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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Revisiting Kier-La Janisse’s Cult Classic, House of Psychotic Women, Ten Years Later
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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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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 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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The best books out in paperback in fall, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. * Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Anchor Books) “A a fiendishly clever romp, a heist novel that’s also a morality play about respectability politics, a family comedy disguised as a noir…Harlem Shuffle reads like a book whose author had enormous fun writing it. The dialogue crackles and sparks; the zippy heist plot twists itself in one showy misdirection after another. Most impressive of all is lovable family-man Ray, whose relentless ambition drives the plot forward while his glib salesman’s patter keeps you guessing about his true intentions. This book is a blast that will make you th…
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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 have a lot of emotions about autumn—love, hate, jealousy, and fear. I’ll get to all of them, but let’s start with fear and hate. The fear begins on September 1st. Now you might think that is because I live in Miami, and that’s when the hurricane season heats up, but no. It is because that is when the scary movie ads begin. Jump scares are not my love language. I hate having to watch movie trailers with my eyes shut and my fingers in my ears. Horror films are like PSL to me. I don’t care for them, but I’m not going to stomp on anyone else’s joy. So, if seeing a red balloon floating by a sewer drain fills you with endorphins and glee, then this list might not be for you. …
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I binge-watched all six seasons of Gossip Girl the summer after I turned fifteen. It’s been seven years since then, but I remember vividly that the entire time I was watching, a question nagged at the back of my mind. Not: Who is Gossip Girl? But: When exactly do these characters find the time to study? That was certainly my primary concern as a scholarship student at an expensive Beijing private school—not unlike the one I wrote about in my debut YA speculative novel, If You Could See the Sun. By the time I got around to binging Gossip Girl, I had attended that school for almost five years, surrounded by the children of diplomats and celebrities and big company directo…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new releases in nonfiction crime. Katherine Corcoran, In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Coverup, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press (Bloomsbury) A powerful chronicle of the life, work, and murder of Regina Martínez, a trailblazing journalist whose stories in Proceso exposed major corruption in the ranks of Mexican politics, and who was brutally killed in 2012. Corcoran, AP bureau chief in Mexico at the time of the killing, trains a sharp investigative eye on the events leading up to the murder and the desperate coverup that ensued. –DM W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American…
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For twenty years I wanted to write about the world I knew as a medical resident, but I could never find the way to do so. There have been plenty of bildungsromans and medical memoirs, but the canvas seemed so rich with possibility I knew I wanted to reach a little further outside myself. When the answer finally came to me, I could only laugh at how long it had taken to realize that my medical book should be a crime novel. The reason I should have thought of it long ago, is that I have always considered medical diagnosis and criminal investigation as being a pair of conjoined twins. After all, at their most urgent, they come down to exactly the same thing: an attempt to i…
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The leaves are turning red, the air is growing brisk, and the fleeting magic of fall is fully upon us. Summer travel season is over, but we can still travel via books, so let this month’s international crime fiction column take you to France, South Korea, Japan, Argentina, and Russia. Here are five titles that will immerse you fully in the worlds (and underworlds) of other nations. Joel Dicker, The Enigma of Room 622 Translated by Robert Bononno (HarperVia) A new meta-mystery from the Swiss author unfolds with uncanny precision and evolves from a hotel whodunnit into something more nebulous. The elegant surroundings bring to mind classic mysteries, with notes of sub…
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“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” —Italo Calvino What makes a literary character immortal? There are only a handful: instantly recognizable, immeasurably plastic, timeless beings that have grown larger than life—they have captured our imaginations in ways that only a few flesh and blood beings may have. Often, their creators were envious or oblivious of their creation’s merit. For example, Mary Shelley regarded Frankenstein as her “hideous progeny,” Arthur Conan Doyle despised his tales of Sherlock Holmes as distractions from his worthier pursuit of writing historical fiction, and Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in no small part as a tr…
