Even if the temperatures are still high, the start of the school year and the first wave of Christmas promotional gift guide emails have combined forces to indicate that fall has now arrived (I’m not kidding about those gift guide emails. They start early). No matter that the bro … | Continue reading
“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the 20th century. Said words prophesied the hard-boiled novel. Hard-boiled scorched its artistic debut on February 1, 1929. Dashiell … | Continue reading
The following is an excerpt from Nathan Ward’s new book about Charlie Siringo: Son of the Old West, now available from Atlantic Monthly Press. ___________________________________ Along the snowy road from Cheyenne toward Fort Douglas, the roundup season was well finished. This wa … | Continue reading
Sure, island vacations can be fun, relaxing, and restorative. But that’s if you’re reading a book in a different genre. In the world of crime, island vacations can be murder. Ever since Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley headed to Italy to bring Dickie Greenleaf back home, the allur … | Continue reading
Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sex … | Continue reading
I’ve always been fascinated by families and what drives their unique dynamics. I think perhaps it’s because mine is so small; both my parents are only children and I have only one sibling. But what fascinates me even more than the family we’re born into, is the family we marry. A … | Continue reading
There’s a reason domestic thrillers are perennially popular: fearing the person sleeping next to you every night, realizing too late that the call is coming from inside the house, is enough to send chills up anyone’s spine. But to me, the idea that your closest friends might be … | Continue reading
NOEMI I’d just given the rolling paper a twist when I thought I heard a knock at the door. My eyes shot to the window. Sure enough. He looked confused when I pulled the door open, as if he’d expected someone else. His lips moved. I held up a finger, telling him to wait while […] | Continue reading
When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finally came to my boyhood mall, I saw it three times, wondering in the dark about the unnamed lawmen chasing the Wild Bunch outlaws around the West, the drumbeat of their horses’ hooves drawing Butch’s exasperated line, “Who are those guys … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen King, Holly (Scribner) “A tour de force. Creepy as hell but full of heart, too.” –Linwood Barclay Craig Johnson, The Longmire Defense (Viking) “[A] standout . . . The whodunit, which presents … | Continue reading
I recently reread Donna Tartt’s Dark Academia classic The Secret History—published 30 years ago this month—for the first time since I was a young identity-less Classics student myself. On the whole, I found the book as enjoyable as I remember (and was also struck by the degree of … | Continue reading
Long before the doors opened, a crowd gathered outside the theater. Noisily, they bustled in, country folk and urban dandies alike, to find themselves good seats. The old mansion’s walls reverberated with their footsteps on the hardwood floors, spirited greetings, idle gossip, an … | Continue reading
I am not the kind of writer who finds every plot twist, detail of setting, and character description in my imagination. I am like a magpie when it comes to developing a story, shamelessly borrowing from and building on whatever I see and hear. Here’s an example. As I was beginnin … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their picks for best new fiction in the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
What pop culture figure of the 1970s had his own board game, guest-starred on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and terrorized backwoods campers with his screams in the night and his skunky smell? You know him, you love him … Bigfoot. In the 1970s, Bigfoot was a pop culture thing that … | Continue reading
A twitching curtain conceals a pair of prying eyes. A friendly smile belies a litany of terrible sins. And eventually, someone is going to find a dead body on their well-manicured lawn. The small town is a mainstay of cozy mysteries, and for good reason. Readers flock to the genr … | Continue reading
True crime writers hold the state of Texas in special regard, not so much for the volume, or even variety, of newsworthy crimes committed there, but for the often strange character of Texas lawbreakers, their quirks, their gruesome excesses and the sometimes striking originality … | Continue reading
A look at the best reviewed fiction from June, July, and August. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as … | Continue reading
After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 16, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in the literary spotlight, retreating to a home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and beginning … | Continue reading
Caution! Poison Snake On Premises! So read a handwritten sign posted at the entrance of our house. Our house was in the outskirts of Tokyo, in a town called Ōizumi in a district called Nerima. The … | Continue reading
