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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What I’m about to say will be provocative. I’m sure many will disagree. But this is a hill I’m willing to die on. It’s time we accept that Bravo’s Real Housewives has become our modern-day film noir. No, really. Just hear me out. Classic film noir was one of my favorite eras in cinematic history. It was old Hollywood glam dipped in stark light and shadowy contrasts. Stylistic romps filled with complex narratives driven by crime, jealousy, greed and explosive confrontations. Taking place in downtrodden backdrops that commonly featured alcoholic hard-boiled detectives and femme fatales – characters entangled in situations that tested their morality and changed their world…
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Natasha Lester writes lush, atmospheric, and richly detailed historical novels; her latest, The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre, takes us into the Parisian fashion world during WWII, as the glamorous Alix St. Pierre takes a job at the fashion house of Dior and starts moonlighting as an American spy. I caught up with Natasha Lester over email to chat about the book, historical research, and the timeless allure of mid-century fashion. Women in espionage have been having a moment, in fiction and in nonfiction. What’s responsible for the rise in interest in women spies, do you think? Their stories have been left out of the history books for so long, which means it’s wonderf…
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Kody Brown is a Mormon on a mission: to demystify and destigmatize polygamy. He has cast himself as the Pied Piper, the Don Quixote, and the Martin Luther King, Jr of plural marriage, a righteous man defined by family and faith. The Browns—Kody and his wives (in order) Meri, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn—came out as polygamous in 2010 when the show premiered. Their step into the public light was a legitimate political event. Most of America only knew polygamy in its fictionalized, Big Love version and in its most abject form, where a patriarch takes many wives, builds a sprawling compound for his ever-growing family, and the movements and rights of girls and women are s…
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September 1943: German forces occupy Rome. Gestapo boss Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. Hunger is widespread. Rumours fester. The war’s outcome is far from certain. Diplomats, refugees, and escaped Allied prisoners risk their lives fleeing for protection into Vatican City, at one fifth of a square mile the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country within Rome. A small band of unlikely friends led by a courageous priest is drawn into deadly danger. By Christmastime, it’s too late to turn back. Sopranos: Delia Kiernan, Marianna de Vries Alto: The Contessa Giovanna Landini Tenors: Sir D’Arcy Osborne, Enzo Angelucci, Major Sam Der…
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The universe has been trying to get me off this planet for years. February 2015: It’s a cold Wednesday night and my Advanced Screenwriting Class (where undergraduate students complete a feature film script in one semester) has just wrapped up a scene-by-scene deconstruction of the iconic film Die Hard, which every aspiring screenwriter needs to study line-by-line. These are good kids—dedicated, disciplined, talented. You don’t sign up for a class like this unless you’re committed. I’m in my twentieth year of teaching screenwriting at Tennessee’s first film school: The Watkins Film School, a division of the Watkins College of Art. I love teaching, but the college is dyin…
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I am not known as a young adult author, but I have published two novels about an adolescent character. Travis Hollister is, in the first book, 12 years old, and in the second, nineteen. The novels, Sweet Dream Baby and Night Letter, are really one story, or the stories of two years in Travis’s life, with a gap of six years separating them. My subject here is voice, which is distinct, I believe from style. Style is a grammarian’s notion. Voice is a writer’s concern. Voice is the sound of a human being speaking, and it’s a performance that can include, I believe, the sound of a character’s thoughts. In my teaching, I have used the term, “voicey,” to describe novels, us…
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When I first had the idea for this interview series, where I’d talk to well-known crime writers about the books that they think every fan should read, it seemed self-evident that I should start with Ace Atkins, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of the Quinn Colson series. As every writer who has interacted with him knows, Ace is a fount of knowledge when it comes to both the craft and history of crime fiction. (He and writer Megan Abbott have a regular meet-up online where they watch noir movies together and then discuss them, an event that would surely sell out within minutes if they ever felt like opening it to the public.) Atkins is unfailingly helpf…
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“Old pirates, yes, they rob I, Sold I to the merchant ship; Minutes after they took I From the bottomless pit.” —Bob Marley,“Redemption Song” This Folio Society edition of Douglass’s remarkable work marks just another stage in its existence as an intractable work of literature and a public record of slavery and the effort to end slavery. Published in the US in 1845, the book sold well immediately, and its anticipated impact, given its quite radical and bold assertions, had Douglass take flight to the UK upon publication. Whilst there, Douglass would see an edition of the book published in Dublin, and his time there would become a fit subject in the argument for collecti…
