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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True crime writers hold the state of Texas in special regard, not so much for the volume, or even variety, of newsworthy crimes committed there, but for the often strange character of Texas lawbreakers, their quirks, their gruesome excesses and the sometimes striking originality of their offenses. “Texas doesn’t have more crime than other places,” the late Mike Cochran, an Associated Press reporter and true crime author (Texas vs. Davis: The Only Complete Account of the Bizarre Thomas Cullen Davis Murder Case and others) in Ft. Worth, used to say. “We just do it better.” Here’s a representative, though hardly exhaustive, look at what Cochran meant. * In 1991, Wanda We…
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I spent many hours as a child, sitting with my grandmother on her couch, watching black-and-white films from the days of classic Hollywood. Her favorites were mysteries, and if there happened to be a ghost or some paranormal element to it, so much the better. It was inevitable that when I started reading that I would gravitate towards mysteries and paranormal stories—with a particular love for ghost stories. I loved the Hardy Boys and the other series for kids; and I still love watching films from classic Hollywood. I eventually outgrew the Scholastic Book Club and the kids’ mystery series (I read almost all of them), and happily spent hours examining the paperback racks …
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One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a room full of people about this spooky situation that culminated in a bathroom where he almost saw something. Something invisible, it turned out, almost became visible by the urinal. But in the end, he didn’t see it after all. The ghost. This payoff was met with derisive laughter, which is the normal response in my family if someone squanders your time with a bad story. I have three middle-aged br…
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It started out as more than just a ride. In the early 1990s, Disneyland Paris (then called “Euro Disney”) had planned a whole Jules Verne area, “Discoveryland,” to be one of the main features of the new amusement park. According to researcher and documentarian Kevin Perjurer, the area’s centerpiece was going to be a giant copper and steel pavilion, and inside it would be a replica of The Mysterious Island, the home port of Captain Nemo from Verne’s 1872 novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Docked in a giant pool would be Nemo’s golden submarine, the Nautilus, which was to be its own walk-through attraction and feature an underwater restaurant. There was going to…
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I just wanted to remind you all of the time, in 2016, when a Norwegian organization called Kongsberg Maritime sent a high-tech robot down into Loch Ness to scan the depths, and it sent back sonar scans of a creature that looked exactly like the Loch Ness monster. Sadly, very sadly, this turned out to be a model of the Loch Ness Monster built for Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which had accidentally sunk into the Loch during filming in 1969. The survey, which BBC’s Steven McKenzie reports was supported by VisitScotland and expert Adrian Shine’s “the Loch Ness Project,” reported that they were positive that the sonar scan had detected the prop a…
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The gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, who is both expert cat-burglar and brilliant detective (as well as a master of disguise), made his debut in the short story “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” in July of 1905. A year later, author Maurice Leblanc thought, why not feature his genius protagonist facing off with the most famous sleuth of the day, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? As a character, Lupin does not have much in common with Holmes, despite their enormous intellects and penchants for showmanship; if he resembles anyone in British literature, it’s the popular gentleman thief character A. J. Raffles, created by E. W. Hornung (who was, incidentally, Conan Doyle’s broth…
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Did you know that this fall will be the fortieth anniversary of the worst nuclear war crisis in world history? You may remember that 1983 was the year that Microsoft Word was introduced but are completely unaware of the nuclear war crisis. After all, American school children didn’t practice ‘duck and cover’ drills under their desks in 1983, as their predecessors had in 1962. The events in 1983 were at least as dangerous as the Cuban Missile faceoff between the Untied States and the Soviet Union in October 1962, yet they remain largely unknown. Unlike in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy’s televised speeches received blanket coverage and alarmed the world, the 1983 cri…
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They somehow managed to get their hands on the key to a door leading to the prison yard. Just before dawn on a November day in 1880, four men leaned a plank against the outer wall, used it to climb to the top, shimmied down knotted blankets to the ground on the other side, and scampered off. They were so quick and so quiet, a guard on duty only a few yards away saw and heard nothing. One of the escapees from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City was a convicted killer. A thief and a forger also went over the wall that morning. But the most notorious of the four inmates was a con man who posed as a monk or priest and had been pulling swindles in the United St…
