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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I will read any book or poem, watch any movie or show, if within its story there is another story. Like most tastes, this one is hard to explain, but part of it is that the Russian nesting doll structure appeals to my sense of mystery. I read quite a few YA books incorporating this technique at a young age, so its rules feel familiar, and one is that, within a nested structure, the inner story holds a key (or keys) to the outer. Whether it be a clue, a metaphor highlighting theme or vital foreshadowing, the inner story becomes a text to scour for clues. It becomes a mystery box, and as a curious reader, I simply must know what’s inside. The reason I read so many embedde…
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One of the elements in cozies that can be lots of fun for authors to create is the main character’s occupation. As you peruse titles you find the genre offers bakers, librarians, booksellers, crafters, teachers, pet shop owners, chefs, and the list goes on. The challenge for me in creating the Paint by Murder mysteries was finding something unique and entertaining for my character to do when she wasn’t busy chasing clues to solve murders. My process in choosing what I want to include in my stories is influenced by personal experiences. In the case of the Paint by Murder mysteries, the setting of a small lakeshore town along New York’s Chautauqua Lake seemed a perfect cho…
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The ring of the doorbell, the pop of a champagne cork, a peal of laughter from another room. Wicked gossip, a meaningful glance across the dining table, a knife secreted in a napkin. The host must step away for just a moment to take an urgent phone call, would you all keep yourselves occupied? No, nothing is the matter. Unless something is? Thrillers and mysteries are genres of danger, suspense, violence, murder. Not anything you’d want at an elegant soirée or holiday bash or a cozy dinner with close friends. But a startling number of thrillers and mysteries have at least one party in their pages or onscreen. All those cozy mysteries set at house parties at some grand …
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I started trying to write professionally—seriously, methodically, a copy of Writer’s Market in one hand and a stack of self-addressed stamped envelopes in the other—at age twelve. (You can imagine how well that ended for me.) Behind me was a decade of bookworminess, yes, but also a deep and abiding love of movies and video games, the faster-paced and more action-packed the better. It’s here I developed a lifelong admiration of a writing choice you see often in visual media but very seldom in books: pitching the viewer (and, occasionally, the reader) directly into the deep end from the first moments of the first scene and paying out just enough line for them to grab onto. …
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This roundtable was inspired by You Love Me, Caroline Kepnes’s majestic continuation of the adventures of everyone’s favorite psychopath-slash-hopeless-romantic, Joe Goldberg. I’ve written about Kepnes before, and I knew she would love this. Caroline is so smart and funny I decided to do a roundtable with her and some other writers who give good psychopath. I assembled my people—Caroline Kepnes (You Love Me), Naben Ruthnum (Find You in the Dark), Edwin Hill (Watch Her), Caroline Louise Walker (Man of the Year), and Joanna Schaffhausen (Every Waking Hour). ___________________________________ Chat-for-Psychopaths “It’s really something to see that phrase and thi…
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May 1932 Charlie Chaplin was visiting Japan with a group that included his brother Sydney Chaplin, and Chaplin’s Japanese personal secretary, Toraichi Kono. Chaplin had been to Japan a decade earlier for work, when he and Fatty Arbuckle performed in a silent comedy show. This time, the purpose of the trip was purely pleasure. The group spent their time in Japan seeing traditional Japanese art, attending performances of Japanese dance, observing traditional craftsmen at work, and viewing the natural beauty of locations such as Miyanoshita and Mount Fuji. Japan’s prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, had arranged for his son to take Chaplin and his party to watch a sumo wres…
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“People should be interested in books, not their authors.”—Agatha Christie A couple of years ago, on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast when it was climate-change hot outside, I had a thought (Okay, I had many thoughts, but mostly—why did I think it was a good idea to go to Italy in July?). My husband and I were halfway through a ten-day tour and our conversation was wandering, as it tends to do when we’ve spent that much uninterrupted time together, into random topics. I talk a lot—maybe that’s why I’m a writer?—and my thoughts sometimes skip like stones across a flat pond. In between Coke Zero’s and Aperol Spritzes (By the time the trip was over I was half Coke Zero and ha…
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I love writers who mix genres. It’s like an athlete who plays sports and somehow, improbably, manages to be good at all of them. C.J. Tudor’s novels cross boundaries between mystery, horror, and thriller, managing to bring out the best in each of them while creating something wholly new. Her newest novel, The Gathering, delves into the aftermath of a grisly murder that may have been committed by an isolated community of vampires in rural Alaska. As one online review put it, “You never know what you’re going to find in a book from C.J. Tudor—other than a great read!” Recently we sat down to talk about another genre-crosser, Michael Marshall Smith’s 1996 novel Spares. Why …
