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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To come clean right out of the gate I had never intended to write about The On Klub days as I had no interest in writing a memoir, but when I finally did (at crime author Denise Hamilton’s behest), the only way I could imagine doing so was by way of a noir story: a memNoir, if you will. For me, the music business of those times, with its array of larger-than-life rogues, hustlers, and mob connected operators, lends itself perfectly to the genre. I’m so grateful to Denise as I had the best time writing Top Rankin’. This approach allowed me to write with the intent of giving the reader an authentic, fun experience of 1980, lived in the moment, feeling the power of music i…
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Shop Talk: Megan Abbott Drinks Two Diet Cokes, Makes Weird Choices, and Keeps on Writing
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Nobody does sports-themed crime better than Megan Abbott. Three of her last six novels (You Will Know Me, Dare Me, and The Turnout, coming out on August 3rd, 2021) have all centered on athletics in some shape or form. As a former coach and player, I can’t help but be a Megan Abbott fan. She nails these particular subcultures with an eye for the gray areas, the blurry spot between the stereotypical cheerleader and what lies behind her ice-blue eyes. Megan is also a prolific author who splits time between writing novels and scripts. Considering her production level, I always assumed Megan’s writing process was akin to that of an Olympic gymnast. Come to find out, I wasn’…
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In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage month, we’re highlighting the incredible array of crime books and thrillers by Asian-American authors publishing in 2021, so you can keep reading these stories all year long. JANUARY-APRIL Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Dutton) “Malinda Lo turns her masterful talent toward an under-covered period of San Francisco history. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is by turns gut-wrenching, utterly compelling, and deeply tender. I loved Lily fiercely, and you will too.” —Rebecca Kim Wells, author of Shatter the Sky Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed (Grove Press) “With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Com…
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Where do we begin as novelists? We set out to chronicle the story of a life—not just any life but a meaningful one, a person who matters to us. I don’t know about you, but every time I start a new novel it’s as if I’ve never written one before. I don’t have a clue how to do it. There I sit at my computer, staring at that blameless white rectangle, waiting. It can take a long time. Days, months, even years—a time of personal exile let’s call it, where you wander, somewhat aimlessly, in sweatpants and your favorite t-shirt, across the wasteland of your mind, agitated, confused, ashamed, with your pesky accomplice, Doubt, as your only guide. If only you had a good idea. I me…
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I’ve always liked stories where people go to Hell. Because I like Hell. Because that’s where the angels are. Angels come from Hell. All angels are fallen angels. Angels know how to fall and rise at the same time. Every Russian literary work is a crime novel and it’s about this, more or less. Hell or angels. Same thing. Anglo-Saxon culture is consumed with morality. Latin culture with mortality. But Slavs, we are melancholic fireflies in your summertime. We know we are bad, bad, bad. And how to be good, good, good. But we don’t want to play that game. We are damned and transcendental. We are a cracked basin hit by a shard of sunlight. See: Tarkovsky. Remix with some Jewis…
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We’ve covered Montreal and Toronto before in Crime and the City, so time to head west. All the way west to ‘Terminal City’—Vancouver, British Columbia, the third largest city in Canada and perhaps its most diverse and multi-cultural today. But Canada’s ‘City of Glass’ is also the country’s most expensive city to live in and now feels mighty familiar due to the number of TV shows up there in (surely room for one more nickname!) “Hollywood North”. There’s some crime and vice too…. A good place to start is always the great series of city-based crime collections from Akashic Noir. Vancouver Noir (2018), edited by Sam Wiebe, starts from the premise that the invariably rain-so…
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There’s something alluring about safecrackers. The image of a black-clothed figure sneaking stealthily into a dark bank or mansion, turning the dial until the safe opens to reveal its treasures, is exciting and glamorous, despite its inherent illegality. There is a mystique, a level of advanced skill and polished competence to this particular crime that isn’t part of the common criminal’s repertoire. Perhaps that is what has long intrigued us about safecrackers. They abound in fiction, dating back at least to the early twentieth century, but there are also historical counterparts whose exploits are every bit as entertaining as those in the books and movies. Here’s a brief…
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“Lost” was a sensation when it aired on ABC for six seasons, from 2004 to 2010. Millions tuned in every week and talked afterward, in online forums and at the fabled workplace water cooler, about the show’s many mysteries. But you know all that. Like millions of other viewers, I found the series riveting television. I loved the characters and situations and twists. The polar bear. The hatch. The slowly-unfolding story of the Dharma Initiative. And I was never more horrified at a TV plot point than when “the Others” kidnapped young Walt. The intense reaction the series inspired in me and others backfired, though, when “Lost” ended with a disappointing final season and a…