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When I go to crime scenes, I’m ready to focus on terrible things. I end up at crime scenes because my best friend, a homicide lieutenant, thinks I have something to offer on the cases he calls “different.” He rarely gives me details, wanting me to form my own impressions. As I pulled up to the yellow tape on a Monday morning just after ten, I knew nothing. No evidence markers outside. Whatever had happened was limited to the interior of a navy-blue, two-story stucco building. I gave my name to a uniform guarding the tape and was allowed to park in a red zone. The blue building sat on the north side of Venice Boulevard, perched on a grubby corner, the entrance on a si…
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Authors writing spy thrillers, or crime novels laced with espionage, often hook readers with declassified intelligence. By our nature, we want things we can’t have; we want to place our eyes on what we’re not allowed to see. To be sure, information governments once classified in the name of national security is by its nature sexy and provocative. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the study of UFOs, for instance, is catnip for any generation. Declassified information is forbidden fruit that’s fallen off the tree, now ripe for eating. What once was a nation’s crown jewel lies on the ground—abandoned and discarded—beckoning like that glowing green crystal in Sup…
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This city is large and diverse. There are pockets of grinding poverty, pockets of middle-class respectability, pockets of wealth. There is corruption beyond a normal person’s belief, and incredible selflessness and valor. Intrigue worthy of a spy novel, and innocence and wonder. Eight hundred thousand-plus people living out their stories. And all too often, their stories merge with mine. –City of Whispers (2011) A classic hardboiled opening. It could have come from any of the guys – Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald – but it didn’t. Its author was Marcia Muller, recently fired from her magazine job because she kept embellishing the quotes (“they were more interesting,…
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1. The 1934 Extinguishing of the Frank Clements and Elsie Hildreth Smith Family The coroner declared that there was no evidence that the house had been forcibly entered, but added that the investigation showed that the Smiths frequently did not lock doors and windows at night.—“Alabama Banker and Family Slain—Couple Were of Leading Families,” New York Times, November 26, 1934 As day began to dawn on Sunday morning, November 25, 1934 in Demopolis, a quiet little Alabama town of just over four thousand souls situated in rural Marengo County at the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers in the heart of the state’s old plantation belt, Gertrude Robertson, coo…
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Rocking. Gentle at first. A lullaby. Rock-a-bye baby. Then harder. Rougher. Her head banged against glass. Her body rolled back the other way and she was falling. Onto the floor. Hard. “Ow. Shit.” Her heart spiked and her eyes shot open. “What the fuck?” She rubbed at her throbbing elbow and stared around. Her eyes felt like someone had rubbed grit into them. Her brain felt like wet sludge. You’ve fallen out of bed. But where? She sat up. Not a bed. A wooden bench. Running around the side of an oval-shaped room. A room that was moving from side to side. Outside, gray sky, swirling flakes of snow. Glass all around. Nausea swept over her. She fought it down. There wer…
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In his introduction to the Black Lizard edition of Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues, Elmore Leonard writes that neither he or Willeford wanted to be stuck with the good guy’s point of view. “We both saw Harry Dean Stanton as our hero,” he said. When I lived in Los Angeles, I haunted the bar at Dan Tana’s because I heard Harry Dean Stanton haunted the bar at Dan Tana’s. I spent a couple foggy closing times in his company, drinking tequila, smoking American Spirits, and singing Irish songs. Later, when I started writing about the burned-out Van Nuys bail bondsman who became the hero of my first novel Zig Zag, I always pictured Harry Dean. Across a hundred or so movies, Har…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jonathan Kellerman, Unnatural History (Ballantine) “This is Kellerman at his very best. Just the dialogue between Sturgis and Delaware is worth it. But also, the depiction of Los Angeles is always the star.” –Mystery & Suspense magazine Kwei Quartey, Last Seen in Lapaz (Soho) “Quartey once again finds piercing social pain beneath what looks like a routine case.” –Kirkus Reviews Deborah Crombie, A Killing of Innocents (William Morrow) “Crombie is as skilled as Louise Penny or J.D. Robb in developing characters while entwining personal lives with riveting police investig…
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São Paulo – the most populous city in Brazil; the largest Portuguese speaking city in the world; arguably the fourth largest metropolitan area in the world and a major financial, corporate, and commercial centre for the country. And also a melting pot city – Arabs, Italians, Portuguese, Jews from all over Europe, and Japanese among others have all made São Paulo home and have added to its distinctive feel. It’s a city of skyscrapers, buzzing helicopters, traffic jams, a serious soccer addiction, and the massive energy of the Paulistanos, as the locals are known. São Paulo crime fiction is invariably tough, hard boiled and accentuates the problems within Brazilian society …
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meth·od act·ing /ˈmeTHəd aktiNG/ noun a technique of acting in which an actor aspires to complete emotional identification with a part, based on the system evolved by Stanislavsky and brought into prominence in the US in the 1930s. Method acting was developed in institutions such as the Actors’ Studio in New York City, notably by Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, and is particularly associated with actors such as Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman. I didn’t start out aspiring to be a novelist and I came to it later than many. I was in my late thirties, the creative director of a NYC ad agency when I started writing screenplays. When one was stolen and produc…