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Every writer likes to think they’re a psychologist. Inventing a character means having at least a cursory sense of their backstory, motivations, past traumas—the history that makes them unlike every other person in this world. By definition, writers are observers and people-watchers, and most of us believe that this gives us an uncommon understanding of what makes them tick. But Jonathan Kellerman really is a psychologist. Prior to his career as a novelist, he worked as a staff psychologist and clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine and then opened a private practice. He is now a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine, but…
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When I began this series for CrimeReads, I imagined myself reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Chester Himes. That was fine with me; other than a brief Agatha Christie phase in middle school, I’d never spent much time on the classics of crime fiction, and I looked forward to hearing what writers I admired had to say about them. What I didn’t anticipate is that I’d also be introduced to novels from the past five or ten years that I’d somehow missed or overlooked. Descent by Tim Johnston—a tense, complex, and beautifully written literary thriller—is one of these. And who could be a better guide to the classics of the modern day than Megan Miranda, auth…
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Crime fiction sometimes seems like a solo sport: one man or woman coming up against the forces of confusion and chaos and fighting through them to identify a solution. We start in disorder and end in (some version of) order. At least that was my assumption, before I read Chester Himes. A native of Missouri, Himes spent his most productive years in France, where he began writing hardboiled detective fiction set in Harlem. In some ways, this was a practical decision—Himes had failed to find success writing screenplays and traditional literary fiction—but it also enabled him to explore a community that hadn’t been represented in crime fiction to that date. Like the other no…
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Of all the subgenres of crime fiction, the one I know the least about is the spy novel. I will happily watch almost any Bond movie (especially if it has Daniel Craig in it), but my only familiarity with his novelistic counterparts comes from the one John le Carré novel I picked up in college. If you’d asked me why I avoided reading about espionage, I would have said that while it’s fun to watch beautiful people zooming around exotic locations with outlandish gadgets, I prefer even the most high-concept novels to have a heavy dose of realism. The spy novel is, I would have argued, unrealistic by definition. But Chris Pavone changed my mind. In his novel The Expats, the pr…
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When I first learned that “Liv Constantine” was the co-writing name of two sisters, Lynne Constantine and Valerie Rees, I was immediately fascinated. How did they do it, I wondered? We tend to think of the writing process as a necessarily solitary activity, so how could you share that task with someone else? Would it be fun or frustrating, productive or tedious to collaborate with another writer, especially a family member? I couldn’t wait to talk to them about it, and when I saw that their new novel, The Senator’s Wife, was out this spring, I jumped at the chance. I read The Senator’s Wife in one sitting. I’ve always been fascinated by the private lives of D.C. power …
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In “The Backlist” series, Polly Stewart and today’s top authors revisit and discuss a classic work of mystery or suspense. Today, Stewart is talking with Andrea Bartz, bestselling author of The Spare Room, We Were Never Here, and more. They’re reading Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel, The Lady Vanishes. How were you first introduced to The Lady Vanishes? Well, I first read it when I was thirteen or fourteen, and then pretty much forgot about it. Then I recently read Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment, and in the back of this particular edition, they had a section on the books and movies that inspired the novel, and one of them was The Lady Vanishes. Foley said it was an insp…
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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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Before I’d ever heard of crime fiction, or thrillers, or psychological suspense, I knew about detective stories. As a child, I’d sneak out of bed to swatch the opening to the PBS series Mystery!, with its iconic Edward Gorey sequence of gloomy houses and damsels in distress. Sometimes I’d manage to stick around for part of the show before my parents sent me back to bed, but the episodes themselves often struck me as slow, full of shots of dark streets and men having serious conversations while holding umbrellas. Fortunately, my tastes have changed since then. Though the adaptations of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series never aired on Mystery!, the novels traffic in…
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As soon as you try to define a crime novel, things get complicated. Is it any novel in which a crime occurs? Is Middlemarch a crime novel? Crime and Punishment? Lolita? In the contemporary context, the problem is often solved by categorizing a novel of high quality in which a crime occurs as a “literary mystery” or “literary thriller”—terms that presuppose both a blending and a demarcation of genres that many writers are reluctant to admit exist in the first place. With definitions so hard to come by, what can we say about a novel that takes the form of a mystery but defies all the expectations of the genre? I’m not sure I can answer that question, but I do know that the…