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This roundtable was inspired by You Love Me, Caroline Kepnes’s majestic continuation of the adventures of everyone’s favorite psychopath-slash-hopeless-romantic, Joe Goldberg. I’ve written about Kepnes before, and I knew she would love this. Caroline is so smart and funny I decided to do a roundtable with her and some other writers who give good psychopath. I assembled my people—Caroline Kepnes (You Love Me), Naben Ruthnum (Find You in the Dark), Edwin Hill (Watch Her), Caroline Louise Walker (Man of the Year), and Joanna Schaffhausen (Every Waking Hour). ___________________________________ Chat-for-Psychopaths “It’s really something to see that phrase and thi…
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I write a sporadic column for this website entitled “The Unlikely Stars of Noir” in which I register that an actor not normally considered to be a denizen of crime cinema has actually made a career out of appearing in such films. It might seem that the purpose of this column is to present information that everybody already knows in a way that they might not have thought about before, but what it really is an excuse for me to revisit the canons of my favorite, talented character actors: highlighting the range of the performers I admire the most, who, chances are, appeared in their fair share of movies about murder and other crimes. Much to my regret, I have lapsed in submi…
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Publishers, booksellers, and many readers like to know the genre of a novel. Where will it sit on the bookstore shelf? How to categorize it online? Which types of readers will it appeal to? Sometimes it’s easy to slot a book into a category or genre: romance, crime, or indeed, mystery. But there are lots of novels which are too slippery for that. They have plenty of suspense and often a good dose of secrets and the unexplained to propel the story forward, even though their premise is not built around a central mystery which follows a trail to a satisfying conclusion. My novels have often been categorized as mysteries and although I’m okay with that, I don’t write them w…
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Back in high school, my best friend and I wanted to be Writers, the W definitely capitalized. We didn’t spend a lot of time writing, though. (It was hard.) Instead, we spent a lot of time talking about what we would do when we became writers. One of the questions that haunted our teenage souls was, What if we have nothing original to say? Hasn’t everything already been said? What if we’re… derivative? Oh, those poor kids. Both of us kept writing and making art (my friend, Marc Ruvolo, started a record label and became one of the founders of Chicago punk). Eventually we realized uniqueness, in the strictest sense, is impossible. All art is in conversation with what’s come…
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By the late 1970s Spain had become the most popular foreign destination for UK holidaymakers and, increasingly, the residency of choice for expatriates looking to tan their bodies and knock back cheap booze. Discount flights, guaranteed sun and locals with a warm welcome (and a willingness to speak English) combined with an increasing UK subculture of traditional pubs, Sunday roast dinner, fish and chips and warm ale made Spain a magnet for Brits—and especially the Costa del Sol. The region became to many in the UK what the Caribbean became to some in the US—a bolthole that was close enough to endure the flight but far enough away to add that exotic magic fairy dust to a …
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Prologue: Welcome 1. If Tom hadn’t left his sweater in his locker, if he hadn’t gone back to get it, and if he hadn’t passed the main office on the way, the whole dark night might’ve been avoided. “Hold up a minute, Tommy. Got one more run for you.” Dammit. Tom had a fun night planned ahead. A great one. Pizza, beer, old movies, feet on the table, and the open prairie of the living room to himself. “Where to, Jerry?” Before his boss even said the city name, Tom knew he’d scratch his evening plans. He never said no to Jerry. “Goblin.” Goblin? “Jeez, Jerry. Goblin’s what . . . an hour away? I haven’t been to Goblin in something close to . . . thirty years.” To Gob…
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May, they tell me, is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spring in Toronto (please, someone tell me so I don’t miss it). The books are flowing a lot more freely and the summer is jam-packed with every writer you wish had a new book (Hint: Kubica, Constantine, Abbott, Hawkins, Gaylin, Dahl, Paris, Vernon, Harding, Stevens, Downing, et al.). In the meantime, we have a very respectable May list for you. Nancy Tucker, The First Day of Spring (Riverhead) Okay, so maybe I’m preoccupied with endless winter: our first book is called The First Day of Spring, and it’s a whopper. It’s a Bad Seed-esque story narrated by the Bad Seed, Chrissie. Chrissie is eight years old. Chrissie k…
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After a year of COVID lockdowns, we are all antsy to go somewhere, but where, exactly? Many countries are still under lockdown, and who’s going to buy a high-price plane ticket only to end up haggling with the airlines if you have to cancel. So, ROAD TRIP! That’s the answer, and I’ve got a great one for mystery reading, adventurous types—a trip up California’s Highway 99 straight through the Central Valley from Bakersfield to Sacramento. I’m certain this is not the first itinerary you had in mind. Right now, you are envisioning a multi-lane, pot-holed road, crammed with dilapidated produce trucks, flotillas of giant Walmart big rigs whizzing by on the left, and speeding …
