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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Fadeout, originally published in 1970, introduced Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator based in Los Angeles, in the first in a series of twelve crime novels the Los Angeles Times would hail as “groundbreaking” in the 2004 obituary of its author, Joseph Hansen. Why groundbreaking? They were beautifully written and dexterously plotted, but that wasn’t the reason. Brandstetter himself, rich, white and blessed with movie star good looks—a far cry from his hard luck noir predecessors like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer—doesn’t seem, at first glance, to be much of a groundbreaker. But the adjective is justified because Brandstetter is by nature what Marlowe and Archer w…
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After his five decades in show business, the late Richard Lewis is rightly being remembered for many career highlights: his peerless stand-up routines and late-night comedy appearances, his neurotic and oddly soulful portrayal of a fictionalized version of himself in 12 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. However, if you were a lover of mystery stories and a budding comedy nerd in the 90s, you might first have seen him chasing a dachshund across Monte Carlo. Lewis’ role in the 1992 crime caper Once Upon a Crime will not make any list of his achievements. But, briefly, he is oddly winning and wonderful in a lovable little flop of a film. It’s an improbable performance that …
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William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of the masterpieces The French Connection and The Exorcist has died at the age of 87. Born in Chicago on August 29, 1935 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Friedkin worked on documentary film crews and TV shows in the 1960s, rising to prominence in the early 1970s among a generation of creative and resourceful young filmmakers who would create the New Hollywood movement. He directed a handful of highly theatrical films in the late 60s and early 70s—musicals or adaptations of stage plays. But it was The French Connection, his gritty, low-budget neonoir set in present-day New York City, that catapulted him to the big-time. The fil…
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One night in 1970, Rena Pederson, a young wire-service reporter organizing news bulletins printed by the Dallas office’s teletype machines, came across a dispatch about an audacious crime. The so-called King of Diamonds was at it again, absconding from a local mansion with jewels worth an estimated $60,000. “That,” Pederson recalls, “was ten times what I made a year at UPI.” The clever crook, it seemed, had been active for years, stealing from dozens of homes owned by Texas tycoons whose new money came from oil wells and retail empires. Pederson would spend the next several decades amassing an impressive journalistic resume, but even as she climbed The Dallas Morning Ne…
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“What if Dracula’s long-suffering, bug-eating lunatic henchman Renfield finally got fed up with the abuse wrought unto him by his master, and decided to quit?” is, objectively, a very good premise for a movie. It’s got the three best things a movie can have: room for a rich character arc, a clear source of conflict, and Dracula. “What if Renfield goes to a support group for people in abusive or dysfunctional relationships, and his new friends help him on a journey of self-discovery and encourage him to leave Dracula?” is another good idea, a good way to develop this premise, love it. Additional good ideas include,”what if this movie is styled after and positioned as a se…
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I know this veers perilously close to ‘what are you wearing?’ territory, but please, bear with me—What do you wear to sleep at night? Flannel pjs? Pyjama shorts set? Night gown? Adult onesie? Growing up in Canada within a lower-class immigrant family, the only pyjama sets I ever got were gifts. I mean, I knew what they were, of course I did. I watched TV. I’d even worn at least one set, when I was maybe two years old. I’ve seen the photo. The before times, when I lived in Hong Kong. Maybe, if my family had stayed, I’d have grown up with sets upon sets of coordinated tops and bottoms, all properly matched together for the sole innocuous purpose of being slept in. As it …
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After the greed of studio bosses led to what The Simpsons would call a “scary couple of hours,” crime and mystery TV is back this year in a big way, from a chilly new season of True Detective to Clive Owen as a retired Sam Spade to Sofia Vergara as legendary cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco. Amid the embarrassment of riches, however, one of the decade’s most underrated crime yarns quietly gears up for its third and final season, the perfect time to catch up. In an era where most premium cable makes at least some stabs at awards bait, Starz has stayed solidly populist, for good and for ill, with its biggest cash cow the pulpy 50 Cent-produced “Power” universe of shows or …
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From the top of the world to the bottom. Last time we visited the Arctic, the North Pole, and so, in the interests of planetary equilibrium, it’s now time for the Antarctic, the South Pole. Of course, the Arctic is a virtual bustling metropolis compared to the far scantier population of the South Pole – barely four thousand cold souls live in the 5.4 million square miles of Antarctica. To get a sense of the isolation of Antarctica perhaps Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021) is a good place to start. The men of an Antarctic field station at the South Pole start to find things going seriously wrong. Robert “Doc” Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, holds the clues …
