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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If you think you don’t know Quinn Martin … believe me, you really do know Quinn Martin. Martin produced hundreds of television series, for the most part cop-and-crime oriented dramas, for decades. His best-known work probably came in the 1960s and 1970s, with shows like “The Fugitive,” “Streets of San Francisco,” “Cannon,” “Barnaby Jones” … the list goes on and on. And no, it wasn’t really hundreds of shows. It just seemed like it. (I mean that in a good way.) Unlike a lot of producers who had relative anonymity, Martin guaranteed he would be a household name – at least in some households – because of the formula of the credits of his series. One of the most recogniz…
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Say cheese—and if murder and mayhem don’t come to mind, say it again, this time with murderous intent. Because as every true turophile knows, cheese plays a lethal if unheralded role in crime fiction. Cheese has been around nearly as long as murder. A 3,200-year-old cheese was found in the tomb of Ptahmes in Egypt. Ptahmes served as the mayor of Memphis back in the 13th century BCE. But the real mystery is why people are clamoring up to sample the poisonous dairy product, which contains bacteria that could cause brucellosis. I myself discovered the dark side of fromage while researching my newest Mercy Carr mystery, THE WEDDING PLOT, which opens on a Vermont goat farm k…
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There was a time when women in thrillers were the body in the ditch or the killer’s terrified girlfriend. Ladies, we have come a long way… More and more female characters are driving the action—from nosey spinsters meddling in cosy crime villages to hard-nosed murder detectives leading the hunt and rustling up dinner at the end of the day. And I say amen to that. I chose women investigators when I started writing thrillers. First, with journalist Kate Waters and now DI Elise King in my new book, Local Gone Missing—because they bring an edge, an interior life and a different perspective to the challenges of solving crime. And because I have been inspired by authors past a…
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Death of a Mystery Writer Six decades ago, on March 7, 1962, the body of fifty-five-year-old Milton Morris Propper was discovered slumped over in his automobile outside his apartment residence at 1841 West Tioga Street in the Nicetown-Tioga section of northern Philadelphia. Authorities concluded that the dead man had expired in his car three days earlier from “acute barbiturate poisoning”—or, in other words, a fatal overdose of sleeping pills, taken deliberately. This is the sort of death scenario that Golden Age mystery writers are known to have concocted, although in those fictional cases the dead man invariably turns out to have been a victim not of suicide but of can…
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It’s a great year for noir, which this list will showcase; there’s also an elegant classical mystery, a speculative mapmaking adventure, and several works that straddle the line between psychological thriller and literary fiction. I won’t say that any of these works transcend the genre—rather, they are a perfect expression of it, both embracing and exploding tropes, playing with our expectations and fulfilling our needs. It’s a tough year so far, and perhaps a clear-eyed vision of our struggles and strengths is something crime fiction can best provide. I’ve always hated feeling lied to, and crime novels have all the honesty you can take about this world (plus a little mor…
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Crime novelist Laura Lippman never stood a fair chance of becoming anything but a writer. Her mother was a librarian. Her dad was a newspaper editorial writer. Her sister worked in bookstores. How could she possibly do anything else? But then there was that editor at the Baltimore Sun who told the young reporter after she’d worked at the newspaper for some time, she “just wasn’t a good writer.” Lippman’s older now, he’s dead and she’s taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College and Eckerd College’s “Writer’s in Paradise” annual conference. Couldn’t write, huh? Yep. She never stood a chance to do anything but. And you must wonder about her crotchety edit…
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Private schools—with their old-money elitism, ivy-covered buildings, and bucolic grounds that look more like country clubs than educational institutions—are ripe settings for mysteries and thrillers. Behind the stone gates, secrets are closely guarded, longstanding traditions can take on the air of cultic rituals, and justice is often meted out in a clandestine manner. I create just such a world of cloistered power in my upcoming novel, All the Dirty Secrets, where my main character, Liza, a graduate of a Washington D.C. private school, must face the dark side of such privilege. For research, I drew on my own last two years of high school at a New England boarding school,…
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My latest novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, takes The Island of Doctor Moreau as a launching pad, probing the connections with race and colonialism inherent in H.G. Wells’ fiction, as well as its literary and film cousins. It is, as you’ll see, a long and distinguished lineage. The Island of Doctor Moreau focuses on a shipwrecked man’s discovery of a distant facility in which a reclusive researcher vivisects animals in an effort to turn them into humans—a hobby that makes him one of the grand mad scientists of literature. By the end of the short novel, Dr. Moreau’s carefully cultivated animal-human society has descended into chaos and murder. But H.G. Wells was not t…
