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,
3,491 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 68 views
In an earlier article, I had written about the lack of Indian crime fiction when I was growing up. We had plugged that gap by turning to western authors – Christie, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other giants of crime fiction. The lacuna had kept gnawing at the back of my mind, and had eventually pushed me to write crime fiction set in India. That paucity of local crime fiction had continued until a decade ago. How much has that changed now? In this article, I’ll try to offer a glimpse of today’s Indian crime fiction space. Huge Potential Before I do that, let me step back and look at India as a setting for fiction. The first thing that hits you be…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 397 views
The story of Stephanie’s life is a game of connect-the-dots. It just takes me time to connect them, and the hues and shades of who she was start to fill into a complete portrait, even though it’s still only in two dimensions. It is her murder that will ultimately define her—that will set her apart, that will draw attention to her life. But the story of her murder is a rabbit warren, a maze with a hundred dead ends. In my quest to understand my stepsister, I become a detective too, looking for meaning, for truth. For anything. When I first started writing about Stephanie back in 2009, aimlessly trying to make sense of her dominion of my mind, my mom gave me a big canvas…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 309 views
Our moving van rolled into Seattle and brought the heat. A week of record-setting triple-digit temperatures, brutal enough to buckle the sidewalks. Had we packed the Southern California sun along with the blender and spatulas? Seattle wasn’t this hot—in both senses of the word—when we’d left the Northwest sixteen years before. In 2005, Rain City was still more or less the overcast, over-caffeinated burg of my college days. It was the combined bust-and-boom of the late aughts that first made me want to write about Seattle. The housing market crashed even as local tech companies (including a certain online book vendor) were just hitting their stride, attracting corpora…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 36 views
In the summer of 1995, I was living in a country at war. Where I kept my billet, in the westernmost province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the worst atrocities had been committed two years before my arrival. Nevertheless, it was amid the blast craters and bullet holes of Mostar, a demolished city that now lay under a psycho-terror siege of random mortar launches and sporadic sniper shots, that I began to recognize “the problem of evil” as an obstacle to religious faith. The tales of horror I heard in Mostar were moral quicksand. I kept my head above the horror by floating the surface of it in a cracked shell of professionalism, refusing either to believe or disbelieve th…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 251 views
You either doo be doo be do like the Rat Pack or you don’t. Their legacy is messy. On the one hand, the supergroup of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. projected a contagious party atmosphere, they were heroes to the working class people they resembled and represented, and they were integrated before it became fashionable. On the other hand is the racy (and racial) humor and outright misogyny they trafficked in. Originally, the “Rat Pack” was a group of Humphrey Bogart’s Hollywood pals, but the name got appropriated as a marketing scheme by Sinatra and the Sands Hotel. The scheme hit the jackpot, and Sinatra, Martin, and Davis, mainly, but also Joey Bishop,…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 225 views
tl;dr: Research is hard, rabbit holes are interesting and twisty, and electric cars were invented a long time ago. Also, crooked cops are bad, whatever the era. Spoiler alert: Wow, electric cars sure were invented a long time ago! And some serious points are made. I spent this last week down a rabbit hole. We’ve all been there. My last big dive before this was when I was looking up DNA for my upcoming mystery novel, He Wasn’t There Again Today, which will be the third in the Epitome Apartments novels, following last year’s The Adventures of Isabel and this year’s What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? (I’m tempted to post the results, but this travelogue is already pretty l…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 69 views
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s era-defining debut novel about a load of disaffected men beating the bejesus out of each other in order to feel alive, was first published twenty-seven years ago today. The book rapidly gained a cult following, was adapted into one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s (despite an initial failure at the box office), and, of course, originated the modern pejorative use of the word “snowflake.” Here’s what the very first reviews had to say about “Gen X’s most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities.” I don’t want to die without any scars. “A volatile, brilliantly creepy satirefilled with esoteric tips for causing destructi…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 278 views
“Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn’t likable, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing.” ― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist If there’s anything I’ve learned from my experience as both a lawyer and a human (while the two are not mutually exclusive, I am unwilling to say that they’re completely overlapping Venn circles) even truly decent people tend not to act their best under extreme duress. Good and kind folks can be selfish, defensive, and lash out when pushed too far. That doesn’t prove them bad as much as it shows them to be, well, people, albeit perhaps unlikeable in that moment. Someone …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 76 views