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A few months ago, I jokingly wondered whether Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), a movie I was in the midst of celebrating as the greatest spy film ever made, hadn’t actually cut the legs out on a few careers, based on a quick glance at the IMDb pages of some of the top people involved in the production, notably director Tomas Alfredson, who did a brilliant job with the complex le Carré material but somehow wasn’t given another opportunity at the helm of a film until 2017. (And when they did give him something to do, it was The Snowman, of all things.) In that same article I also implored—implored might not be a strong enough word, it was more of a cosmic plea—that some…
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“A girl dies today at 3 p.m.” —Posted on Facebook, January 14, 2012 at 1:04 p.m. *** Joyce Hau had her whole life ahead of her. Known to everyone as “Winsie,” she had a smile that lit up her face, and she wasn’t afraid to show it. An attractive and outgoing fifteen-year-old, she enjoyed the kinds of things other young people her age enjoyed: hanging out with friends, going to parties, chatting on social media. Winsie also maintained close ties with other young people in the Chinese Dutch community and often attended Asian cultural events. Always into the latest fashions, she sported a piercing beneath her lower lip. She danced and played the piano and was even skilled …
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If du Maurier re-invigorated the Gothic house with modern passion and intrigue, Agatha Christie turned it into something of a three-dimensional game-board in which to reconfigure characters and objects to act out the varied plots of her seventy-six novels, 158 short stories and fifteen plays. Not all of these took place in large old English mansions; her settings evolved over time to include modern houses and apartments, as well as trains, pleasure boats and archaeological encampments. She became the bestselling author of all time, and her characters emerged from the page onto stage, television and film. But it is for popularizing the ‘murder mystery’ set in a specific pl…
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The CrimeReads editors make their picks for best new fiction in the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, and police are interested in quickly pinning it on her nonverbal son. Kim uses the parallel investigations of police and family to explore the complex dynamics of interracial marriage, Asian and biracial identity in America, and the nuances of raising a child with special needs. You’ll want to savor every word as Kim plunges the depths of human action and finds love at the center.–MO Lou…
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You ever watch a TV show or a movie and the characters are watching something that only exists in that universe? Like Rochelle, Rochelle in Seinfeld or M.I.L.F Island from 30 Rock or The Alan Brady Show in The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mock Trial with Judge Reinhold from Arrested Development? Remember when Stanley Tucci plays an actor studying Adrian Monk to play him in a movie on Monk? They’re adapting the Nikki Heat books in that one plotline of Castle. That kind of thing. Well, creating a fake show or movie within a show or movie is an art, and today, we are here to celebrate that art. For your fake watching pleasure, we present the ten best fake crime movies and TV show…
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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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I’m an apocalypse junkie. Not because I love seeing the world all jacked up (except, okay, I do) but because of how powerful and versatile the apocalypse is as a narrative device. Apocalypses can be fun! They’re a chance to sweep away all the annoying quotidian bullshit and live life pared down to just your favorite tools and your wits, a camping trip that never ends. Or they can be a handy crucible, a way to boil off everything until only the hardiest emotional truths remain. At their most wretched, the apocalypse gives authors and readers a place to see how dark the human soul can get and why. I set my own forthcoming novel, City of Orange, in a post-apocalypse. That’s …
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We’re ranking Sherlock Holmes performances. One hundred of them. Not Sherlock Holmes adaptations, but the representations within them of Sherlock Holmes himself. Now, you might think that you know the best Sherlock Holmes, but as the man himself has said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” I have just watched one hundred different portrayals of Sherlock Holmes. I have the data. And now it’s time to theorize. Even, to deduce. There are so many excellent and varied takes on Sherlock Holmes. Please know that ranking them was very, very hard to do, and while I took lot of pleasure in researching and writing this piece, I took no pleasure in making any…