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“I think it’s time for me to tell you about my sister.” I didn’t know where to begin and surprised myself by starting on the day when Vera was eleven and went missing. Everyone in our apartment house on Arbat Street in Moscow looked for her, in every flat on every floor, in the yard, in the alley, in the square. I was six and wasn’t supposed to help; our mother took me to bed, tears in her eyes behind her thick glasses. My brother, Yuri, was eight, and as we lay together in our bed listening to our neighbors call “Vera! Vera!” he patted my hair and told me not to worry. If somebody tried to snatch Vera away, she’d kick and bite them, and they’d regret picking on her. I …
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I know, I know, this is a monthly column, but sometimes your whole team gets Covid and you get a little behind on monthly columns, okay? Rather than just skip the June releases, I thought I’d combine June and July’s excellent releases for a double dose of fiction in translation. These books are fresh, fascinating, and Noir AF. Javier Cercas, Even the Darkest Night Translated by Anne McLean (Knopf) Javier Cercas is one of the most brilliant and creative writers living today, and Even the Darkest Night is one of his best yet. A Barcelona detective heads into the countryside to solve a double murder; both the murders and the detective are not what they seem to be, as s…
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In this series, our editor Olivia Rutigliano rereads every Sherlock Holmes story, and puts together a small close-reading. This week: “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). ___________________________________ I reread “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” the ninth of the twelve stories that comprise The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), so that I might deliver a toast at a recent meeting of The Three Garridebs, the Sherlock Holmes society and scion group of the Baker Street Irregulars, where I was a guest. The toast was way too long, perhaps because the story is so strange and fascinating. It goes like this: Wat…
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From the other, all terrors flow. Since the advent of horror as a genre, fear of the unknown—and fear of what we think we know—has largely driven the narrative. Likewise, there is little more frighteningly unknown to us than that generalized monster commonly referred to as the other. You know the one—the monster with green skin and a flat head, the alien from a distant planet, the beast that drinks blood instead of red wine, the necromancer that conjures spirits in a foreign tongue. The one that doesn’t fit neatly into the small boxes in which our rigid frames of reference so comfortably exist is the one we’ve been conditioned to fear the most. As the film and genre exp…
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Ah, series. Most readers love them, and most writers love to write them. We get to know the imaginary world we’ve created, and it is fun and rewarding to slip back into that headspace and get caught up on what our protagonist has going on. I don’t believe most authors set out to write a series that lengthens from three or four to eight or more. We start out with what we know, then readers demand more so we happily oblige. Of course, we all hope the work we’ve put into planning out that series will be rewarded with avid readers, but what elements cause readers to care enough to keep reading? I decided to take a look at my favorites and why I love them. The Detective…
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Hanging on a rack in a local department store, a sweater can be seen as nothing more than an innocuous piece of everyday clothing. But a sweater worn by Aileen Wuornos gives an insight into the psychological and physical torture she put herself through while on death row. As well as believing the guards were going to steal her eyeballs postmortem, Wuornos was convinced that they were perpetually trying to make her sick by keeping her cell exceptionally cold (an accusation the guards always denied). She wore the same sweater almost every day to try and stay warm. Male inmate clothing, female inmate clothing, and female clothing worn by male inmates. The collection of Bran…
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Lately I have needed novels that not only keep but wholly command my attention, which means most books are out. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for a tender friendship or the patience to follow a trail to a dead body. I can’t bear to hope for an alternate universe—and I don’t want to read about the one I’m currently in, either. None of the usual formats are even remotely sufficient. I need to be captured, made into an active reader, solve a puzzle from the get-go in a world that looks like one thing but is gradually revealed to be another. I want tricks of the light, sleight of hand—anything that keeps my eyes on the ball. I want to follow a primary narrative underwr…
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Just Like Home is dedicated “to everyone who ever loved a monster.” It is the easiest thing in the world to love a monster. It’s easy to love a monster because love isn’t a decision. It’s no one’s fault that love happens. Emotions, urges, and impulses are themselves beyond our ability to control. Love in its many forms wells up out of the human spirit irrepressibly. Like anger or sadness or the desire to kill, it arrives without invitation or intention. Action might spring from emotion—love might lead to an expression of affection, anger might lead to violence, a powerful impulse might lead to a monstrous act. But on its own, love is no different from any other feeling. …
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This article is part of an ongoing series in which we ask contributors to anthologies to weigh in on the collection’s theme. The new anthology Other Terrors sets out to examine the fear of the other in society and turn that fear into understanding. What does “other” mean to you? Holly Lyn Walrath: My story “The Asylum” is about women living in an 1800s asylum and the horrors they endure. Every detail in the story is drawn from real events. I think society has long “othered” people who are “different” and categorized them as “insane”. Others are those who are “other than”—often people normative society has failed. This reality has been particularly horrific for wome…
