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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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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Hercule Poirot hasn’t been brought to the screen as many times as Sherlock Holmes has, but he’s certainly had his fair share of portrayals, throughout the years. He’s been everywhere, from radio to the big screen to the small screen to the stage. The rules: as usual, with these things, I can only rank performances that I can actually watch. So, no radio (VERY sorry not to include a Poirot adaptation with Orson Welles in multiple parts), no theater, no video games. But that’s okay. That leaves us with 20 performances to assess. It wasn’t an easy job. I relied on most of my little gray cells to pull it off. Now, normally, when making these lists, I have to put together th…
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It’s that time of year again! The nominees for the Anthony Awards have been announced. The winners will be declared at Bouchercon, scheduled to take place in New Orleans from Tuesday, August 24th to Saturday August 28th. This year’s gathering will be themed “Blood on the Bayou,” and it will be a celebration you don’t want to miss. Congratulations to the nominees! ___________________________________ BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL ___________________________________ What You Don’t See, by Tracy Clark (Kensington) Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books) Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur Books) And Now She’s Gone, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Forge Books) The …
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There’s no place like a diner, nowhere at all like a diner. A separate piece, a more focused essay, would simply muse on the ontology of “the diner,” trace the history of the diner, evaluate the American-ness of the diner. This piece is not that, but I would like to write it anyway, because diners are my favorite things, but besides that, they also have a particular, elusive mystique. What is it about the diner that is so appealing, so satisfying? Is it the cheapness, the accessibility of the diner? The local-ness, the nostalgia? That so many of the diners we encounter today are actually relics of earlier times and different aesthetics: roadhouses along interstates, break…
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Okay, everyone, it’s time to rank Prison Escape Movies. What are the parameters? The criteria for this category seem straightforward, but might involve even more hair-splitting than usual, so please read the guidelines, or what we’ll have here is… failure to communicate. First of all, not every movie that features a prison escape or escaped prisoners is a Prison Escape Movie. To be on this list, a movie must centrally feature the escape, both tonally and practically, emphasizing the conditions that create the need for the escape, the process of planning and strategizing the escape, the actual escape, being on the run or pursued or recaptured, and/or a general atmosphere…
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There is possibly no more enjoyable archetype in crime film than the con artist. Probably because it’s a fascinating profession. The con artist isn’t exactly a thief… he (or she) is more manipulative than that. A thief takes your money, but a con artist convinces you to give them your money. And that’s a big difference. Here at CrimeReads, we often discuss the legendary pros of the great movie cons, and today, finally, we’re bringing that discussion to the site. What are the rules? Simple. To be on this list, a character has to be more of a swindler than an actual thief. We’re talking confidence men, frauds, tricksters, charlatans, impostors, swindlers, shady real estat…
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Three years ago, when I ranked 100 Sherlock Holmes performances in an article for this very website, I had thought that I had landed upon the most challenging project I’d ever undertake at CrimeReads. Watching countless film and TV adaptations, attempting to ascribe value to various interpretations of the character, attempting to force a logical ranking out of them all… for weeks, I wrung my hands over it, and, when it was over, I washed my hands of it—and the notion of putting together any similar list ever again. And yet here we are. Here we are again. The list which you are about to read is a ranking of the 85 film and TV performances of Sherlock Holmes’s esteemed col…
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When Taryn Cornick’s sister was killed, she was carrying a book. People don’t usually take books when out on a run, but Beatrice must have planned to stop, perhaps at the Pale Lady, where she was often seen tucked in a corner, reading, a pencil behind her ear. The book in the bag still strapped to Beatrice’s body when Timothy Webber bundled her into the boot of his car was the blockbuster of that year, 2003, a novel about tantalising, epoch‑spanning conspiracies. Beatrice enjoyed those books, perhaps because they were often set in libraries. The Cornick girls loved libraries, most of all the one at Princes Gate, which belonged to their grandfather, James Northover. Beat…
