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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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as we’ve seen, the TV networks tried all kinds of variations on cop and detective shows. One of the most interesting variations was a crime show that focused on a very different kind of investigator: Hard-hitting journalists. This was before “All the President’s Men,” or course, and years before Watergate, for that matter. “The Name of the Game” ran for three seasons, airing 76 episodes on NBC from September 1968 to March 1971. It’s obscure these days, although a DVD set was issued a few years back. Some of the episodes, which ran 90 minutes with commercials, are posted on YouTube, which is where I watched them for the first time since…
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The medical world is an ideal backdrop for thrillers because it is bursting with life-or-death emergencies. Medical thrillers count on our fear of disease, something everyone has to face, and they make us ponder our own mortality. Many doctors have been inspired by their fascinating worlds and have felt the need to put pen to paper. Several of the qualities defining a good doctor overlap with what makes a successful author, such as the ability to “read” people, meticulous work in confronting high-stakes situations, investigative talent, and the ability to integrate many clues into a meaningful sum. One of the first rules of writing is “ know the field you’re talking a…
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In 1977, the boy left the drivers corps of the Grain Administration, where he’d been working, and started university. The day he was due to enroll, the man who’d taught him how to drive insisted on giving him a lift—still in uniform, complete with white gloves, in the unit’s newest truck with its liberation plates. The older driver said nothing along the way, just smoked one cigarette after another. Finally, when they were almost at the campus, he broke his silence and asked, What do you actually study in the Chinese Department? The boy said, I don’t know, I want to learn how to write novels. The driver said, What’s the use of writing? The boy replied, I want to write, th…
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I hadn’t planned a deep-dive essay. Just a brief think piece…maybe a couple of examples where the gravamen of the story is not cat-and-mouse with an evil nemesis…no one’s menacing their husband’s mistress at a beach house…the mastermind of heist gone-wrong isn’t being double-crossed. Yet two things happened. First, I started interviewing friend and colleagues in crime writing—from newbies and true crime journalists to reliable list-toppers to studio favorites— and found that all had a lot to say, and much of it would ruffle and rattle. So ruffling and rattling in fact that a few said they didn’t want to be identified. Second, recently on HBO, home of David Simon’s master…
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The Vista Theater “It’s the details that sell your story. And you have to make them your own.” I learned that lesson in the art of storytelling on Friday, October 23, 1992. But I didn’t learn it in school. I learned it at the movies. I was in the audience to see Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut, at the Vista Theater, an aging movie palace at Sunset Junction on the border of Hollywood and Silver Lake. Tarantino was a 28-year old last employed at Video Archives, a video shop in a mini-mall in Manhattan Beach. I knew the place from when I lived on the Marina Peninsula in Venice Beach in the late 1980s. In those days, the two video stores wor…
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Here at CrimeReads we operate on the premise that every few weekends, no matter the weather, the mood, or the reading options, you need to spend a couple days inside watching an international thriller series from start to finish. In pursuit of that ideal, we bring you an occasional roundup of what’s available for your viewing pleasure. If you’re interested in England, organized labor, and noir… Sherwood Seasons: 1 Streaming on: Britbox Are you ready for some English mining town internecine tension? Do you like atmospheric television packed full of interesting accent work and extreme moral ambiguity? Then get ready for Sherwood, an intensely noir series about the min…
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Decision to Leave, the atmospheric new film from the great director Park Chan-wook (the writer-director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden), is a near-perfect neo-noir: a spiraling detective story laced up with a burning star-crossed romance, the whole thing soaked through with senses of dread and doom and death. It is the story of two characters—one straight-laced insomniac detective, and one beautiful woman suspected of murdering her husband—trailing and circling and obsessing about one another until they derail each other’s lives, and of course their own. The film follows Busan police detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), an unhappy officer who spends nearly every night on a sta…
