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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Prior to the founding of the Metropolitan Police of London in 1829, policing in England was a fairly haphazard business. In the provinces, most law enforcement fell to part-time, unpaid (often resentful) parish constables and to poorly paid watchmen (“Charlies”), who patrolled the streets. Then there were “thief-takers,” who pursued lawbreakers—although they were known to collude with criminals, resorting to blackmail and intimidation to frame innocent people. There were also private services (akin to private investigators) and “voluntary associations” that people could subscribe to, for protection from burglary. In 1748, under London’s Chief Magistrate and novelist Henry…
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I’ve been doing a lot of interviews around the publication of my novel Five Decembers, and one question I keep encountering is what I plan to write next. The true answer is, I’m not sure yet. But in all the research I did for my novel, I learned things that filled out the details of a tale I’d been aware of for a long time. It’s a war story and an international crime saga with connections to the Philippines, Japan and Hawaii. It stretches across eight decades, involves war crimes, torture, treasure, and courtroom drama. I’m talking about the Yamashita Treasure, the Golden Buddha, and the everlasting Hawaii legal saga of Roxas v. Marcos. It’s a story so wild that if someo…
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From MURDER BOOK: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR OF A TRUE CRIME OBSESSION by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell. Copyright ©2021 by Hilary Davidson Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Andrews McMeel Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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For four decades, nobody has worked the Los Angeles crime beat better than Michael Connelly. Connelly’s “watch” started in the 1980s as a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times and continued, since 1991, with the publication of 36 crime novels set in the city. He has covered everything from the chaos that gripped the city after the 1992 acquittal of four LAPD Officers charged with the savage beating of African American motorist Rodney King to the imposition of a federal consent decree over the LAPD in 2001 after another scandal in the Rampart Division, and from the shuttering of the dilapidated Parker Center on Los Angeles Street to the opening of a gleaming new LAPD h…
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In this current phase of life, one I like to uniquely call, “The Era of Absolute True Crime Insanity!”, it seems we have delved into nearly every subject on every podcast, documentary and book. We’ve explored so many wronged victims, and even more wrongly accused. We’ve mourned the loss of Michelle MacNamara, we’ve wondered if Scott Peterson was innocent (This confuses me but I’m trying to remain level-headed!), and we claimed to have uncovered the Zodiac killer for the upteenth time! But in all of this, I find myself still angrily screaming into the void… What about Ann Rule? Have we forgotten the actual queen of True Crime? The woman who did it all, before you could do…
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On April 9th 1957, at the close of a sensational 17-day criminal trial at the Old Bailey, the British newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook picked up the telephone receiver to speak to one of his employees: the chief crime reporter of the Daily Express. “Percy,” he rasped (Beaverbrook was famously not a man to waste words). “Two men were acquitted today. Adams and Hoskins.” And then he rang off. Nearly thirty years later, in 1984, Percy Hoskins was still so proud of that short, nine-word call from his ultimate boss and paymaster that he wrote a book about the case and called it Two Men Were Acquitted. If you are puzzled by what Beaverbrook meant, he was saying that a) …
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When I incorporate folktales into my contemporary-set novels, it feels like I’m taking my place in an ancient tradition: re-telling old stories, updating them for a modern audience. While I’m not literally holding fort around the fireside, I like to think that creating and publishing a novel with roots in ancient folklore is the modern way of passing these tales on. Folklore itself exists everywhere, and there are many beautiful examples of novels that incorporate elements of these beguiling stories, bringing to life themes and characters that have captivated us for centuries. Selkies, which feature in my novel The Hidden, are shape-shifters: seals in the sea, human on la…
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The late novelist Ed Gorman once talked about how excited he was when his first novel received a positive notice, one that included the phrase “transcends the genre.” He was very excited to have defeated the strictures and audience expectations of the mystery novel and to have created something new. Then he read the rest of the bullet-point reviews in the column and saw that three of the nine novels that week had transcended the genre. Well then, how hard could it be? Crime fiction is far more capacious than people who don’t read the genre give it credit for. The field of play is so wide that it is difficult to transcend the genre, but it is possible to break it. A relat…
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It’s more or less impossible to describe the new true crime podcast “Hemingway’s Picasso” in a few lines, but here it goes: there was a man named Steve Kough who probably played in the NFL, but that’s beside the point, or it’s the essence of the point, one or the other, and later on when he was no longer probably playing in the NFL he started smuggling drugs across the Caribbean, mostly from Jamaica into the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, but also to and from Cuba, and one time when he was in Cuba he got his hands on an artifact—a ceramic, possibly collateral on a drug deal—that may or may not have come from Hemingway’s house and may or may not have been created by Pablo Pic…
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We’ve all heard people say of various books, “The setting was like a character in itself.” But can a setting really be a character? Unlike a character, a setting doesn’t have motivation or intention or dialog. Yet we hear this statement time and time again. So how does a setting become so alive in readers’ minds that they declare that it was “like a character in itself?” Most of the time, setting is simply that—setting, a place where characters live and experience life. But it can be a lot more than a passive place where action occurs. The physical environment, either human-made or natural, can profoundly affect the course of a story and the choices that characters make.…
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