tales about the Wa, who once made a practice of beheading intruders. But the book’s bigger story involves America’s hapless war on drugs. Winn spent several year…
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“You any tougher than you look?” “Hell yes! At least, I used to be.” “I used to be. We all used to be.” Harry Ross (Paul Newman) was, as he describes it, a cop for twenty years, a PI for five, and then a drunk. When an errand to retrieve the wayward daughter of film stars Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon) goes awry due to Harry’s inattention and subsequent injury, the Ameses allow him to recuperate in an apartment above the garage in their Art Deco mansion. Two years later, Harry remains, having settled into a cushioned role as a handyman and sort of kept friend to Jack. His mutual attraction with Catherine adds a pinch of spice to bland days of…
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Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is challenged by knowledge of something greater, and tested by a newfound bond with a distressed young person. Via these characters, the films in this trilogy tend to pair and interrogate the relationship between two normally unrelated topics: religion and climate change (First Reformed, 2017), gambling and the War on Terror…
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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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The novels of Paul Vidich are far removed from the sheen and opulence of James Bond, and feel more at home with the wry wit and stuff air of John le Carré’s George Smiley. In Vidich’s world, few can be trusted and the double-crosses often become triples, creating a gray, murky world of uncertainty and intrigue that propels his lush prose. Vidich’s latest, The Matchmaker (available February 1, from Pegasus), could very well be his best yet—and it features some unexpected influences. I had the chance to discuss the new novel, Vidich’s views on the spy genre, and what role—if any—comic books play in his literary DNA. ALEX SEGURA: Paul, your latest, THE MATCHMAKER, feels lik…
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The recent death of Joan Didion caused me to visit my local bookstore and buy her essay collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I couldn’t find my old copy so I made a pilgrimage to McNally Jackson in Soho and picked up the book from the shelf they’d prepared with copies of all her work. Few essays have left as deep an impression on me as “Goodbye to All That,” the final essay in the book. It’s opening line is haunting: “It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.” Her essay was written after she’d left New York, driven away by the city’s intensity, but it is a tribute to all the things that every year draw young people to the Emerald City – amb…
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(Adapted from the introduction to The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 3, edited by Paula Guran.) * Poverty, inequality, climate change, violence, disease and so many other evils—real life is frightening. Why, then, would anyone want to read dark fantasy or horror? One traditional view of why we enjoy horror—because it gives us a feeling that bad stuff can be overcome and order restored—may be true, but today’s dark fiction often challenges and discomforts, even in these challenging and uncomfortable times. The fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King and many others arose after the societal nightmares of the first world war and a worldwide influenza pa…
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What is it about trains? What is it about them that fires the imagination, that suggests to those of a certain disposition the possibility of danger lurking behind every seat and in every carriage? There is, undoubtedly, something in the collective experience of a journey that lends itself to storytelling, and then of course the tantalizing proximity to strangers of every stripe. The chance meeting, whether fleeting or prolonged, the accidental brush of hands as the train hurtles around a sharp bend, a casual conversation in the bar car taking an unexpected turn. In a letter she wrote to her friend Marc Brandel in 1985, Patricia Highsmith confessed to thrilling to the id…
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The first time we meet Irene Barnes—eighty-year-old widow, retired dental receptionist, loyal friend, voracious reader, and possibly my favourite of all the characters in A Slow Fire Burning—she is sorting through a pile of books. The books in question used to belong to Irene’s neighbour, Angela, who has recently died. Now, as Irene flicks through the pages of Angela’s books, she has to decide which to keep and which to pass on to the charity shop. This, as any book lover will tell you, is neither a rapid nor an uncomplicated process; there are many factors to consider. For Irene, the usual considerations (Has she read it? Did she love it? Does she own it? Is this copy a…
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The morning newspapers offered precious few developments about the amusement park massacre. The police had discovered the robbers’ vehicle at a rest stop, abandoned and burned. The police said they had leads on the suspects. They were probably lying. I’ve spent fifteen years in this peculiar profession, Miller mused as he sipped his coffee at the little shop across the street from his apartment. Never had one screw up quite this badly. At least I got all the money. Once Miller finished his coffee, he walked south. He was dressed in jeans and an N-1 deck jacket a little too warm for the weather. He blended in with the workmen swarming toward the docks. His heart leapt as…
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Peg Tyre and Peter Blauner are New York Times bestselling authors who have over a dozen published novels and multiple awards between them. They’ve also been married for 34 years. Their novels STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT and THE INTRUDER, originally published in the 90s, are both being released for the first time in hardcover by Dead Sky Publishing. Peter Blauner: Most people these days mainly know you as a responsible and respectable journalist who writes very seriously about subjects like education. They have no idea you published a pair of funny, scary, sexy crime novels back in the 1990s. You want to tell them how that happened or should I spill the beans? Peg Tyre: Well,…
