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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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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CrimeReads asked me to write a post, and as soon as I read the suggested title, I went to the corner drugstore and bought two nine-ounce packages of Coffee Nut M&Ms. I needed inspiration. There are such a lot of ways to eat chocolate. I should know. I was born loving chocolate. And, like every author, I was a reader before I was a writer, and I loved stories before I could read them. My mother used to tell the following one. “When she was around three, JoAnna’s special treat was chocolate milk, which she called ‘choc.’ One afternoon, I was reading, and she came to me and asked for ‘choc.’ And I answered, ‘As soon as I finish my chapter.’ “And she said, ‘When I ask…
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We went outdoors more in 2021 than we did in 2020, and boy it was nice. But now that we’re staring down the barrel of our third pandemic winter and will doubtlessly be spending more time sheltering indoors in the coming months, it’s time to talk TV. Happy Holidays, I guess. It was a good year for TV, and not just crime TV. In case you were wondering about good, non-crimey TV recommendations, I also suggest The Chair, What We Do in the Shadows, WandaVision, Schmigadoon, and All Creatures Great and Small. (My friend Katie Yee also recommended Love Life, Season Two and I am going to watch it before year’s end. She has flawless taste so I’m just saving time and passing the r…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best crime anthologies released in 2023. * Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (eds), Never Whistle at Night (Vintage) “Spine-tingling and suggestive storytelling. . . . Entertaining and thought-provoking, especially in its highlighting of the lurking terrors—from intergenerational trauma to environmental destruction to toxic allyship—confronting Indigenous peoples today.” –Kirkus Reviews Molly Odintz, Scott Montgomery, Hopeton Hay eds, Austin Noir (Akashic Books) “With the common thread of Austin, Texas, Austin Noir is a new compendium of original short stories, each of which are showcased gems of noir …
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We went to the movies more this year than we did last, or at least I did. It was incredible to be back in a theater. For me, there are few things as soothing as leaning back in an auditorium seat, wondering if I’ve dropped my cell phone, and elbowing my boyfriend to stay awake one third of the way through the film playing. This year experienced numerous releases of last year’s movies, which were held off from theatrical runs due to the COVID-19 outbreak. in 2021, we got a new James Bond movie, a new Matrix movie, the first Dune movie, and possibly twelve (?) Marvel movies (numbers still coming in). We got a new Wes Anderson movie, a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, two ne…
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2022 was an incredible year for crime films, I’ll just say that up front. We had at least three big-screen whodunnits, several neo-noirs, reboots of beloved detective franchises, two cannibalism stories, several meditations on victimhood, some good superhero movies, some bad superhero movies, and Bullet Train. Here are the rules for our selection. As usual, all films considered had to be full-length feature films, released (in theaters or on streaming services) in the United States during the 2021 calendar year. One of the most annoying things is that several of the year’s best crime films—Australia’s Nitram and France’s Happening (not to mention the best overall, non-cr…
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It was a very good year for movies. It seems like everyone made a movie, this year. We got new movies from veteran auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Paul Schrader, Todd Haynes, Kelly Reichardt, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Ava DuVernay, Wes Anderson, Hayao Miyazaki, Greta Gerwig, David Fincher, Frederick Weisman, Ira Sachs, Nicole Holofcener, and Rebecca Miller. We got a slate of masterpieces from new-in-town filmmakers like A.V. Rockwell, Celine Song, Nida Manzoor, Cord Jefferson, Kitty Green, Daniel Goldhaber, and Juel Taylor. We were, in a word, blessed. But we didn’t get Richard Linklater’s Hitman movie, and that’s because …
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of the year. Check back in the coming days for more of the Best Books of 2021. * PJ Vernon, Bath Haus (Doubleday) The great age of the gay thriller has arrived!!! For so long, gay characters were either either extremely problematic villains or overly respectable charmsters designed to soothe heterosexual audiences, as Vernon writes about here, but lately, gay thrillers are finally allowing queer characters the moral range of, well, real people. In Bath Haus, the perfect exemplar of this trend, restless Oliver knows he should be happy with his long-time doctor partner, but he finds hi…
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CrimeReads has been accused of a bias toward noir in the past, and we’re sorry (not sorry) to report that this year’s best of the year so far list is noir AF—the world is, after all, getting darker, and cynical take-downs are often less depressing to read than fantasies of happiness (for those of us who don’t believe in happy endings, anyway). Noir is a cornerstone when it comes to fictional critiques of social mores and growing inequality, and the books below serve as either sendoffs of the corrupt and privileged, or as folk-hero tales of those who fight the system. You’ll see plenty of household names at the top of their game, plus rising new voices who will hopefully c…
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Usually, when it comes time to round up the best crime novels of the year, we cap it at 10, but this year brought such a wide variety of excellent releases that we decided to up the number to 20. And it’s that variety, rather than any particular trends, that truly distinguishes 2022 from previous years. This year’s list includes plenty of hard-boiled noir, insightful psychological thrillers, lush historical journeys, and stunning traditional mysteries. There’s also some old ladies kicking ass, a social-justice oriented procedural, two works in translation, and the most noir depiction of a football game since North Dallas Forty. Scroll to the bottom to see our list of nota…
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To be entirely honest and upfront, I’m not sure there’s a single crime show premiering in September that’s really worth getting too excited about. The slate is just too crowded with the new fantasy juggernauts (House of Dragons and Lord of the Rings) and the perennial onslaught of network procedurals back on the air after summer breaks (Law & Order, FBI, Chicago, CSI, etc, ad infinitum…). That said, there are some lower-profile projects coming up, and one of them may just turn out to be a new favorite, who knows? Fakes (Netflix / Premieres September 2) It’s hard to pin down the exact tone on Fakes—is it more Superbad, Claws, Brick? what are we talking here?—but t…
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