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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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The culinary cozy genre is populated by wonderful authors who are inspired by a true love of cooking. Some of them focus on recipes that reflect their own dietary concerns. Libby Klein struggles with Hashimoto’s and celiac disease, so her Poppy McAllister Mysteries feature gluten-free recipes. Daryl Wood Gerber’s series, which include the Fairy Garden Mysteries, also feature gluten-free recipes because she’s a “true blue celiac.” Other culinary cozy authors like Mia Manansala (Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries), Raquel V. Reyes (Caribbean Kitchen Mysteries), and Jennifer J. Chow (Night Market Mysteries) include recipes that are a tribute to the cultures their books celebrat…
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By ten a.m. on the morning of Saturday, October 18, 1947, the awful word had gotten round among the other fifty-nine first-class passengers sailing aboard the Durban Castle, an ocean liner situated off the coast of equatorial Africa that was en route to the English city of Southampton from Cape Town, South Africa. Gay Gibson had disappeared! Gay Gibson, the vanished young woman, was an enchanting auburn-haired, milky-skinned stage actress, only twenty-one years old, who had left her home in South Africa aboard the Durban Castle in order, she told people, to find her fame and fortune strutting upon the boards in England, where she had originally resided with her peripatet…
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A new Brubaker/Phillips original graphic novel is always reason for crime fiction fans to celebrate, but there’s something particularly special about the bestselling, much-lauded team’s latest – Night Fever – a twisty, mind-bending neo-noir that pulls you through a winding, hypnotic tunnel of darkness in a way only Brubaker, Phillips and colorist Jacob Phillips can. Cinematic and gripping, Night Fever is an outlier in the greater Brubaker/Phillips canon, but in the best way possible – a memorable detour that sticks with you. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Ed, who took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss the book, his other projects, collaborating with Sea…
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The lack of women serial killers in fiction is often a source for 90s-style feminist outrage—an extreme version of “anything you can do, I can do better”—but the female serial killers that do pepper crime fiction have, until recently, been rather like cardboard cutouts of their male counterparts, mostly around for shock value. I shudder to think of one popular tale-turned-film in which the woman committing the crimes was merely carrying on for her father (the acceptable form of taking a man’s job). Women serial killers in fiction have, in effect, been the twist—a hat trick from an author who believes too much in the inherent kindness of women to realize why women might be…
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The book smelled old. It must have been sitting on the shelves of the secondhand bookstore for a long time before I bought it. The title was enigmatic: With the Italia to the North Pole. What was the Italia? And who was going to the North Pole? The author was just as mysterious. Who was Umberto Nobile? I was looking for a mystery to solve—and now I had found one. When I opened the stiff pages of the ninety-year-old volume to try to find the answers, I felt a slight draft on my hand. An equally old and irregularly cutout newspaper clipping slipped out of the book and fluttered to the floor. The faded headline of the story answered some of my questions. It read: “Bound…
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As a society we are not just interested in jewelry heists: you might even say we are obsessed with them. Books, films, TV shows abound decade after decade from Robin Hood to Lupin. From the Moonstone to the Oceans franchise. We love jewelry robberies the point that we seem to even admire the professional criminals who carry out these robberies. Think Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. Yes, we’re relieved to know he’s given up his thievery, but would we really be that upset if we’d discovered every once in a while, he still pocketed a diamond bauble or two. As a writer who has been telling stories that revolve around jewelry for over a decade, I’ve often wondered at the mean…
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One day in the early 20th century, a man called Andrew Helgelien received a letter from a woman he had corresponded with for a while. The woman was a land-owning widow of means, based in Indiana, but of Norwegian descent like himself. Andrew had first written to her after seeing her personal ad in a newspaper for Scandinavian immigrants. The two of them had hit it off, and were already planning their future together. Enclosed with the letter was a dried four-leaf clover for luck. Little did Andrew know on that day that the woman he was so enamored with would later come to be known as one of the most prolific women serial killers in American history, and that he was to bec…