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I always like watching how holidays are represented in movies, and one of the most interesting ones to get this treatment is Halloween. Why? Because Halloween usually exists within horror movies as a date of note; horror movies like Halloween or Donnie Darko or Halloween II or Hell House LLC or Halloween III: Season of the Witch or The Blair Witch Project or Halloween IV: the Return of Michael Myers all notably take place on Halloween. But I’m interested in when non-horror movies have Halloween scenes. Movies like Meet Me in St. Louis or ET: The Extra Terrestrial or Mr. Mom or Ironweed or Mean Girls. Maye the best Halloween scene in a non-crime movie is in Ed Wood, when …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Wanda Morris, Anywhere You Run (William Morrow) “Beautifully rendered prose written in the vernacular of a small Mississippi town will immerse readers in the lives of two sisters trying to survive. In this viscerally frightening novel of the Jim Crow era, Morris writes a stunning, heartbreaking portrayal of being Black in the 1960s U.S. South.” –Library Journal Claudia Lux, Sign Here (Berkley) “Lux brilliantly combines satire, suspense, and pathos in her remarkably assured debut…Lux balances the whodunit plot and her antihero’s quest perfectly as the action builds to a surprising…
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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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Once again, October brings more terrifying thrills to stamp its authority as the undisputable king-month of horror! Halloween rolls in with its creepy wagon of chills and treats. And in the spirit of the season, I invite you to dive into this fully stacked terror-wagon and see which diabolical merchandise takes your fancy. But just in case you’re confused from the plethora of deliciously horrible stuff piled inside our terror-wagon, allow me to guide you to my top 5 Halloween reads, written by five female horror-demagogues, whose works will trick, treat, terrify, traumatise, and most definitely thrill you. None of the old brigade here—Shirley Jackson, Mary Shelley, Susan…
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I was raised on old noir, the original post-war wave: Laura, The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Heat, Touch of Evil, to name a few. My parents were big fans and made me a big fan, too. Noir is a genre of hopelessness, of being trapped in a glass cage and fighting back against darkness that you know will defeat you in the end, but I love it. I love the new wave, too, neo-noirs like The Long Goodbye, Body Heat and Bound. But my favorite is The Big Sleep. What I love so much isn’t just all the classic noir stuff or the acting or chemistry—it’s the romance: Bogart and Bacall, two people who don’t quite trust each other—for good reason—who, despite their mutual warine…
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Lee and Andrew Child’s new book, No Plan B, was released earlier today, so we asked them a few questions about writing routine, advice, and influence. * What time of day do you write (and why)? Lee Child: I’m ruled by my biological clock, which mandates one unshakeable conclusion: nothing of value is ever achieved in the morning. Typically I get up late and spend a couple of hours moving from a comatose state into something resembling human life. Then I’ll start work about 1 or 2 in the afternoon. I have learned to sense the point when quality starts to diminish, which is usually about 6 hours later, so I’ll stop then. Often I get a second energy peak around midnight, …
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W. Scott Poole has one of those jobs slightly warped kids dream of: he’s a professor and expert in modern horror. His new book, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire, focuses on the ascension of the classic monsters—vampires, wolfmen, Frankensteins—and about the real monsters we face. His previous book, Wasteland, argued that the Great War greatly influenced our fears and monsters, and Carnivals is both a continuation and a shift from classic monsters to truly nefarious—and often invisible—enemies. Horror is not my jam, but I’ve read the classics: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the entire Twilight trilogy. I am interest…
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When I finished my debut novel, The Confessions of Matthew Strong, I planned a trip to Birmingham, Alabama to search for the plantation homes and graveyards of the southern slaveholders who inspired the book. Yet, when my wife suggested I bring my 14-year-old daughter with me, I hesitated. After all these years, the racist violence in the deep South that tormented me and drove my family to migrate from Alabama to New York City still haunted me. But, come on, I thought. Did I really think she or I would become targets of some white supremacist? That was ridiculous. I knew Birmingham had done tremendous work to repair the racial divide since the 1960s. The city was over 50 …
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On Monday, December 23, 1799, the morning after Elma Sands disappeared, the death of George Washington dominated New York newspapers. Muffled church bells tolled continuously for an hour beginning at noon, as they would each day up to the former president’s ceremonial funeral in Manhattan a week later. To memorialize the general who liberated New York from the British on Evacuation Day in 1783 and was inaugurated in the city as the nascent nation’s first president six years later, marchers accompanied a symbolic three-foot-tall urn to a service at St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway, where Washington had worshipped after he was sworn in. “Every kind of business ceased, and ever…
