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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THE DEVIL’S PREDECESSORS For as long as humans have been able to tell one another stories, there have been tales of malevolent and chaotic spirits. The world was full of distressing events that people could not understand—whether it was famine by blights or deaths from mysterious internal causes. To explain life’s most fearful elements, cultures worldwide developed the idea of superhuman beings that sometimes preyed on humanity and engineered misfortunes. As a means of countering these malicious forces, many invoked protection from benevolent gods through prayers and rituals. Such early spiritual traditions also helped uphold the social order: whenever there was conflict…
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We’re a year into the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of city dwellers have fled their urban apartments for suburban spaces. It is, if you live outside the city limits, a seller’s market. New York City, where I live, is in the middle of an all-time low-rent bonanza. It is a crazy time for real estate, that’s no doubt. If you’re like me, the pandemic has increased your habit of casually browsing Zillow and Realtor.com listings (well, I look at StreetEasy, a site for NY real estate only, but you get the picture), wondering what it would feel like to leave my apartment and swap it for a bigger space. I have dogs who would love a backyard. I would love a bigger closet, or, i…
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I think it’s safe to say that becoming an expert in Shakespeare’s plays presents difficulties. What would “expertise” entail? Does you need to know every consistency and inconsistency in all the versions of every play cobbled together in the First Folios (pluralized because all the extant versions are also slightly different)? What about wordplay rooted in local pronunciation of the era, which sounded a little like current English in areas of Ireland or England’s West Country? Should you know the etymology of every single word—if Shakespeare didn’t allegedly coin it—and everything that word alluded to at the historical moment in which each play was written, a date that’s …
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The young woman, still new to San Francisco, descended onto Market Street with a dangerous shopping list. She was slim and very pretty, with a long neck, wide cheekbones, and a sharp chin. She likely would have been dressed in a frilled blouse with a high neckline, a meticulously tailored coat, and a long flowing skirt that just cleared the ground, like most of the women shopping along the busiest commercial street in the city. Her hair would have been pinned up and tucked under a brimmed hat trimmed with flowers or bows. She came from a distinguished family, was educated at pricy schools, and carried herself with an easy grace, though on the inside she was heartsick,…
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There is something grizzled, world-weary, and wise about Charlie Cole (Natasha Lyonne), the protagonist of Poker Face, Peacock’s new ten-episode detective series developed by Lyonne and writer-director Rian Johnson. She is a compact amalgam of a whole TV guide’s worth of ultra-cool, unpretentious detective characters. Both odd and slick, kooky and badass, spacy and focused, she has the canny, street-smart aura and vaguely Brooklyn dialect of Frank Columbo, the laconic, chill sensibilities and trailer-living habits of Jim Rockford, and the outwardly-rumpled appearance and insouciant supermarket-shopping patterns of Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski. Like all those guys, Charlie…
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I am a pony. But not just any pony. I am a pony who is bent on revenge. I am the Iago of ponies, a furry Fury. I am both adorable and devious, and, until I get what I want, I’m going to make every human I meet pay for your collective crimes. I am a tiny, mop-topped demon, and I am coming for you. Picture a riding stable. If you haven’t been in one, a row of horses hang their heads over their stall doors, gently bobbing to escape the flies, pricking their ears when a human appears who might have a carrot or a peppermint in her pocket. In the riding arena, a sandy rectangle outlined by a white wooden fence that could use a coat of paint, there’s a small dapple gray pony n…
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Back in the 1980s, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke declared the town “the city that reads.” While that phrase was hyperbolic at best, Baltimore has always been a city that produced, adopted, inspired and aided many excellent writers. A few favorites include detective/ horror pioneer Edgar Allan Poe, essayist/Black Mask founder H. L. Mencken, novelist Laura Lippman, Harlem expat Barry Michael Cooper (who penned the script for New Jack City in the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library), screenwriter Barry Levinson, essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates and former Baltimore Sun journalist/The Wire creator David Simon. However, one name that was always missing from the list of B-M…
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I’d argue that seeing your friends succeed is probably sweeter than your own success—it’s less fleeting, and purer in a way. Writers tend to speed past the good times and focus on the bad. Maybe that’s what makes us who we are? But when it’s something good happening to someone else, to someone we care about, it lasts longer. This is a circuitous way of saying I was so happy to see the success my friend Pornsak Pichetshote’s had with his creator-owned comic book series, THE GOOD ASIAN, in tandem with artist Alexandre Tefenkgi. A love letter to the PI genre told through the eyes of flawed, conflicted detective Edison Hark, who is hunting a killer on the streets of 1936 Chi…