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Part the First: The Ambitious Young Author Despite having produced more than one hundred and thirty mystery novels between 1886 and 1932, the year of his death, English born, New Zealand raised author Ferguson Wright Hume (1859-1932) today is remembered—to the extent that he is remembered—for one work, his debut murder tale, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886). Accounts typically assert that upon the novel’s publication some 500,000 copies of Hansom Cab were placed into the eager hands of murder fanciers (some sources suggest up to a million copies may have been sold), making the novel a landmark financial success within the mystery genre. Few people indeed ever achieve s…
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Sometimes secret codes can be the poignant echoes of languages that have been suppressed by conquering powers. There are words and phrases and cadences that have been smothered by oppressors and, as such, can be used by their original speakers in the spirit of defiance. This was the case for the languages spoken by the many tribes of the Native Americans in the early years of the twentieth century, whose lives and cultures had been decimated by the swarming colonialists taking over the whole of North America. The new rulers of the west decreed that the children of Native Americans should be turned away from the old tongues. They were enrolled in boarding schools far from …
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We all have a picture in our mind of the archetypal detective of American fiction. The hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s, most influentially in Hammett’s novels and in the pages of the legendary magazine Black Mask. American crime fiction has a much longer history. It begins, of course, with Edgar Allan Poe. (The history of most genre fiction in the USA begins with Edgar Allan Poe.) His chara…
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You’ve seen the Amish culture in books, movies and even in exaggerated “reality shows.” Without electricity, automobiles, TV, radio or other modern conveniences, the Amish drive horse drawn buggies, use kerosene and candle light, and generally live a rural farming lifestyle. It’s like stepping back in time with a community of people who choose a simple existence and reject any outside influences on their self-described Plain way of life. The Amish have attracted a lot of attention from curious tourists and authors alike. Not only are people curious about this peculiar culture, but it gives a wonderful setting for murder mysteries with a tight-knit community that will prot…
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I remember when I first learned that Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes and heels so their feet would fit the glass slipper. Or the first time I read Bluebeard and discovered—alongside his bride—what hid behind the closet door. I realized that many of the fairy tales I grew up on had been altered to hide their claws and teeth and gruesome violence. And yet how our society is built upon such tales. We hunger for them, just as the fairytales are built on hunger—for food, for love, for power, for vengeance. When I was gathering research for my fantasy novel, A River Enchanted, I sifted through pages of Scottish fairy lore, fascinated by the old folktales as well as…
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DUNCAN MCMILLAN, INTERVIEWER: What was going through your mind that night in the tent with Sandy? CLEO RAY: I could look up and see the sky and stars. Those stars were the brightest ever. I could hear a breeze rustling through the pines above us. The sound of an owl hooting. I had the feeling of being surrounded by pure nature, pure peace. Sandy had fallen asleep with his arm around me. My physical body could not have felt safer next to his. But you asked about my mind, didn’t you? FRED HITE, COUNTY SHERIFF: We arrived at the Kim home in Juniper Ridge and found three cars parked in the driveway. One belonged to the suspect. We split up to cover the back and side entran…
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Quick Confession Let me start by admitting something that may be a little shameful, a little anathema, on a site like this: I’m not a crime fiction aficionado. Honestly, I read other genres much more extensively. I’ve never read Agatha Christie (gasp!), Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, Harlan Coben, Dean Koontz, James Patterson, John Grisham etc. Sadly, the list goes on. Are you still reading? Am I still invited to this club? Maybe, maybe not. Let me also say, I fully enjoy the thriller/crime/mystery genre. I love Tana French, Kate Atkinson, and Val McDermid; I especially enjoy thrillers that toe the line between other genres like Julie Phillips’ Disappearing Earth or Jeff Va…
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I started writing crime novels back in the dark ages—the early eighties. I had always wanted to be a writer, but somehow other things had gotten in the way of my doing that—two years of teaching high school English, five years of being a school librarian on an Indian reservation, and ten years of selling life insurance, not to mention the births of my two children. In 1982, at age 38 and as a divorced single mother, I finally gave myself permission to start living that dream. I hadn’t been allowed in the Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona in 1964 on account of my being a girl. As a consequence, my first effort at fiction writing turned out to be a 1,40…
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