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The following is excerpted from the introduction to Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World by Alex Joske. _____________________________________ One April day in 2001, Lin Di sat before an exclusive audience in Washington, DC. His host, the former US government China expert Chas Freeman, gave only a brief introduction to the talk. Lin was well known to Freeman and the many foreign policy luminaries gathered at the National Press Club. As secretary-general of a key Chinese cultural exchange organisation, Lin had established contacts across America’s policymaking circles and Chinese communities. In Beijing, he’d warmly welcomed dozens of Am…
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Witches in novels, and in real life, are having a moment. While last summer was defined by the nap dress and Cottagecore, this year’s end to Roe V. Wade makes “goth witch” the only reasonable aesthetic to embrace. After all, the original witch crazes, according to Silvia Federici’s essential theory book Caliban and the Witch, were meant as methods of reproductive control—village women steeped in herblore understood how to terminate a pregnancy, and the capitalist need for new workers, soldiers, and prisoners, (or as Amy Comey-Barrett calls it, the “production of infants”) demands that women with enough knowledge to end a pregnancy be themselves terminated. Paradoxically, …
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Bela Lugosi spoke before a Los Angeles crowd of over two thousand people in August of 1944. The Hungarian-American Council for Democracy (HACD) sponsored the mass rally to urge the Roosevelt administration to end immigration restrictions for Hungarian Jews and to pressure the collaborationist Nazi regime that controlled Lugosi’s homeland to protect those that remained. He had no way of knowing the effort did little good. The SS, with the direct aid of Hungarian fascists, had already deported nearly half a million Jews to death camps in Austria and Poland the previous month. Lugosi described the plight of Hungary’s Jews nearly a quarter of a century after he fled his nati…
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For anyone who has read my debut novel SIGN HERE, it should come as no surprise that I am a fan of dark humor. My mom is the funniest person I know and watching her, especially together with her three brothers, turned me to the dark side early on, and I never looked back. That’s the thing about dark humor. Few simply dabble in it. Either you are a dark humor person, like me and the rest of my family, or you’re not. And you can’t fake it. While all humor has a punchline, dark humor comes with a one-two punch. The way your audience receives the first punch tells us everything, and usually goes one of three ways. Option A: shock, and then strict disapproval. If you are a da…
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When I was a kid I saw two seconds of a horror movie on TV that started a life-long attraction to—and terror of—the genre. In it, a woman on some sort of indoor roller-coaster slams into a brick wall. That’s it. I have no idea what movie it came from; Googling “indoor roller-coaster slam wall horror movie” bears no fruit. All I know is that image has haunted me for decades and led to breathless viewings of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and under-the-covers reads of Goosebumps that both thrilled me… and kept me up at night. I was addicted to the scares, but sleeping with the lights on was really wearing on my sanity — and my parents’ electric bill. Ever the practical kid, a…
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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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Blackwater Falls is a book I wrote during the pandemic. It was inspired by the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and by the wave of the protests that swept the nation after his death. George Floyd was a Black man killed by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly ten minutes, despite Floyd pleading for his life. That police officer, Derek Chauvin, was eventually convicted on charges of second degree murder, third degree murder and manslaughter, and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. As a police officer, Chauvin had a record of at least seventeen misconduct complaints prior to his killing of George Floyd. It was not the first killing of a Black…
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One of my favorite things, as an author, is to play with structure. My home genre is science fiction because it allows me to tip the natural world to the side to expose the interconnected tissue. But I also have a deep love for mystery as well. I love the twists and reveals. It turns out that these two genres play really well together. I think that genres divide into two major types: structure-driven genres and aesthetic-driven genres. Structure-driven genres are things like mysteries, thrillers, and romances. Without a meet/cute and happily ever after, it’s not really a romance. Without red herrings and unveiling the murderer, it’s not a murder mystery. Science fictio…
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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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