Haiti has never been an easy place to live. From colonialism to liberation by the ex-slave revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture at the start of the nineteenth century – the largest slave uprising since Spartacus – it’s been a country wracked by violence, foreign interference … | Continue reading
I was impressed by A Haunting in Venice as much as I was relieved by it. I had always found it both delightful and intriguing that, of all the possible franchises to take on, Kenneth Branagh chose Hercule Poirot, a funny, punctilious little Belgian detective. Yes, Poirot is one o … | Continue reading
I was working the day that it happened, preparing meals. Jason should’ve been watched every minute! He was … he wasn’t a very good swimmer. —Pamela Voorhees, Friday the 13th What would he be like today? An out-of-control psychopath? A frightened retard? A child trapped in a man’s … | Continue reading
On the eve of Hallowe’en, 1980, Dick Cavett’s television guests included Stephen King, George Romero, and Peter Straub. Watching it now, King is the most voluble, playing the open-shirted raconteur, stage right, closer to the audience than the others in several senses. He is aler … | Continue reading
Published in 1947, Dorothy Hughes’ noir novel In a Lonely Place is a masterpiece of crime fiction whose influence has extended to both books and films, including a 1950 movie adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart. The story follows a mercurial and mysterious lead, Dix Steele, who i … | Continue reading
It’s a cliché to cite some decades-old book, movie or TV show and say, “This is as relevant today as it was back then.” That said, one 1957 film satire is possibly more relevant today than when it was first released to movie theaters. “A Face in the Crowd,” directed by Elia Kaza … | Continue reading
The millennial is a strange beast. Though “millennial” is factually the word to describe someone born between 1981 and 1996, hearing it conjures a number of confusing associations: we’re soap killers, selfish and entitled, we can’t afford diamonds yet we hoover up avocados as if … | Continue reading
I wrote my newly released Lily Wong novel, The Ninja’s Oath, during the pandemic when my newborn granddaughter was in lockdown in Shanghai. Twenty-three months would pass before I could hold her in my arms. Writing this book helped me feel as if I were there, not in lockdown Shan … | Continue reading
Gardening detectives, both professional and amateur, abound in crime fiction and they appeared early on. Wilkie Collins introduced the first horticulturally inclined investigator in The Moonstone. The serialized story first appeared in the United Kingdom in January 1868 in Charle … | Continue reading
I have a confession to make. I have a mad crush on my neighbor. Whenever I see him sprinting in my direction, my heart swells and I can’t hold back a smile. His eyes are as blue as a cloudless day, and his gleaming coat…Oh—did I neglect to mention something? My neighbor, Benzo, i … | Continue reading
The first crime was the most defining moment in the history of the human. It was not Cain’s murder. That was defining too. But the first crime began in the realm of the numinous. It could only be deemed an act of spirit. Philosophers and religionists and mystics struggle to defin … | Continue reading
In 2016, journalist Amelia McDonell-Parry and I were asked to look into the death of Freddie Gray for the Undisclosed podcast, a series that focused on wrongful convictions. Gray had been killed in Baltimore police custody the year before, which led to mass protests and riots and … | Continue reading
I still own three of Lois Duncan’s books. Growing up, I read so many, but these are the three I have left: Daughters of Eve, Stranger with my Face, and Summer of Fear. The covers are creased and falling apart, and the pages are so fragile that they tear when I try to turn them, [ … | Continue reading
Jeneva Rose is a whirlwind. When the publishing world didn’t work for her, she created her own. Like most aspiring authors, she first took the conventional route to hoped-for literary success. For her efforts, agents and publishers turned her down a combined 500 times. After she … | Continue reading
One of the joys of writing historical fiction as opposed to non-fiction is that the author can take a well-reasoned conspiracy theory and run with it, imagining how such deliciously scandalous events might have unfolded. That is exactly what I have done in my new novel, The Royal … | Continue reading
“No biography or autobiography is true, because no one in his senses tells the truth about himself….Whoever wants to know me can find me in my work.” –Eden Phillpotts (quoted in Reverie, 1981, by his daughter Adelaide Ross) “Mr. Phillpotts has always avoided personal publicity l … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Dont Die (Counterpoint) “As ever, Goldberg is adept at writing about mob hits, explosions, corpses and other cases of criminal bad news with a smirking, noirish tone. But he wr … | Continue reading
On May 13th, 2034, twenty-three-year-old Joy Ruiz disappeared. On July 19th, 2037, Cassie West sat at a table inside an encrypted Lockbox in front of the young woman’s grieving family, preparing to tell them how much their daughter’s life was worth. Cassie was not responsible for … | Continue reading
“I want to talk about land as power.” I first heard those words while jogging along the coast in Santa Cruz, California, listening to a recording of Attica Locke’s keynote address at Noirwich 2020. I had come to Locke’s speech because I had a problem. I was working on my first no … | Continue reading
Most everyone wants to be better. Whether it’s to become healthier, stronger, or even fix a perceived personality flaw, humans seem to be on a never-ending journey to improve ourselves. So, if it’s all about finding enlightenment, why can the wellness industry sometimes feel so… … | Continue reading
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