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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Like most crime writers, I’m drawn to stories about broken homes, dysfunctional families and those surviving at the edges of society. In my D.I. Marnie Rome series which began with Someone Else’s Skin (Headline UK, Penguin USA), Marnie is locked in a lethal dance with her foster brother, Stephen, whose actions altered her life forever. Nell Ballard, my young heroine in Fragile (Pan Macmillan) is herself a foster child, caught up in a perverse power struggle in an older couple’s home. Crime fiction is packed with orphans, outcasts and the reinvented. Care leavers – those raised in foster care or by relations – feature again and again. In one very simple sense, by removi…
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Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare’s collaborator, exact contemporary and, until his violent death in 1593, aged 29, the better-known playwright and poet. But since then both his life and death have fertilized conspiracy theories and mysteries. Who killed him, why, how, was it deliberate murder or was it self-defense? Or did he live on in secret to write Shakespeare’s later plays, as some conspiracists claimed? He was killed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1, whose position was precarious. If she died the throne might pass to Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin. Mary had been brought up a Catholic in France and if she inherited the throne Spain would forcibly reverse th…
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I was a little kid the first time I saw Frankenstein. It was the 1931 version with Boris Karloff in the role of the monster. On Chicago station WGN after 10 p.m., there was a show called “Creature Features” that opened with Henry Mancini’s theme from the film Experiment in Terror and a TV announcer reading this poem: “Gruesome ghouls and grisly ghosts Wretched souls and cursed hosts Fog rolls in and coffins slam Mortals quake and full moons rise Creatures haunt and terrorize …” That’s all I remember of that part. I also remember that most of the giant-bug-giant-lizard movies shown back then seem rather innocent by the standards of teen-slasher films of today. (I e…
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I think my wife is plotting to kill me. Countless mysteries have begun with some poor fellow uttering these most ominous words. And all too often, as it turns out, the poor fellow was correct. Murderously-minded females do hide in polite society—but of some such femmes fatales, you need have no fear. Consider the case of this young chap whose anxious missive recently crossed our desk: Dear Miss Lovelost, I think my sweetheart is plotting to kill me. Or worse: she may have given her heart to another. I have lately entered into an engagement with a dear and sweet Young Lady of Substance—accomplished, well-read, and able to converse on the widest variety of subjects. I b…
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In a world of excess, nothing exceeded expectations like Elias Vicker’s Fire Rites of Beltane, the legendary stag party he held every year on the first Tuesday of May, just as spring buds were bursting into the brightness of just-opened leaves, lending midtown streets a transitory illusion of innocence. For years, the hedge fund centibillionaire, dubbed by Forbes New York’s richest man and by the New York Post its most odious clown, had taken over The Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue to cultivate a couple hundred carefully curated denizens of the hedge fund, finance, and political elite. To avoid an uproar, Vicker went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the details of…
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It’s August 2018 and I’m on a plane—heading for a destination chosen by little more than a pin in a map. A few weeks earlier, my publishers in the UK had agreed to support me stepping from my longstanding career as a historical novelist to try something new: a contemporary thriller, set in the heart of the American Midwest. I had the idea for the novel the previous year, after reading a disturbing article about the dangerous power of Big Agriculture. After months of research, I zeroed in on Iowa for the setting, corn-capital of the world and a place where the struggle between small family farms and Big Ag was all too clear. I’d never been and there were no guidebooks, …
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About one minute into episode one of the new Apple TV+ series The Afterparty, a young man in a purple suit (Dave Franco) plummets from the balcony of a cliffside mansion, falling to his death on the rocks below. At the four-minute mark, the two detectives who have examined the body (Tiffany Haddish and John Early) determine that the cause of death was homicide—and what initially seems like haste on the part of the writers is quickly reframed as haste on the part of the characters. Detective Danner (Haddish’s clever, ambitious, and bubbly hawkshaw) has swooped into the investigation after hearing about the death on her scanner; her captain tells her that this case is too h…
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It’s easy to romanticize the South. We see it often in film. Beautiful trees dripping with Spanish moss. Pristine homes with sweeping porches and glittering white facades that open to acres of lush greenery. Quaint streets filled with restaurants and bars, jazz music in the air. Small town Main Streets with beaming, friendly faces, every outfit meticulously coordinated, every hair in place. Manners and genteel accents and gentleman offering their arms, their seats to ladies, the conversations punctuated with yes ma’am’s and yes sir’s and how y’all doing? But behind all the gilded wrapping, there is a fecund abundance of decay and degradation. Lipstick smiles and paint co…