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“For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.” ― Joyce Carol Oates This well-known, incisive quote serves as a fitting introduction to the work of Nadine Matheson, a defense attorney in London who has just published her second Anjelica Henley thriller, The Binding Room. A sequel to her debut crime novel, The Jigsaw Man, a truly – and suitably – macabre exploration into the mind and actions of an unrelentingly evil serial killer who’s terror…
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At this point, after reading every one of Ruth Ware’s books as soon as I could get my greedy little hands on them, I would call myself a Ruth Ware fan. Nay, a Ruth Ware stan! Ware has been writing some of the most intelligent, incisive, well-paced psychological thrillers around since 2014, and her latest continues to uphold her impeccable standards. In The It Girl, a new student to Oxford becomes obsessed with her glamorous roommate, who never misses a party and always gets good grades. When her roommate is murdered, a porter takes the blame, but 10 years later, the question of true guilt is once again wide open. Who killed the It Girl? Did they want her or want to be her…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In the Dark (Minotaur) “Jennifer Hillier writes the kind of propulsive, no-holds-barred crime fiction that keeps you up at night, with a style and verve that is unmatched. Things We Do in the Dark is a timely, engrossing thriller that will keep you turning the pages until dawn’s light starts to creep through your bedroom window. Hillier is a master.” –Alex Segura Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughters of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey) “The imagination of Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a thing of wonder, restless and romantic, fearless in the face of genre, embracing…
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I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ordinary people being put in extraordinary situations. I’m ordinary, after all. I find it relatable. Could I land a plane? Fight off a shark? Stop a country-crippling cyber attack? (Spoiler: No, probably not.) But I like thinking about people who have, or who could, or who, quite unexpectedly, might. But these scenarios aren’t always heroic. What about ordinary people who find themselves in difficult situations who choose extraordinary (maybe not “good” extraordinary) solutions to those perceived problems? What do they do when they’re backed into a corner? What do they do when they decide enough is enough? Too many true crime s…
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As a road musician and entertainer many years ago, I stayed in a lot of hotels. Seven nights a week, I observed the tourists, the business class, the gamblers who came to play the ponies and the hustlers, swindlers, drunks and pick-up artists. I wrote songs about them, told jokes and now, along with seven other talented authors, we’re writing stories about them. Hotel California includes an original Jack Reacher story by Andrew Child (New Kid in Town), a story by Reed Farrel Coleman who has written the Robert Parker Jesse Stone series, a story by Heather Graham, John Gilstrap, Rick Bleiweiss, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush and Amanda Flower. The plots are wonderful, and the d…
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I have a recurring dream of dark spaces. I’m in a large house, always with a different layout. My journey through the rooms invariably brings me to a cave-like basement that seems never to end—a warren of small chambers full of jumbled objects, each space more sinister than the last. I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that caves, basements, and crawl spaces are our ways of visualizing the dark places within our own minds. That’s why they’re perennially popular settings for fiction genres in which everything hinges on the revelation of terrible secrets. Basement dungeons are, of course, a mainstay of serial killer tales. But even when nobody gets locked up in the da…
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Twenty minutes into Michael Mann’s theatrical debut feature, Thief (1981), James Caan storms into an office and aims a gun—expertly wielded—at the head of a sleazy Chicago schmuck who refuses to give him the time of day and confess to stealing the payoff money owed Caan from his jewelry fence. “I am the last guy in the world that you want to fuck with.” Caan delivers these lines slowly, quietly, precisely. His speech is oddly formal with no contractions—a Windy City dialectical eccentricity—that he delivers seamlessly. He’s ice cold—and he’s terrifying. James Caan was a brute force. In a career that spanned seven decades in film and television, he brought an air of charg…
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I don’t know about you, but I am grateful for everything that makes me laugh these days. I am also seeking and finding humor wherever I can: my dog’s inability to understand the rules of fetch; reruns of The Good Place; reader reviews of Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger. I’m also wondering why there aren’t more funny crime writers. Some of the greats were very funny: Elmore Leonard immediately comes to mind, and there is humor in classic noir of the mordant wit variety. Lisa Lutz’s Spellman books, Timothy Halloran’s Junior Bender series, Amy Gentry’s Last Woman Standing, Caroline Kepnes’s You books all have laughs along with the scary. Crime writers hear my plea: mor…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