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Portland, Oregon. To outsiders perhaps the “City of Roses” with a penchant for hipsterdom, coffee and food trucks. But, as we’ve seen recently, it’s a city of opposing sides, clashing views, uneasy gentrification and social marginalisation. Fertile ground for crime writers, and Portland has turned out quite a few excellent exponents of the genre. You want the Portlandia image of a hipster Oregon city of coffee shops, crafts, poetry circles and food trucks? Then don’t start your Portland crime reading with Don Carpenter’s 1966 classic novel Hard Rain Falling. Jack Levitt, the orphaned teenage anti-hero of the book, living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool…
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Anna Cser lay on the floor of her living room. Her back was red and crawling with an itch. She had been lying for hours on the sackcloth the midwife had laid out for her, and the burlap had left a platoon of faint crosshatches imprinted on her skin. Maddening bits of the flax were clinging to her. She was cloaked in a thick hide of summer sweat, and all the impossible bits of filth she had failed to clean from the room had floated to her, freckling her with speckles of dirt and dust. Her stringy brown hair hung wet around her neck and shoulders. She took quick swipes at her forehead to push the strands from her brow, but they soon found their place again and plunked b…
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I love crime fiction for its versatility, how it can incorporate well-realized characters, a wide range of tones and styles, and social commentary all within propulsive plots. A crime sets up an immediate conflict: a wrong is committed, and someone tries to address it and restore order. Crime fiction can include a wide range of stakes, from “Who stole Grandma’s award-winning pie recipe?” to “How do we catch the Pigface serial killer?” It offers a window into the dark recesses of the human soul while also celebrating the better angels of our nature. As a genre, it’s one of the most accommodating forms of storytelling. That being said, when I look at the crime novels on m…
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1. THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT-- develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? Triggered by threats of losing her granddaughter and being dumped into a senior living facility, unpublished writer Shelby Garrett sinks farther into the fantasy world of her fictional characters who help her keep the past at bay. When intruders arrive to rob her and threaten her life, she is convinced the armed aggressors are her very own fictional characters, ones she can control. Unaware of the true dangers, she challenges the intruders and demands a rewrite. As the early trauma awakens, she spirals o…
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Mysteries and detective fiction are usually thought of as the inventions of Edgar Allan Poe, but the truth is that they have both been popular in China for over a thousand years. The Chinese have no clear place or person of origin for mysteries and detective fiction, the way the West has Poe, but what the Chinese do have are centuries’ more mysteries and detective stories than the West does. The first Chinese proto-mysteries—that is, mysteries who some but not all of the elements of modern mystery fiction—were the “gong’an” (“court case”) stories. Told in the form of oral performances and puppetry shows, the gong’an began appearing during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1…
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Linc: So, Doug, what’s going on here? Doug: I think we’re supposed to have a conversation about how we met and what it’s like writing bestselling novels as a team. Linc: OK. We can do that. Doug: Do you think we ought to tell the truth? Or make up something more interesting? Linc: I think we’d better tell the truth. Especially since we already know what things to leave out. Why don’t you start with your recollection of the first glimmerings of RELIC, the novel? Doug: I worked at the American Museum of Natural History, writing a column each month for the museum’s magazine on weird little stories about the history of the museum. You were an editor at St. Martin’s Press…
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I’m back, and this time we have a power panel of psychological suspense writers: sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine, whose high-toned suspense novels have a splash of Judith Krantz (collectively they’re known by the pen name Liv Constantine); debut novelist Susie Yang; the delightfully creepy Liz Nugent (to clarify: the books, not Liz, are delightfully creepy); rising star Samantha Downing; and the juggernaut Ruth Ware, who is just as funny and quick as you’d want her to be (remember this when you read about how Agatha Christie wrote 12 novels during WWII without mentioning war once). I assembled the roundtable to talk about how we are going to talk about domestic su…
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What does home turn into when a stranger steps inside? Have you ever considered yourself a trespasser? In many ways, all of us are. The setting of The Guest Room revolves around the concept of home. The spaces we create for ourselves which at their foundation are meant to be safe – somewhere to retreat, breathe out and do whatever we like away from the eyes of society and the scrutiny of people. My story subverts this, picking apart the nature of a home, and the selves we are within it – how this can be intruded into, both physically and psychologically. The environment my narrator lingers in most is a small London apartment – one of the millions of boxed spaces inside …
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Publishing Is a Nightmare: 31 Horror Films about Writing, Reading, and the Book Business
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The business of writing and reading pops up all the time in horror films. Maybe it’s that screenwriters understand better than anyone the terror of creation. Maybe it’s that long, late hours spent alone in an office juxtaposes nicely on screen against glamorous events hosted by the literati. Or perhaps we’ve all just had a traumatic childhood experience in a library. Either way, here are 31 films guaranteed to give you an October that’s equal parts eerie and erudite. We’re taking a broad understanding of both the horror genre and of the book biz, with films featuring authors, agents, screenwriters, journalists, and just straight up evil books. Whether or not you’re a har…