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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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My novel Good Rich People pits the “Have” and “Have-Nots” against each other in violent game, the prize of which is simply the right to exist. In the real world, every one of us is locked in such a battle. The novels on this list imagine that battle on grander scale. The funny thing is, in fiction the “Have-Nots” often take on the more villainous characteristics: envy, wrath, even murderous intentions are de rigueur. Meanwhile, the wealthy are simply annoying, insensitive but worst of all rich—so really, can you blame the “Have-Nots” for wanting them dead? Fiction is possibly the only place where the “Have-Nots” can defeat the “Haves,” and the penance is that no charact…
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During the Golden Age of detective fiction, which spanned the years between the first and second world wars, England’s Maj. Cecil John Charles Street was one of the best-known and most accomplished writers of classical, puzzle-oriented mystery tales. Under his most famous pseudonym, the punning “John Rhode,” John Street was especially admired for his fiendishly clever, yet scientifically rigorous murder methods. If Major Street’s drinking buddy and fellow detective novelist, the ingenious American expatriate John Dickson Carr, was the Golden Age’s lord of the locked room mystery, Street himself was vintage mystery’s master of murder means. The murder plots Street intrica…
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By the time the invasion of Poland officially kicked off the Second World War, the Germans had been engaged in strategy sessions for years—probably even before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Versailles. Eager to redress their losses and keen to demonstrate the imagined superiority of the Aryan race, the country had been zealously preparing its youth, citizens, infrastructure, military, and factories (not to mention its pigeons) for another chips-all-in fracas. The Brits, meanwhile, were thoroughly occupied in moving on after the devastating war years and were eager to downplay the indications that another war was looming on the horizon. They may as well have been an i…
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But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. —Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu On the night of July 27, 1990, Ed Friedland came home from a long day at work to find his wife bound with handcuffs and viciously slain on the dining room floor. The couple’s ten-month-old adopted son, found in the nursery at the rear of the home, was unharmed but distraught after being left unattended for hours. Ed called 911 to report the murder. The police arrived minutes later and dutifully commenced their investigation into this unspeakable crime. Even though Ed had no prior crim…
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Winter for many is dreary. Seasonally, it’s a time to rest after a harvest. Our bodies crave a nap. We want to read by the fire with our dog, curled beneath a knitted blanket, hot cocoa (possibly doctored to chase off the chill) by our side. Weather on the coast amps that blustery feeling with white-capped waves in a charcoal sea, brisk—as in, steals your breath away—ocean breezes, and a sky of solid gray. I was born in Seattle, so gray and dreary is part of my DNA. It wasn’t until I moved to South Florida twenty years ago that I realized a dip in the ocean didn’t require a wet suit or a visit to the dentist after chipping a tooth from the force of your teeth chattering.…
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“All art is but imitation of nature,” or so Seneca observes in, Moral Letters to Lucilius. But Oscar Wilde flips Seneca’s view in his essay, “The Decay of Lying,” holding that, “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” It’s a chicken and egg thing, really. And if you mix in the matter of art imitating art and take the discussion into ideas, inspiration, influence and homage in crime fiction, things get interesting. Many authors have drawn on previous works, which in some cases, have been inspired by other previous works, or by life. It’s a subject I love exploring or kicking around with others as some recent examples – and there are many – come to mind. The…
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My love for stories featuring the theme of human vs. the elements started at a very young age, when I would squirrel away in my toy box (a story for another day) with a blanket, a pillow, a flashlight, and my books. Over the years, I escaped into the wintry worlds created by the likes of Ezra Jack Keats in The Snowy Day, Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Florence and Richard Atwater, and The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Eventually, I found my way to The Shining by Stephen King (though I was long out of the toy box by that time). My love for books set in snowbound settings hasn’t waned. Here is a list of thrillers and mysteries where an untimely winter storm takes center st…
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Like many writers, Gabriel Valjan does not like to talk about himself. On social media, he seems more comfortable boosting other writers or showing off his charismatic cat, Munchkin. So you may not know that he has written three book series: the Roma Series, about organized crime in Italy; the Company Files, espionage adventures set after WWII; and the Shane Cleary Mysteries, following a private eye in 1970s Boston. He has also been nominated for the Agatha, Anthony, Silver Falchion Awards, and won a Macavity Award in 2021 for his his short story “Elysian Fields.” I got to talk to Valjan about his newest book—his twelfth published novel—Hush Hush, just published this Janu…