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It was close to midnight in Manhattan and they were still waiting in the van. Ford, short and wiry, was behind the wheel, while Neuland—bulkier and a foot taller—slouched in his seat trying to keep his head from hitting the ceiling of the van. They were dressed all in black and had black balaclavas on their faces so that the only things visible were their eyes—and someone would have to look carefully to see them. They’d been parked at the edge of the alley since twilight and both men had long since grown bored. Still they waited, their rifles propped against their legs. Their employer—Mr. Garrick—hadn’t given them a description of their target, just the bare outline of w…
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John Humphrey Noyes, in his youth, was so painfully shy that he could barely endure the company of women. “I could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation,” he wrote in his diary, than “a room full of ladies with whom I was unacquainted.” Born in 1811 on the Vermont frontier, he was the fourth of nine children of John Noyes Sr., a former congressman, and flame-haired Polly Hayes, whose nephew—the feeble, emaciated Rutherford B. Hayes—would grow up to become the nation’s nineteenth president. John Humphrey was a precocious student, and he enrolled in Dartmouth College at fifteen. He went on to study law, but his shyness was so paralyzing that he stammered and stu…
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My husband and I fell in love with Kauai when we went there for our honeymoon. We’ve been back many times since, and during the pandemic, we decided to live there so I could research the book I was working on. It was supposed to be an upmarket novel like my first two books, but pandemic homeschooling coupled with the state of our world put me in a dark place. My solution: I started killing people in the book. There was an accidental death or two, an intentional murder, stalking, and a drowning. All of which I wrote while sipping Mai Tais at the beach under the sunny sky, sand between my toes. I didn’t know I’d accidentally written a thriller until I showed it to some wri…
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It may not be possible to definitively pinpoint when horror movies turned into racial minefields, but there’s little doubt that 1968 was a watershed year. That’s when two films that would help shape the genre through the turn of the century splayed high-profile Black deaths across the screen, ingraining these images on the minds of future generations of filmmakers and moviegoers. Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told and Night of the Living Dead were grimy little black-and-white indies whose provocative content—and eventual success—reflected the anti-establishment shift of the decade. It was an era of social and political upheaval that forced the nation to confront…
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There’s someone in the house. I know it as soon as I’m inside, though I couldn’t say how. Some indescribable change in the air, perhaps, or a sound I hadn’t consciously registered. A wave of adrenaline sweeps over my skin, prickling all hair follicles on end. I stand frozen, just inside the still- open front door, a layer of warm air and sunshine pressing at my back and the shadowy cool of the terraced house silently waiting for me. But it’s the wrong type of silence. I stand motionless, staring, my ears straining to catch any sound above my own racing heartbeat, which is thumping in my ears, thumping in my throat; waiting for a moving shadow or the thud of a footfall or…
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In 2004, following allegations of widespread inter-governmental spying at the United Nations headquarters in New York, then Spanish ambassador to the U.N., Inocencio F. Arias, told the Washington Post: “In my opinion everybody spies on everybody, and when there’s a crisis, big countries spy a lot.” Despite the delicious irony of Señor Arias’ first name, he was right to point out that no government is innocent of espionage; they’re all doing it, and they’re all denying it. To us regular citizens, there’s an inherent absurdity here: why go through the rigmarole of denying you’re doing something that everyone knows everyone’s doing? As I write, NORAD has spotted the third—…
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I’m an avid reader, so it was hard to decide how to choose my favorite books with characters starting over in some way. I went through my bookshelves and selected mysteries with an amateur sleuth; if you haven’t read these yet, you won’t be sorry if you add them to your TBR list. I personally enjoy stories about others rising to the challenge, whatever the situation. Scot Free by Catriona McPherson Book 1 in the Last Ditch mystery series. The author’s gift with humor makes this impossible to put down. I totally want to hang out with California transplant Lexy Campbell and her pals. Lexy Campbell fell in love and left her native Scotland for a golden life in Californ…
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After five years of procrastination, Ian Fleming sat down at the typewriter. He began to write not for the joy of creating, but as a way to avoid reality. He was forty-three years old and troubled by thoughts of the future. At the typewriter, he could escape reality and dream about the person he would rather be. On the surface, Fleming’s life looked idyllic. It was 1952, and he was wintering in Goldeneye, a simple one-storey house near Oracabessa on the north shore of Jamaica. He had had this house built after the end of the Second World War, with the intention of using it as a winter writing retreat. It was quite an ugly, sparse building, to the eyes of those used to…
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