I dare to suggest that Detroit has a bit of an image problem these days. But I’m an outsider, so what do I know? Here’s Michigander author Stephen Mack Jones’s character August Snow, a man very ded… | Continue reading
Crime investigation is a daunting process. It involves numerous hours of tedious and meticulous gathering and analyzing of physical and trace (forensic) evidence, searching for and interviewing wit… | Continue reading
In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle … | Continue reading
For those of us obsessed with them, stories about skyjackings offer retro fascination, criminal ingenuity and daring, and, in some cases, wackiness. Skyjackings have been around as long as aviation… | Continue reading
—Heather Martin is the authorized biographer of Lee Child and the author of The Reacher Guy (Constable at Little, Brown in the UK and Pegasus Books in the US) ___________________________________ On… | Continue reading
One of the first things you discover as a crime writer is that the range of plausible murder methods is disappointingly small. Basically, it’s stabbing, throat-cutting, strangling, shooting, drowni… | Continue reading
There was no centralized formal peacekeeping system in London until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police. Prior to that, in the seventeenth and eighteent… | Continue reading
“This is Brian Selfon, the chief investigative analyst here.” My boss at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office is introducing me to a pair of NYPD detectives, and there’s a wink in his voice when… | Continue reading
“It’s impossible to explain to young people today why we in the YCL felt such allegiance to the Soviet Union. In those days it was the workers’ fatherland—the only socialism on earth.” — Pete Seege… | Continue reading
Yes, that’s right. Apparently, Elliott Roosevelt, the son of Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, authored a long-running murder mystery series starring his mother as an amateur detective. … | Continue reading
The true crime podcast Serial was groundbreaking—an “audio game-changer,” according to the Peabody Award jurors who gave it the prize in 2014. Yet as host Sarah Koenig notes, the show’s serial form… | Continue reading
In spring 1877, Calamity Jane was out riding a trail and happened upon a runaway stagecoach from Wyoming that had been attacked by a Cheyenne war party. Promptly engaging in a breathless mounted pu… | Continue reading
From its inception, cyberpunk has shared quite a bit of DNA with crime fiction. Your archetypical (some might say stereotypical) cyberpunk anti-hero, hacking into the mainframe of a highly militari… | Continue reading
Bowie placed the shotgun on the ground and picked up the .22 rifle. “I always wanted one of these little guns when I was a kid,” he said. “That time they got me in Florida,” Chicamaw said, “and sen… | Continue reading
AGNES SOREL, MISTRESS of KING CHARLES VII of FRANCE, 1422–1450 On a cold winter’s day, twenty-eight-year-old Agnes Sorel, the most beautiful woman in France, lay dying in the tidy stone manor house… | Continue reading
–I now describe my country as if to strangers. I chose those lines as the epigraph for a novel called The Distant Echo, which was published in 2003. Although Scottish crime fiction had started … | Continue reading
When John J. Gotti took over the Gambino crime family after engineering the assassination of former boss Paul Castellano in December 2015, he knew he would become the object of intense FBI and NYPD… | Continue reading
In October 2017, the con artist, fake heiress, and Instagram influencer Anna Sorokin, who called herself Anna Delvey, was arrested for swindling approximately $275,000 from various high-end entitie… | Continue reading
Charles Dickens was, among many other things, an insomniac. While London slept, Dickens walked. He must have been possessed of extraordinary energy to sally forth, after a full day’s work as … | Continue reading
At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, November 29, 1983, a man the FBI called the Yankee Bandit walked into the lobby of a Bank of America in the Melrose district of Los Angeles and stood in line. When he got to… | Continue reading
But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his … | Continue reading
Let me tell you about the most popular mystery author you’ve probably never heard of. He sold 50 million of copies of his books worldwide. His work was translated into a dozen languages. The Myster… | Continue reading
Sandy Fawkes landed in Atlanta on the night of November 7, 1974. She’d spent the day in Washington on a fruitless quest to interview former Vice President Spiro Agnew, part of a one-month try… | Continue reading
The Past In the superhero extravaganza, Avengers: Age of Ultron, the villainous Ultron blossoms to life in a haze of confusion. The disembodied, James Spader-voiced Artificial Consciousness swims a… | Continue reading
Ten years after its publication in 1940, the literary critic Edmund Wilson sent his then-friend and future enemy Vladimir Nabokov a copy of The Big Con by David W. Maurer. It was just one of a batc… | Continue reading
“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”–Saul Bellow 1. They found the body on Monday—in the field. It belonged to a woman, a mother, who is the… | Continue reading