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Beautiful Penang, on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, by the Malacca Strait. Its densely populated capital of George Town is a feast of colours and heritage buildings. If geography is destiny then Penang and George Town are evidence of the theory – deemed vital to the East India Company, the navies of a half dozen colonial countries and any number of pirates. The Straits of Malacca remain one of the world’s key waterways, linking east and west, but also one of the most pirate infested too. It’s had some interesting visitors over the years too. Penang-born Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors (2023) is set in 1921 and mixes real and fictional characters and events…
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I became a private investigator because of my face. It’s an ordinary-looking face, but if I ask “How are you?” sometimes people start crying. “I’m getting a divorce,” they say. “He ended our marriage by text.” Or “I was just diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease.” Or a man grips a packet of peas in the frozen food aisle and asks, “How do you cook these? My wife died last month.” Or an immaculately dressed woman suddenly tells me, “I hate my job so much I want to kill myself. I’ve been saving up Ambiens.” Then we sit on a concrete curb, or stand in line at a train station, or clutch clear plastic cups at a party as the near-stranger in front of me dabs away mascara with…
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The thief of perfume is, in fact, one of the most active of the twenty-first century. In the UK, cosmetics/perfume was the fourth most-shoplifted category in 2019 (after packed meat, razor blades, and whisky/champagne/gin). In the US, perfume is first on the list of products pinched by women, and an AdWeek list of the ten most shoplifted items ranks Chanel No. 5 at No. 9 (a few notches down from Axe body spray). Just ask Mrs. Thyra G. Youngstrom. In a 1959 news article, she’s reported as having discovered her West Hartford, Connecticut, home had been ransacked. It seemed everything was out of place, but nothing was gone: until she noticed she was poorer two bottles of Ch…
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My mother was a private eye. She was petite and elegant, she could shoot and drive, and she was a crack investigator. She was born in Paris in 1933 to an American banker and a Connecticut socialite and lived there until the Germans drove them out. She arrived in Manhattan speaking only French, and all she wanted to do was return to France and fight in the French Resistance. She was seven. Everywhere she went in New York City she would listen to groups of people talking and try to make out from their tone and gestures who was a Nazi spy. She had the investigative bent early on. Once she had kids she got her P.I. license. About a week later the FBI called. They won…
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Everyone loves an odd couple. “The Odd Couple” proves this—the premise is right there in the title—and for mystery lovers, there’s the brilliant Sherlock Holmes and slow-to-the-solution Dr. John Watson. (Although the movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce went way too far in making Watson a dunderhead.) But while Rathbone and Bruce was arguably the most notable on-screen pairing in mystery films, starring in 14 (!) movies between 1939 and 1946, they had competition as “most unlikely thriller partners” from Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Lorre and Greenstreet were, of course, memorably teamed in “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941 and “Casablanca” in 1943. They wer…
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On October 4, 2022, legendary author Peter Robinson, creator of the long-running Inspector Banks series, passed away after a brief illness. Beginning with Gallows View in 1987, Robinson delivered a novel in the series, or short story collection, almost every year until his death. He also managed to find the time to write three stand-alones. All told, he completed 34 books, 31 of them either Inspector Banks novels or related short story collections. His new, posthumously published Banks novel, Standing in the Shadows is now available. And while all of Robinson’s Banks stories can be read out of order, this book also completes the “Zelda” trilogy, and represents some of Ro…
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At the beginning of my new novel The Hollow Tree, a man stands on the roof of a Scottish hotel. It is night, and the distant mountains are hidden. It is rural Argyll, and the stars above are clear in their spiralling array. The nearby sea murmurs, but in the dark it is invisible. The man is naked, and his toes grip the stony edge of the battlements of the baronial tower. Behind him is safety. Before him is a sheer drop into darkness. He is not alone. He turns around to face Shona Sandison, a journalist, who is staying at the hotel for a wedding. To her surprise, she can see his chest is adorned with a complex tattoo. But it is not a picture or decoration on his exposed f…
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No one wrote more mysteries, nor more popular ones, nor better ones, set on Cape Cod than Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909-1976), best-known for her series of twenty-four novels featuring Asey Mayo, the amateur detective known locally and to readers as “the Codfish Sherlock.” Mayo’s first appearance was in The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), which sold out its first printing of 5,000 copies, an exceptionally strong sale for a first novel during the Great Depression (and not too bad in the present day). In the words of the English novelist Nicholas Blake (the pseudonym of C. Day Lewis), Mayo is “an eccentric individual” who Taylor describes as “a typical New Englander . . . the kind …
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After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 12, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in the literary spotlight, retreating to a home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and beginning a reclusive lifestyle, he assured The New York Times in a rare interview in 1974, that “publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold more than 65 million copies. His self-imposed exile was hardly acceptable to many among the throngs of readers lon…
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Haven’t we all felt a little murderous when we’ve missed our train? Crime novelists certainly do. There’s a legacy of murder mysteries taking place on various forms of transport – from classics such as Agatha Christie’s train-set Murder on the Orient Express to new blockbusters like Falling by TJ Newman. I’m stamping my ticket to board this club of writers with my new novel, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect, which got me thinking. Why is transportation so perfect for a murder mystery? The answer: Proximity, Pressure, Punctuality, and Peril. 1. Proximity Enclosed spaces. Trapped suspects. Doomed victims. These are all essential for any good murder mystery but they are…
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