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The 1977 Creation Convention was a transitional event in terms of my comic book worldview. It was where I was introduced to the amazing work of Jim Steranko and George Perez, first saw the exquisite paintings of Jeff Jones and Barry Windsor-Smith, and met friendly newcomer/Joe Kubert School undergraduate Steve Bissette, who’d later go on to illustrate Swamp Thing. Held in New York City over Thanksgiving weekend, that first afternoon I befriended a chubby kid (we were both 14) who was an Art & Design High School freshman as well as a convention regular. When we about to walk through the doors that connected Artists Alley to the main showroom, I noticed a very cool look…
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I have a lot of emotions about autumn—love, hate, jealousy, and fear. I’ll get to all of them, but let’s start with fear and hate. The fear begins on September 1st. Now you might think that is because I live in Miami, and that’s when the hurricane season heats up, but no. It is because that is when the scary movie ads begin. Jump scares are not my love language. I hate having to watch movie trailers with my eyes shut and my fingers in my ears. Horror films are like PSL to me. I don’t care for them, but I’m not going to stomp on anyone else’s joy. So, if seeing a red balloon floating by a sewer drain fills you with endorphins and glee, then this list might not be for you. …
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Western China in the late 600s of the seventh century. In a candle-lit bedroom of a shabby tavern on the outskirts of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang’an (now known as Xian) sits Dee Renjie. A man more commonly known simply as Judge Dee. He is the Imperial Circuit Supervisor of the Tang Empire, appointed by no-lesser personage than the Empress Wu herself. Judge Dee has a white beard, wears a blue robe and a black skull cap, while sipping his favourite Dragon Well tea. He is out of favour at court, a victim of the internecine infighting between the squabbling Wu and Li political clans throughout the troublesome middle years of the dynasty. He is a Confucian scholar-turned-ma…
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I have discovered the secret to making a great roundtable: Alex Segura. If Alex is involved, or I get interested in a book by someone Alex has introduced me to, it’s a breeze to fill our imaginary table. This time I wanted to focus on the positives and negatives LGBTQ+ writers face. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we did the sex roundtable: if we rarely see any vanilla sex, then all of the other flavors are probably not being served either. Anyway, this came about because of PJ Vernon’s excellent new thriller, Bath Haus, and his enthusiastic participation at the aforementioned sex roundtable where he was suggested to me by…Alex Segura! The rest of our distinguish…
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In 1992, two of the year’s most memorable independent films depicted gay men committing murder. Gregg Araki’s The Living End and Tom Kalin’s Swoon arrived at the peak of what critic B. Ruby Rich coined the “New Queer Cinema”, an informal movement of transgressive, formally inventive films from young queer filmmakers, usually with a political or historical bent. Araki and Kalin’s films were representative of one of the major strains of New Queer Cinema—centralizing queer villains from a queer point of view. The Living End is a jagged, Godard-esque lovers-on-the-run film with an HIV-positive couple at its center. While The Living End raged at contemporary oppression, Swoon …
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Books adapted from movies don’t have a sterling reputation. They’re often viewed as slapdash cash-grabs by writers-for-hire, despite some notable examples to the contrary—for example, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (written concurrently with the screenplay) and Alan Dean Foster’s “Alien.” Now Quentin Tarantino is providing his own twist on this odd genre with the novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the 2019 movie he wrote and directed. The story follows fading Western-movie star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and his stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, drinking and talking and lur…
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“Mr. Rai.” Constable Neri at my elbow, her gaze incisive in a softly rounded face, and her skin a midbrown shade made dull by the lack of sunlight. “Would you like me to drive you home?” “That’s my father,” I said. “Call me Aarav.” Not Ari. Never that. It’s what my mother called me, and I couldn’t bear to hear it from any other lips. The last girlfriend who’d tried had been so frightened by my reaction that she’d packed up and left the same day. “You looked like you wanted to strangle me,” she’d said on the phone the next day. “That much rage, your face all twisted up until I didn’t know you anymore . . .” Her voice had broken. “Aarav, you need to see a shrink or you’ll…
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It’s not often that the most memorable lines in crime movies are about love. In fact, the most memorable lines in crime movies usually seem to be about crime. But it’s Valentine’s Day, so here at CrimeReads, we decided to put together a fun quiz to spice up your day, one which merges both those things: romance and crime. The objective is very simple: try to name the crime movie that each romantic quote comes from. “Romantic” is defined slightly loosely, because of the genre we’re playing in, but “crime” is not. There are no war films, no fantasy movies, no action-adventure flicks on here. These quotes are from movies where a “crime” is a very important part. If a line is…
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