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Violence and art couple freely as rabbits on the American scene, but as a crime writer and defense attorney—with a foot in each world—I find it impossible to recognize real-world crime in the depiction of violence for art’s sake. Popular media gets murder wrong. The fantasy unpacks itself weekly from red Panavision trucks, spitting distance from the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn where I work. There on random afternoons crews erect lighting scaffolds and gaffers fasten down thick electrical cords before actors arrive to shoot another episode of whatever crime show Americans love. I don’t watch them anymore. Before becoming a DA twenty-five years ago, I worked for a big…
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The germination of a story can be hard to pinpoint, even more so if the seed was planted over 30 years ago, as I suspect is the case with my newest release, The Initial Insult. I can’t say for sure that I’d been introduced to Poe before my freshman year in high school, but I can certainly recall staring at Harry Clarke’s 1919 illustration of “The Cask of Amontillado” included in my English textbook and feeling—in a word—horrified. And also—oddly elated. I ditched the pace of the always-painful class read aloud, finished Amontillado, turned the page to take in “Hop-Frog” and looked back up from my textbook with a single thought: I didn’t know you were allowed to do that i…
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Long before undertakers organized themselves into the professional group of funeral directors, tradesmen undertakers and families battled a group of ghoulish men called resurrectionists who operated by the light of moon. The resurrectionists were body snatchers, yanking freshly buried remains from the earth and selling them to medical men. Body snatching was such an uncontrolled problem that it led to the invention of the burial vault, a device still used today. The tipping point in the ghoulish behavior was a sensational body snatching splashed across the front pages of every major newspaper. The incident involved a president’s son and a future president, and it uncover…
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From the moment I sold my first thriller, I’ve been acutely aware of genre. I’m not alone. The explosion of the psychological thriller in the wake of Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster Gone Girl created a wide lane for crime writers to steer into. Twisty twists and unreliable narrators became our calling cards, and book concepts were shaped to fit the mold. I owe my career to genre boundaries, so I was not about to start a rebellion. In 2015, I was on the brink of quitting the business. I had been writing novels for a long time – long enough to get the message from the Universe that it just wasn’t going to happen. I was a divorced mom, co-parenting three children, managing a ho…
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Revenge. The motive fuels major crimes and petty forms of aggression. I was inspired by Alison Gaylin’s excellent book on maternal revenge, The Collective, to investigate revenge as motive and means to keep a story moving. Stephanie Wrobel, author of the Munchausen-by-proxy thriller Darling Rose Gold and This Might Hurt. Ashley Audrain is the author of The Push, and Chelsea Summers’ book, A Certain Hunger, is a particularly rich canvas of revenge (spoiler: it’s about a woman who cooks and eats her exes). Winnie Li’s Dark Chapter is one of the most complex novels about rape I’ve encountered. Now that we have our cast of characters let’s turn to the conversation, which rang…
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What is the ideal medium for a true crime story? In the last decade, we’ve seen countless examples, from longform podcasts to feature films. Sometimes things converge in unexpected ways — a podcast begets a television miniseries (Slow Burn and Gaslit, respectively); a fictionalized account leads to a documentary (All Good Things and The Jinx, respectively). A true crime story can expose societal inequality or venture into a troubled psyche. It can thrill or enlighten; it can also take readers or viewers to places they never thought they’d go. From 1997 to 2001, a trilogy of works by writer Gary Indiana were published, each in its own way a work of true crime. Over the la…
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At the turn of the twentieth century, American crime fiction was at a shallow ebb. Anna Katharine Green, who had achieved great success with The Leavenworth Case in 1887, continued to produce popular novels (and would do so until 1923), but the tastes of American readers of mystery fiction had turned to England. Certainly the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories had focused attention on British crime writing, but not until Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose first novel appeared in 1908, the popular The Circular Staircase, did American mystery writers again achieve success. It is not surprising, then, that Richard Harding Davis— the most popular American journalist of the …
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Every woman who enjoys horror films has at some point felt the need to explain herself. The interaction begins cordially, among mixed company at a gathering of family or friends. The chit chat shifts to movies, and she mentions a scary one she’s just watched—because that’s suitable for small talk, right? Wrong. Whether it’s number one on Netflix or a gnarly grindhouse flick from the 70s, her interlocutor has no interest in discussing the topic further. “I can’t watch horror,” they’ll say, often with a grimace or performative little shudder. The follow-up question needn’t be verbalized; it hangs in the now airless room: “How can you?” The passage of judgment is palpable…
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Revisiting The Anderson Tapes, Sidney Lumet’s Wisely Paranoid Heist Film, 50 Years Later
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The Anderson Tapes is a heist movie, there’s no doubt about that. It depicts the typical thrills and shenanigans of the genre, beginning when a charismatic ringleader assembles a colorful crew of criminal masterminds with varied skills, to pull off one last job. It is, to say the least, a good time at the movies. When it was released in 1971, it did quite well at the box office, grossing $5 million. But it received mixed reviews, and if it is remembered today at all, it is for presenting the world with the first mainstream film performance of Christopher Walken. But, if you really listen to The Anderson Tapes, then you will learn that it is bolder than a traditional heis…
