There is a magnificent bit in a Sherlock Holmes story, which—subconsciously in the beginning, I guess – gave me the inspiration for my first detective novel, Death Under a Little Sky. Holmes and Watson, that charming odd couple of nineteenth century fiction, are on a train, chewi … | Continue reading
The beauty of being asked to interview Chris McGinley about his new book Once These Hills was I knew I was going to read it anyway and knew I was going to read it as soon as it hit my hands. Chris is a writer of very specific passions—classic Appalachian literature and crime fict … | Continue reading
You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great debt because it introduced me to the work of one of my favorite mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. Ca … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Grippando, Goodbye Girl (Harper) “This is the eighteenth Swyteck novel since The Pardon (1994), and it’s just as good as the rest. Grippando keeps coming up with complex and timely cases, and th … | Continue reading
Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Formerly Léopoldville under the bad days of Belgian colonialism, now one of the fastest growing megacities in the world with 16 million citizens and rising quickly – the most populous city in Africa, ahead of Lagos and … | Continue reading
Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at its center. Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling “impossible crime” plots in which corpses are discovered in s … | Continue reading
When I first came up with the idea for Five Bad Deeds, I didn’t imagine telling the story from so many different points of view. I had my main character, Ellen Walsh, all fleshed out, and Five Bad Deeds was supposed to be very much her story. However, best laid plans often go aw … | Continue reading
My last book about the mafia, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, was an international bestseller translated into 20 languages. Because of the book’s global appeal, I was invited by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer to speak at their annual r … | Continue reading
Cornell Woolrich published Black Alibi in 1942. His tenth book overall, it was the third in his series of “Black” novels. The Bride Wore Black (1940), later adapted into a film by Francois Truffaut, led the sequence off, succeeded by The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Angel (194 … | Continue reading
I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer always varies, as each book is different. But for my latest, Mister Lullaby, the idea was sparked by a luridly creepy picture of the Petite Ceinture, a once-thriving and now abandoned railway looping around the center of P … | Continue reading
Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with a mysterious interactive theatre troupe—as a straightforwardly Gothic cult story: complete with pl … | Continue reading
I’m a city girl, but I really enjoy reading stories set in state parks and forests and islands and other areas where there is less population, and the environment is as much of a character as the people. And the wildlife? Oh, yes, I want to meet them too. I write stories mostly s … | Continue reading
Who doesn’t love a superbly executed plot twist? One that completely takes you by surprise and turns the story on its head. One that makes you gasp out loud because you truly did not see it coming. There have been times when I have been totally blindsided by a twist and every tim … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
The woods have been a popular setting in literature for centuries, from the Grimm Brothers to today’s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction? When I started putting together ideas for my second novel, What Waits in the Woods, I turned to this in … | Continue reading
If you are going to write a sensational, news-worthy crime story into your fiction, you have a few models for how to proceed. First, there is the Gone Girl model. Use a real-life crime as your inspiration—in Flynn’s case, the disappearance of Laci Peterson—and take liberties. Cha … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (Marysue Ricci/S&S) “An intricate puzzle in which [Chan] deftly moves narrative pieces in time and among viewpoints.” –Booklist Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho) “A gritty … | Continue reading
Will robots dream of us in the same way that we dream about them? They say that AI can “hallucinate”, right? Hadn’t Philip K. Dick warned us about all this many years ago? Maybe we weren’t paying enough attention then. Maybe we aren’t paying enough attention now. What a strange w … | Continue reading
For me, there are few things more enjoyable than a good, old-fashioned whodunnit. Or a good, new-fashioned whodunnit. I say it a lot on this website, but, to me, the best thing that can happen in a book or a movie is someone crying out: “someone in this house is a murderer!” Or, … | Continue reading
This year’s offering of scifi and fantasy crime fiction leans heavily towards alternative history and near-future imaginings, but with plenty of bizarre and magical detours into the just plain weird. Speculative fiction can be a catch-all phrase in literary circles for anything t … | Continue reading
The Christmas Egg, first published in 1958, is an unconventional Christmas crime novel by an unconventional writer. Mary Kelly was one of the most talented British novelists to write crime fiction in the post-war era, coming to the fore just before P.D. James and Ruth Rendell app … | Continue reading
Good and bad. Good. There were many good things in Daniel Kennicott’s life right now. He was entering his seventh year as a homicide detective and had advanced in record time to be one of the top officers on the Toronto homicide squad. After too many years of failed and near-miss … | Continue reading
This year’s top horror novels distinguished themselves not only through quality but with their use of metaphor to approach societal ills obliquely. Through the lens of horror, and the examination of monstrosity, we see the many ways that hatred, prejudice, and and the enforcement … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
It’s that time of the year again, and, no, I’m not talking about the holidays. I’m talking about year-end-list time. Just like the holidays, year-end lists can be anxiety inducing, especially for authors. So, as a reprieve from everybody and their Uncle Bob’s “Favorite Books of … | Continue reading