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Maybe it’s just because I reread all of the Wheel of Time books last year in preparation for the series, but I’ve had an itch for fantasy ever since. Not just any fantasy, mind you—dark fantasy is where a crime fan goes looking when crossing over into the realm of magic. Some of the books below are nihilistic, some are hopeful, and some are profound statements about contemporary existence. What unites the items on this list, other than their 2022 release dates, is a shared emphasis on the abuses and misuses of magic, the consequences of power, not any awe-inspiring achievements. In dark fantasy, the use of magic often comes with a terrible cost to the spell-caster, which …
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Coming fresh to a new work by the author and musician John Darnielle is a deeply unsettling experience. From the outset, you’re fairly certain that what appears to be a modest, brooding text will transform into a howl of loneliness and a prolonged meditation on some of life’s rawest forms of pain, but you’re not quite sure how it will all go down. There’s a Hitchcockian element to his work, in that sense: an ever-building dread, along with the anticipation at turns to come and what they might expose. (His 2014 novel, Wolf in White Van, might be one of the most slyly disquieting works to come around in a long while, but Universal Harvester (2017) certainly gave it a run fo…
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One reader’s fair-play mystery is another’s confounding enigma, so at the risk of starting an internet debate, first and foremost, I’d like to set out what constitutes ‘fair-play’ in a world where twists, turns, dead ends and red herrings are de rigeur. 1. The guilty party must be present within the cast of characters. 2. Unconventional narrative devices are allowed, but still the ‘murderer’ must be theoretically guessable within it. 3. There can be no left-field resolution, such as ‘it was all a dream’, or aliens arrive and destroy the world anyway. So, a fair-play mystery gives its readers a decent chance of working out whodunit for themselves. Read any of my picks …
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Shady Hollow is the first in a series of mystery novels. The twist of our setting is that all our characters are animals. They are wonderfully charming, very civilized animals, but animals nonetheless. Our amateur sleuth Vera Vixen is a literal foxy reporter who senses more to the story when the local curmudgeon (a toad) turns up murdered and it seems like every resident had a solid reason to do the deed. Think Animal Crossing meets Knives Out. As Vera works her way through the clues, the reader is introduced to the world of Shady Hollow. Establishing this world was a challenge, because it not only uses common tropes of the cozy mystery genre, but also places them into a…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * John Darnielle, Devil House (MCD x FSG) “Devil House is terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense…It’s never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times Janice Hallett, The Appeal (Atria) “[I]ngeniously plotted…Hallett skillfully lays an intricate and twisty trail of bread crumbs that leads to half a dozen suspects, which should delight those eager for the opportunity to sift through the evidence…a writer to watch.” Publishers Weekly Robyn Gigl, Survivor’s Gu…
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Norman Mailer ridiculed novels that fully rely on plot as “heinous.” The two time Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song, and Harlot’s Ghost asserted that the problem with plot is that it becomes a “bed” into which the protagonist must fit. The novelist has to “stretch” the character to unnatural lengths, or “cut him off at the knees.” Crime literature has a conflicted relationship with plot, and most classics of the genre showcase their authors ability to avoid the trap that Mailer aptly describes. Perhaps, most famously, many of Raymond Chandler’s novels have plots that are razor thin, and barely discernible. Georges Simenon wro…
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We’ll follow them anywhere. That’s the key. We want to visit Three Pines to consume a delectable meal with Armand Gamache or kick back listening to an LP jazz record in Harry Bosch’s L.A. hillside hideaway. We want to jet around in Nancy Drew’s little roadster or share a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich with Kinsey Millhone. A series detective has to be clever—that’s a given—but intelligence alone is not enough to carry the weight of five, ten, or twenty novels. If you’re crafting your sleuth for the duration, here are five essential character traits to keep readers turning pages long past book one. They have a lot to learn. Most characters are created with a major miss…
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There is a scene towards the beginning of Midnight Run in which the two main characters have their first in-depth conversation. Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) and his captured fugitive, an embezzler with a heart of gold named Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin), are seated across from one another in the dining car on a train that’s speeding west from New York to Los Angeles, where Walsh must bring his charge. Jonathan is watching in silence as Jack gnaws on a chicken wing. Eventually he speaks, in a low, grave voice. He asks Jack, “Familiar with the word arteriosclerosis?” Jack stares back, shoving the meaty end of a drumstick into his mouth. Jonathan continues…
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