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April 28, 2012 The neighbor’s iron gate stood ajar, something Isabel Nuñez failed to notice when she woke to her Saturday morning routine, during her household chores, or when she left at about 1 p.m. to go shopping. It was on her way home when Yolanda Balderas stopped Isabel to ask her about the gate. Yolanda was a street vendor selling yogurt, as she always did on Saturdays, and stopped by the neighbor’s house. Not only was the gate ajar, Yolanda said, but across the cleanly swept concrete patio with the giant palm, the front door was open as well. The neighbor was never that careless. “I knocked on the gate,” Yolanda told Isabel, “and I yelled her name, but there…
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“Raymond Chandler once wrote that a dead man was the best fall guy in the world because he never talked back. I begged to differ.” —Cleo Coyle, The Ghost and the Haunted Portrait Years ago, I read The Ghost of Captain Gregg and Mrs. Muir by R.A. Dick, the pen name for author Josephine Leslie. The book was a bestseller in 1945. Two years later, Hollywood adapted the story into a now-classic film, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, featuring Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, and one of Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores. Two decades later, a new generation discovered the story via a 50-episode television show. The book was wise, the film moving, the TV series entertaining. What influ…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lev Rosen, Lavender House (Forge) “Lev AC Rosen’s lushly rendered mystery, Lavender House, sets the detective novel on its head. There’s the dishonored policeman sitting on a barstool in 1950’s San Francisco and the elegant woman who slides in next to him with a job. But this femme’s wife has been murdered, and the day-drinking cop has been brutally ousted from his job for being gay. Rosen’s smart, bittersweet tale plays with the oldest truth of all: the price we pay for our identity in America.” –Walter Mosley Joanna Margaret, The Bequest (Scarlet) “Interlocking mysteries lie at…
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No, not the one in Virginia, but rather the slightly older Egyptian city. The country’s second city founded by Alexander the Great, a Mediterranean port, an entrepot of different cultures, religions, imperial invaders, and traders. And once home to the greatest library in the world. And some good crime writing too…most of it seriously historical… So, let’s start with ancient Alexandria. Steven Saylor’s “Gordianus the Finder” series starts in 80BC with Roman Blood (2011) introducing the series hero, Gordianus the Finder, who finds people and murderers. Twelve adventures follow Gordianus in Rome. Now though Gordianus has left Rome and features in a new series by Saylor, “A…
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Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard My school counselor said that I have to do this. She said she wouldn’t, ever, read what I wrote. She added: not that she didn’t want to know what was going on in my head, it was just rude to assume someone could read the words you had just written. She would need my permission. Her name is Ms. Cifuentes and she’s glaring at the two boys in the back who are mumbling to each other. I know why I’m here, but I’m not sure why they are. Ms. Cifuentes seems to always have a bunch of us come see her, though we’re not in her office, which is tiny. Today we’re in an area of the cafeteria not far from where a bunch of other kids are messing around…
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Here at CrimeReads, we love discussing sartorial decisions in crime movies. Crime film might be the most fashionable film category, on the whole, when you think about it—from femmes fatales to English gentlemen detectives, there are countless distinctive style choices and memorable looks throughout its varied subgenres. Many of these ensembles are also fall-friendly (Trench coats! Trench coats! Trench coats!) and include fabulous hats. And that is what I want to discuss with you today. I like hats. I like hats a lot. I don’t wear them enough, but that’s beside the point. Crime film is full of excellent hats, and I have selected what are, to my mind, the ten absolute best…
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Every writer’s dream is to make the New York Times bestseller list. It doesn’t matter if you write crime fiction, thrillers, or cozies, that fantasy bounces around the subterranean nooks and crannies of the writer’s brain just waiting, wondering, fantasizing—will it ever happen to me? It did to Jon Land, and he didn’t even know it. Jon made it big as a paperback writer in the 1980s. He sold more fiction in airports than everyone but the very biggest bestsellers at the time like Clive Cussler and Robert Ludlam. But he had never made the NYT cut. In a 2020 interview he talked about his life and career and how he hadn’t made the list. At the time, he had no idea he was …
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I’ve always enjoyed books set in or about the theatre, particularly for adults. My novel, The Whalebone Theatre, features several: one, created by children from the ribcage of a whale on the English coast; one in London in 1928, where the legendary Ballet Russes perform, and one in Nazi-occupied Paris during WWII. My research into the theatre in London and Paris drew primarily on historical records and social histories, but for the theatre that serves as the title of the book, I drew on my own experiences as a child who liked putting on shows with her friends and a young student who briefly trod the boards at university. Here is a list of the best books about theatre. …
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