I’ll say it again: I actually can’t believe I found another ten crime movies that take place at Christmas. I really, really thought I had scraped the bottom of the barrel last year, rustling up things like “Psycho because there are Christmas decorations in Phoenix while Marion Cr … | Continue reading
At its heart, Blood Betrayal is a novel about fathers and how they shape our sense of belonging. Two separate police shootings take place in the novel: that of Duante Young, a Black graffiti artist, and the killing of Mateo Ruiz, a gifted Latino musician who is shot during a drug … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. * Jillian Lauren, Behold the Monster (Sourcebooks) This startling new book uncovers the crimes of serial killer Samuel Little. Through her many conversations with Little and meticulous research, La … | Continue reading
The inspirations and concerns informing this year’s historical mysteries and thrillers may be grim, but the fiction crafted to explore them is luminous. The 1920s continue to loom large, as do their preoccupations with inequality, excess, and grief (including a great number of no … | Continue reading
On Oak Island, everybody gets up early. By dawn, with the fog turning into a drizzle, the crew is hard at work. I’ve taken refuge inside the rusted hulk of an old tank car, where I can take notes without the ink smearing. Up the hill, men cluster around a drilling rig that is pou … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Growing-up in upper Manhattan, on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside, I always thought of my neighborhood as Harlem or Sugar Hill. Mom, who’d lived in the area since the mid-1950s, referred to it as Hamilton Grange, named after the post office located on 146th between Br … | Continue reading
Looking for a gift for the mystery lover who adores a smart heroine whose adventures will viscerally transport the reader somewhere else? Someone who loves the Miss Marple mysteries as much for their doilies as detection, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski books as much for their to … | Continue reading
Vivian Parry, the main character of Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark, is a perceptive theater critic for a New York magazine. She’s tough on hammy actors, but even harder on herself. Despondent since her mother’s sudden death, Vivian is a self-proclaimed “abyss where a woman sho … | Continue reading
Monk has returned! That’s right! An original Monk movie, entitled Mr. Monk’s Last Case, has just been released. And to mark this momentous release, our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with star Tony Shalhoub and series creator Andy Breckman, who also wrote the new film. Mr. Mon … | Continue reading
Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, if external circumstances change. Given the headlines of t … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best noir fiction of 2023. (As is our annual tradition, we decline to define ‘noir’ even for the purposes of this exercise, because who knows, it’s just sort of a feeling, don’t you think?) * Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Zando, G … | Continue reading
So there you are, sitting in a cozy café in Odense, the hometown of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen, enjoying a flaky Danish pastry and a strong coffee. As you gaze out the window at the old, charming city streets, an unsettling thought pops into your head: Wha … | Continue reading
Well, it’s a horrible year in world history, but it’s a great year in international fiction! Specifically, international thrillers and noir. France and the Scandinavians are, as usual, well-represented on this list, and there’s also a great showing from South American writers and … | Continue reading
Movies are loud. They are often written and written about in clamorous verbiage: they leer and loom, assault, pummel, and thunder. They are religion and sex strapped together into a rig of worshipful attention, all spectacle satiation and ritual subjugation. Before every contest, … | Continue reading
The couple walked on the beach at Santa Monica that September afternoon in 1903, then stopped at a shop to buy postcards. Once they were back in their suite on the third floor of the oceanside Arcadia Hotel, Tina Griffith began to pack – they were heading home to Los Angeles in t … | Continue reading
Nearly a decade ago, I fell in love with the twelve, out-of-print, Hardman crime novels by the late Ralph Dennis… an obsession that led me to acquire the copyright to his work, published and unpublished, and to co-found Brash Books, a publishing company to get his novels back int … | Continue reading
After two decades of making our living as mystery authors, we thought, hey, we must have done something right. If you think so, too (or you’re simply curious), read on. Just to be clear. This is not a list of mechanical techniques. Much has been written on genre tropes and tricks … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best espionage fiction. * Javier Marías, Tomás Nevinson Translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf) A half-English, half-Spanish spy gets pulled into his old tricks after a years-long retirement by his mysterious mentor in … | Continue reading
Many thanks to Jyoti Guptara and Thomas Locke for kindly offering a conversation about their new thriller, Roulette. Jyoti Guptara: Thomas, remember when you visited me at the UN in Geneva? You arrived with this brilliant story seed: “What appears to be a simple case of overdos … | Continue reading
My latest novel, The Fiction Writer, is a modern-day gothic mystery that explore the boundaries of creative freedom. It asks questions about writing and ownership and who owns the right to tell any story. My main character, Olivia, is a writer, whose most recent novel, a retellin … | Continue reading
“Mr. Rawlins?” Niska Redman, our office manager, was standing at the door. “Yeah?” “That woman, Miss Stoller, the one Mrs. Blue wanted you to talk to. She’s here.” Niska was tallish for a woman at that time, maybe five nine, and brown like the lighter version of Sees caramel cand … | Continue reading
It’s been fourteen years since we last saw Adrian Monk. Monk, the anxious, observant detective protagonist of the USA Network series of the same name, which ran eight seasons from 2002 to 2009, was a prime-time treasure, one of the greatest detectives in the annals of TV. Played … | Continue reading