I joined my first cult when I was…just kidding. Mostly. When I was born in the early 80s, my parents were part of a church in Virginia Beach, an area influenced by the likes of Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network as well as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These are the kinds of organizations that helped fuel the Satanic Panic, decrying games like Dungeons & Dragons and any Halloween celebration that wasn’t spent as a simple “Harvest Festival” in a church gym. My family’s Southern Baptist Church was no exception, inviting my parents to break their classic rock records in order to avoid “backmasking,” the supposed subliminal evil messages encoded in rock s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 43 views
The truth is often stranger—wilder, more volatile, and somehow even more unbelievable—than fiction. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to true crime. As an author of mysteries for adults and young adults, I’m always scouring real-life, historical events for the seeds of my own stories. Here are a few true crimes that were stranger than fiction—and the books they inspired. One of the first true crime books I ever read was Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Set at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the book’s narrative snakes between the Fair’s renowned architect Daniel Burnham and the “devil” t…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 83 views
I make mistakes in all my books. Once I described the USS Intrepid as a battleship. A reader who had served on her during World War II set me straight that she was an aircraft carrier. Another time I had a character gazing out onto the Atlantic from the shores of Sag Harbor. A local told me that Sag Harbor is on the Long Island Sound, a tidal estuary of the Atlantic. (And yes, I had to look up what that meant.) There are others. A lot of others. All of my errors, however, are inadvertent. I do not take any literary license in my writing. Most of my books are legal thrillers, and I pride myself on getting the look and feel of the legal system exactly right. There are…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 79 views
When Scream came out in 1996, it broke one of the cardinal rules of horror film––the characters in the movie watched and loved scary movies. The characters in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press), love to tell a good ghost story. In “At This Late Hour,” the specter of a local legend clouds the social forces which women negotiate in a small town in New Hampshire. In “Warnings,” a girl’s cross country team groans about running together until a teammate goes missing, becoming the missing girl from the warnings they’ve been given. “The Last Unmapped Places,” one of the collection’s most propulsive and evocative stories, looks at th…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 72 views
When I moved into the basement in fifth grade, there were certain rules that had to be followed in order to stay safe. The light always had to be on at the bottom of the stairs. No amount of parental scolding could convince me to turn that light off, or to reach back into the hallway to flip the switch once I was free. The hall had to be taken at a sprint. While the idea of not showing fear seemed like a good one, speed was always preferable over bravado. Because once I hit the stairs to go up or closed my bedroom door, I was safe. But I could never, never look behind myself as I ran. That was the biggest rule of all. The most important, the most sacred, the most vital…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 53 views
Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, I wasn’t surrounded by luxuries, but there was one thing our home was never short of – books. My love of mysteries began with the first Famous Five novel my dad brought home and immediately, I was hooked. As an adult, thrillers and mysteries continue to be my favorite genre, but I wish there were more novels written with main characters who looked like me. When I started writing my own novel, following the advice, ‘write what you know’, I centered my locked room novel on a multigenerational South Asian family. The main character is Jia, an Indian single mom who is invited by her married sister, Seema to take shelter in her …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
San Francisco, March 1907 Nora May French was two weeks late. She was twenty-five years old and had never been late—not without a reason. She knew she was pregnant again. This time, she would need to act quickly; she could not afford a “therapeutic” abortion in a hospital even if she could convince a doctor to give her one. She would have to do this on her own. She bought the pills on Friday night, easy to secure even though it had been not quite a year since the earthquake of 1906 leveled most of San Francisco. Her local drugstore boasted an array of cheerfully colored boxes on its shelves, advertised cannily as bringing on “suppressed menstruation,” “regulation,” o…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
Jon Gutiérrez faces the top flight of stairs at No. 7 Calle Melancolía (in the Lavapiés district of Madrid) in a really foul mood. The captain wouldn’t explain anything when Jon asked him about Mentor. “Where the hell did he come from? The National Intelligence Center? The Interior Ministry? The Avengers?” “Do what he says and don’t ask.” Jon is still suspended without pay, but the charges against him have been dropped for the moment. And the video showing him planting the junk in the pimp’s car has disappeared as if by magic from the TV and newspapers. Exactly as Mentor had promised if Jon accepted his strange proposal. People are still talking about him on social m…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 51 views
With the benefit of hindsight, the 1920s seem like an odd reprieve from the rest of that century. After the most devastating war the world had ever known, and before a global economic cataclysm and a second world war on top of it, the U.S. and western Europe saw a brief golden age of glamorous parties, economic prosperity and flourishing arts and culture. Soundtracking it all was what has been called the first American art form, jazz, a preview of the century’s American cultural hegemony. The truth, of course, was not quite as simple. Even as the music they invented came to define the decade, Black Americans had to contend with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. And even b…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 279 views