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John Hunter, a notable 18th century surgeon, wrote a case study about an unnamed doctor who carefully, intentionally nicked his genitals with a scalpel, then bandaged the cut with matter taken from the sores of one of his patients, a man with gonorrhea. The unnamed doctor then developed symptoms of gonorrhea and syphilis, so he concluded that they were one disease. He was wrong. The patient had both. Modern readers, blessed by the benefits of elementary school sex education, know that gonorrhea and syphilis are caused by different bacteria with different symptomologies, but this knowledge couldn’t have come to us without medical pioneers like John Hunter. One can also g…
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There have been strong female characters as long as there have been actual strong women, that is, as long as there have been women. The capitalized “Strong Female Character” however, is a more recent development. In her 2013 essay “I hate Strong Female Characters,” Sophia McDougall contrasts the often one-note “sassy kickassery” of nominally empowering female characters with the actual complexity of a character like Sherlock Holmes. “I want a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness,” she wrote. “Badass gunslingers and martial artists sure, but also interesting women who ar…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ben Winters, The Quiet Boy (Mulholland) “Winters has proved himself to be one of our most fascinating genre blenders of crime and speculative fiction, a writer who never fails to challenge his readers to embrace new ideas and new forms of reality. A wonderful, thoughtful book.” –Booklist Nancy Tucker, The First Day of Spring (Riverhead) “A stunning debut…Suspenseful? You bet. Heart-rending? From beginning to end.” –The Washington Post Sam Riviere, Dead Souls (Catapult) “Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to …
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Willy Vlautin, a 54-year-old novelist and musician living in Portland, Oregon, has steadily constructed a body of work that possesses sociopolitical power, without compromising on literary merit, holistic character development, or nuance and complexity. David Mamet, the Pulitzer prize winning playwright, essayist, and screenwriter, has often cautioned writers with grand ambitions to never drift too far from the campfire. The primary purpose of the storyteller is to entertain. Vlautin certainly entertains, but also meets grand ambitions. His latest novel, The Night Always Comes, is his best work yet. A hybrid of John Steinbeck and James M. Cain, its protagonist, Lynette, …
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It’s an adolescent rite of passage: wait until well after dark, then load up the car with a few friends (and maybe a six-pack or two) and go visit a local haunted spot. Frequently, the spot was the site of a horrific tragedy—or at least it was alleged to be. The term used by anthropologists and folklorists for this activity is “legend tripping,” and it happens all over the country. Growing up in York, Pennsylvania, the premium haunted spot to visit was Rehmeyer’s Hollow. This was the site of a notorious witchcraft murder in 1928. Not only was the crime well-documented, it also led to a spectacular trial that attracted newspaper reporters from all over the world. As far a…
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First things first. I’m a true crime junkie. I’m also a fiction writer. And while I do have dreams of pursuing a true crime project, maybe even solving a cold case, I’m pretty entrenched in the writing of novels. There are not a lot of novels that take on true crime—part of the appeal of true crime is in fact that it is rooted firmly in our reality, that it really happened. But fiction about true crime can explore questions that we can’t if we are “sticking to the facts.” Story can imagine the psychic state of the killer and victim, can delve into motivations, and can take the time to empathize deeply with those involved—sometimes even offering belated redemption, or imag…
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NOW To be straight, I never thought they were going to find you. I gave that up a long time ago. In all honesty I kind of wish they hadn’t ’cause Dad and I were getting along just fine without you. It took him long enough to get over you in the first place. Now you’ve gone and reopened the wound, made him mourn for Mom all over again as if she’s only just died. The truth is, Dad was never much of a dad to me until he got over missing you. But now you’re back and, in his eyes, you’re all that matters. That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you. I knew I was supposed to have a b…
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“In your message you indicated that there is something important you would like to discuss with me. So here I am.” I had received an email from Huby a few days earlier, asking me to meet him in Paris on a life and death matter. Huby had never exhibited any melodramatic tendencies in the past, so I was both worried and intrigued. “Indeed,” Huby said with a solemn look, “more than just important. A man’s life hangs in the balance. But first, let’s enjoy a delicious dinner. This place has the best fish in town, and I’ve ordered us both the loup de mer. I hope you don’t mind.” “Not at all, thanks,” I replied, surprised that this life and death matter could wait until …
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The alliance between Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa was shaky from the start. Neither man entirely trusted the other. The first sign of their inevitable break came in the days immediately following Villa’s victory at Juárez—he was offended when Carranza offered only perfunctory congratulations. It was as though the First Chief considered taking the most important Mexican city on the border to be no more significant than winning some minor skirmish. Villa interpreted this as evidence that Carranza might be leading the revolution against Huerta to serve his own ends rather than the people of Mexico. But his suspicions about Carranza didn’t prevent Villa from immediate…
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