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On January 6, 2002, Christa Worthington was found raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in her Cape Cod home. Her two-year-old daughter, Ava, who was physically unharmed, clung to Worthington’s body; the toddler’s mother had been dead for up to 36 hours. The details found in the most basic description of the crime are horrifying on their own and needed no sensationalization, but that didn’t stop the media—and it didn’t take long for Worthington to become the antagonist in her own murder. In the months leading up to September 11, headlines were dominated by another high profile case with some parallels to Worthington’s: the disappearance of Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old inter…
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My historical crime novels The Bloodless Boy, The Poison Machine— out on October 25!—and a subsequent sequel The Bedlam Cadaver are all set during the Restoration era of late 17th century London. All three books have a firm grounding in the science—the ‘New Philosophy’—of the time. After 1666’s Great Fire, one of my main characters, Robert Hooke, was appointed as City Surveyor. (Yes, I use real people in my fiction.) Hooke oversaw the rebuilding of a more fire-resistant city, setting regulations, dictating street widths and which materials should be used. He personally surveyed ground plots and adjudicated disputes over land use, and awarded compensation. (And was handso…
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Rhys Bowen is now collaborating on the Molly Murphy Mysteries with her daughter Clare Broyles, which allows the two writers to work on a topic of great importance to both of them: women’s rights. RHYS: It’s funny how characters take on a life of their own, the moment a writer creates them. We can only follow helplessly as they forge a path for themselves and go in directions we never expected them to. When I started writing the Molly Murphy Mysteries I never pictured that Molly would become a champion for women’s rights. It was not my intention to write a treatise, highlighting the abuses against women. I just wanted to tell good stories about the immigrant experience an…
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Rhys Bowen is the author of the long-running Molly Murphy series, set in turn-of-the-century New York City, as well as stand-alones and another historical series. Rhys was kind enough to answer a few questions over email about historical fiction, crafting memorable heroines, and her latest Molly Murphy story, All That Is Hidden. Molly Odintz: What draws you to historical fiction? Rhys Bowen: I am drawn to the first half of the Twentieth Century because it is connected to my own time through my parents, grandparents and their stories. It is in some ways so familiar and yet so distant. I could take you on a walking tour of Molly’s New York and find it all pretty much unc…
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Rian Johnson and Olivia Rutigliano talk Poker Face, Knives Out, and Golden Age Mysteries
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Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at its center. Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling “impossible crime” plots in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation. Among all of Carr’s ingenious crime scenes, the present case is one of the best known: a dead man is found strangled in the middle of a clay tennis court, just after a storm. In the damp dirt, there is one set of footsteps—his own—leading back to the grass; the court is otherwise untouched. This edition from American Mystery Classics has a new in…
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Yes, that’s right, mystery fans! The great director Rian Johnson, who masterminded Knives Out and its soon-to-be-released sequel Glass Onion, has made a murder mystery TV show, to be released on Peacock on January 26th. It’s called… Poker Face. For the first time in my life, I can’t wait for January! The project is a collaboration between Johnson and Natasha Lyonne, who plays a PI named Charlie Cole, who can always tell when people are lying (a very good quality to have in a PI). It is a ten-part, case-of-the-week murder mystery show and appears to also feature Adrien Brody, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lil Rey Howery, and Rob Perlman. (In case you missed the carousel of famous…
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You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great debt because it introduced me to the work of one of my favorite mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. Carr was an American but lived and worked in England during the 1930s. Outlandishly prolific, he quickly built a body of work that placed him in the pantheon of what is now known as the “golden age of detective fiction.” This isn’t the brute poetry of Hammett or the seedy sexual decay of Cain, no Spades or Marlowes or gumshoes packing gats. This is murder as a gentleman’s game, the fair play of mas…
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By dint of yelling and cursing and blasting his horn until his ears rang, he managed to carve a path through a crowd of fifty or so people who’d come running to the scene like flies to shit and were now blocking the entrance to Via Rosolino Pilo to anyone, like him, coming from Via Nino Bixio. The root cause of the blockage was a police car parked across the width of the entrance to the street, with beat cops Inzolia and Verdicchio—known on the force as “the table wines”— presiding over the scene. At the far end of the street, which gave onto Via Tukory, the “wild beasts”—that is, beat cops Lupo and Leone—were also standing guard. The police force’s “chicken coop,” on the…
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