It’s not easy playing second-fiddle. Think about this for a moment: is there a character in all of Western literature more misunderstood, more defamed than Doctor Watson, the erstwhile sidekick of detective Sherlock Holmes? So often, in twentieth-century film and television adaptions, Dr. John Watson is represented as a blithering idiot—often old, always naive, and perpetually astonished. He exists in a constant state of amazement; at the very most, providing a contrast that makes Holmes seem even smarter. This is strange, because, as he is written in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Watson could not be more different than this scurrilous remaking. Holmes and Watson meet i…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 252 views
It had seemed like such a splendid idea: develop a half-hour police-procedural series for American television based on The Naked City, a 1948 film noir shot entirely in the buildings and on the summer-seared streets of New York City. The original feature starred Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald as a philosophical police homicide detective with more than a modicum of leprechaun in his soul, who investigates the bathtub slaying of a blonde model. He’s helped in this undertaking by a callow subordinate (played by Don Taylor), but hindered by a sponging hunk (Howard Duff), whose adherence to the truth is negligible, at best. The motion picture ranked among that year’s top-50 box-…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 310 views
I’ll start with the basics: Craig Rice was a woman, and her name wasn’t exactly a nom de plume. Shortly after Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig was born, her artist parents absconded to Europe, leaving her in the care of her paternal aunt (or half-aunt). The aunt, whose married name was Rice, adopted her niece, tacking on yet another name. The future comedic crime author eventually boiled her moniker down to two of its shorter parts, a wise edit for book-signings. All this happened a long time ago. Rice was born in 1908. Her first novel, Eight Faces at Three—this one—was published in 1939. She’s been dead for more than sixty years. As I’ve wrangled with what my job is here…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 79 views
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a widely known classic must be in want of some reimagining, reconstruction and general exploration (to misquote Pride and Prejudice). However, different authors reimagining the same original work may go to different levels or poke at different areas when looking for tools they can work with, images they can use, and inherent issues to explore. The surface elements of the Scarlet Pimpernel stories are straightforward enough: a heroic nobleman (Sir Percy Blakeney) rescues innocents from peril (the French Revolution) while pretending to be a fashionable idiot (“Lud, my cravat!”) while juggling a loving wife (Marguerite), romanti…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 217 views
I have long believed that Thanksgiving is the most boring holiday. Christmas, Halloween, and New Year’s all have a competitive edge—there’s always the desire to out-do last year’s festivities. But no one’s ever said “this is going to be the Best Thanksgiving ever!” Frankly, it feels like a holiday built to fail: it’s racist, centered on the worst sport and the worst meat (football and turkey, respectively), and takes place during the end-of-year slump when days are short and dark but not cozy. And it’s on the Thursday before the most morally bereft day of the year after Columbus Day, Black Friday. Good luck ever enjoying this holiday if you work retail. So why not embrac…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 134 views
They say you never forget your first true love. Mystery, specifically cozy mysteries, were my first love. I remember reading my first Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It blew my mind. When I read, And Then There Were None, I was a goner. Over the years, I wasn’t always faithful to my chosen genre. I went through phases where I strayed and read romance, fantasy, and science fiction, but even the Queen of Crime herself wrote romance novels under the name, Mary Westmacott. Regardless of what other genres I read, I always returned to mysteries. When I decided I wanted to toss my hat into the ring and write books, I knew it would have to be a mystery. But the worl…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 209 views
The passing of comic book maestro Neal Adams is a real fist-to-the-gut for his many fans—and if you bought a super-hero comic anytime between 1967 and 2021, you were a fan. Since Michael Barson and Hector DeJean were among the throngs who consider Adams to be as talented as he was prolific, they thought they’d share some of our favorite career highlights of his. HD: I’ll go first: I’ve gushed about Deadman in the past, but it’s a jaw-dropping achievement, and more of a series of pulpy crime short stories than a typical superhero comic. The story is the now-familiar tale of a murdered man whose ghost is trying to track down his killer–and the ghost has the super power of …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 827 views
Television history may not recall the second week of September 1974 as indelibly momentous. Yet for fans of small-screen private eye series, it most certainly was. On Friday, September 13, NBC-TV’s The Rockford Files premiered, featuring James Garner. That was just one night after competitor ABC launched another Southern California-set gumshoe drama with a well-known lead and lofty ambitions: David Janssen’s Harry O. The former program went on to five and a half seasons of public acclaim (plus eight TV reunion movies), and in 2002 was ranked No. 39 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Best Shows of All Time.” While a previous Janssen crime series, The Fugitive, scored even bett…
Last reply by Admin_99,