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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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Because we were all stuck inside for most of last year, it feels easy to suggest that television took on new meaning for us—most simply, as something to actually do (inside). I don’t know, though, if this is especially different from how television normally functions for many of us; we have always looked forward to episodes, counted down until premieres, and we certainly have been binge-watching whole-series for years. But, yes, in 2020, television may have felt more soothing to many of us, for breaking the pervasive monotony or calming our nerves or distracting us. Or informing us! This year, we watched strange-community-fostering shows like Tiger King, and streaming-se…
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It’s spring. It’s officially spring in New York, where CrimeReads is based. Maybe you, like me, wear sunglasses year-round. But maybe you are just busting yours out for the season. There can be no denying that accessory’s association with warm weather. Nothing elevates a look like a pair of sunglasses. And there are many, many slick shades in the annals of crime film and TV. There are cool sunglasses in lots of movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, Risky Business, Lolita… though Dolores wears cat-eyes, not the heart-shaped glasses, in the movie itself). But the crime genre has them in spades. So does the sci-fi genre; hey, it’s also a thing that sometimes CrimeReads c…
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The scruffy detective is one of the purest, most persistent tropes in the crime genre. I’m not talking about the trope of the incompetent cop, but the detective who is very adept at solving crimes and less so at looking presentable/caring about other things. Personally, I like this character type. I want to watch someone roll out of bed at noon and go stagger off to follow a lead while wearing a trench coat that has not been dry-cleaned in a decade. I decided to put together a list of some of the most iconic entrants in this category. This is not a comprehensive list. Some of my lists are fairly exhaustive, while others are more like very specific, little tasting menus, …
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During my three-year quest to rediscover a “lost lady” of detective fiction, Carolyn Wells, another mysterious woman appeared in the margins of Carolyn’s backstory. She is referred to as the “Unknown Woman,” the unidentified victim of a Victorian murder in Rahway, New Jersey, where both women are buried within walking distance of each other. Wells never wrote about her, but I have a hunch the cold case inspired Wells’s decades-long career as a mystery author. In May of 2021, I took a field trip to Wells’s hometown, checking out her former home, the building where she had once worked as a librarian, and her gravesite. It was less “research” and more communion with spiri…
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Three months ago, I put together a list of the 19 scruffiest detectives in crime film and TV. I wrote in that list that “[t]he scruffy detective is one of the purest, most persistent tropes in the crime genre” and that is true. But such is also the case for the suave, polished detective! Crime fiction contains multitudes, what can I say? The gentleman sleuth character is deeply entrenched in the genre, going back to the 19th century. The archetype flourished during the Golden Age of detective fiction at the start of the 20th century, giving us countless well-heeled, refined sleuths ripe for adaptation to television and film. As I did with this list’s rumpled-focused com…
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Three East 236th Street is a trim little house on the eastern border of the park, just north of where the old Mosholu Parkway once emerged from the woods. In the winter of 1931, a middle-aged man named Emanuel Kamna lived there with his wife, in-laws, and two daughters. He had enlisted with the National Guard in his twenties and never left the military. He’d patrolled the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa Expedition and survived the shell-shredded trenches of Flanders during the Great War. After returning from Europe with an honorable discharge, he found work at the Kingsbridge Armory, just south of the park, where he earned $7 a day maintaining guns and rifles for t…
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One and I had a novel, two and I had a sequel, three and I finally felt I could say I had a series. So the occasion of my third Charlie Waldo book, Pay or Play, has me thinking about the works that shaped my own instincts about how to build and sustain a run. Truth be told, I was a child of television, so that’s where my biggest influences lie. I’d had a long career writing TV and movies, too, before I became a serious reader of crime fiction. I was also a child of the 70s, the celebrated decade of Columbo and The Rockford Files. But for me, the 80s were the true Golden Age of TV crime, the decade that changed what and how we watched and laid the foundation for all the…
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Ask any woman who writes fiction meant to shock or disturb about response to her work, and she will no doubt offer up at least one anecdote involving something like, “You write that? But you look so nice!” It’s certainly commonplace among modern female horror writers, and it seems likely that their sisters in the past occasionally endured similar responses. It’s hard to say exactly what readers imagine a female horror writer looks like. Women have been writing this sort of fiction more than even the most avid of readers may realize and for just as long—perhaps longer—than their male counterparts. Why aren’t they as well-known today as their male contemporaries? Why did…
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