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I didn’t know what to expect from a novel called Miami Purity. Was it about nuns, or one of those creepy abstinence-only pledges for teens? I had no idea that the novel was a neo-noir cult classic, one that Megan Abbott in her introduction lauds for “its audacious and subversive play with a tradition it clearly both savors and lays bare.” Nor was I prepared for the voice of Sherri Parlay—former stripper, recovering good-time girl, and one of the horniest women in the history of American fiction—who bursts on to the scene declaring, “Hank was drunk and he slugged me—it wasn’t the first time—and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it.” I should ha…
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North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there – he gets knitted into his suit before his adventure can begin. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time, ‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’, reflected, even perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also protects him, what else is a suit for? Reflects and Prote…
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Riddle me this: I am that which when completed never stops Guards cities, and caves, confuses dimwitted cyclops. Always exciting to turn over but hard to place right, It can have four legs, then two legs, then three legs at night. It turns ravens into writing desks, when neither’s like the other, And reminds you that the old surgeon is really just his mother. What am I? (Yeah, it’s a riddle.) (In more ways than one.) I’ve been thinking about the ontology of “the riddle” since seeing Matt Reeves’s new film The Batman, which offers a total retelling of the story of the Caped Crusader and his struggles to fight crime in Gotham City. This time, he faces off against t…
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Once I watched a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and it put a knot in my brain. The director, Franco Zeffirelli, was universally lauded for his naturalistic translations of important works of the western canon into masterpieces of film. Among his early triumphs were both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. I was a fan. My expectations were high. The performances were strong, the production values top notch, and the cutting of the play captured the heart of the story. Still, something left me deeply unsatisfied. It felt wrong. From my reading of Hamlet, the tension in the play arises from the young prince of Denmark’s indecision over action versus inac…
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When I was ten years old my mother handed me a worn paperback called THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving. “What’s it about?” I asked her. “Life,” she said. I had never read anything so brilliant. She used to take me to the used bookstore and let me buy stacks of paperbacks because I read so fast it was hard to keep me in books. And if we got the usual comment. What’s a little girl like you doing with so many big books…she would look at them and snap…She’s reading them. How may books have you read this week? My mom had one rule about what books I read growing up. Which was there were no rules and I could read anything I wanted. You know what she told me? Use your o…
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There’s a crowd at the bar when I get inside, but I hang back, alone, and watch. There’s a bucket swinging in my hand, rusted tin, filled with pinkish water, and my hands are dyed red. They match the walls of The Ruby, though it’s so packed tonight, you can barely see the diamond wallpaper through the crowd. A constant hum of people talking over each other fills the room, pierced by a loud laugh here and there, like the church organ shrieking over the choir. A few people stare at me – I don’t know if it’s the bucket or just knowing who I am, but they don’t say anything. They look away, quick, back at a friend, or the stage, where the band plays It’s No Sin, the female im…
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Whether you’re packing a locked-room mystery for that long-delayed vacation, seeking the perfect thriller to keep you up at night, or looking for a noir so bleak and beautiful you’ll be weeping under your sunglasses, 2021 has plenty of books to choose from. Notable trends this year include a revitalization of rural noir, the continued revival of intricate espionage fiction, and increasingly blurred boundaries between the psychological thriller and the social justice thriller. In short, we’ve got a ton of great books to celebrate this year, even though it’s only halfway through. So here are our favorites, so far, in 2021. Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) W…
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When I started writing Welcome to The Game, I knew the car would be a lead character. I’m not claiming any of Wernher von Braun’s deductive powers here. After all, the novel’s protagonist is an ex-rally driver who sells niche performance cars in not just any old city, but the Motor City, and who unwittingly becomes involved in a heist, the successful execution of which requires a very specific driving ability. Cars bring to the modern thriller what horses brought to the Western; namely, speed and excitement, car chases, drive–bys, hit and runs and so forth. I’m not saying one needs a car chase to make a bank robbery exciting. That’s the wonderful thing about imagination …
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