Locked-room mysteries are the type of mystery in which a crime looks impossible. (Not to be confused with a “closed circle” mystery, in which the characters are stranded in an isolated setting.) Why are these mysteries appealing to so many readers? I’ve been a fan of locked-room mysteries for decades, and more recently I’ve become an author in the genre. Here are the three reasons why it’s such an enticing type of mystery. First, you know you’re getting a “fair play” puzzle. Many mysteries include clues that are fairly presented, but readers don’t always know which of the many terrific myster ..read more

When I sat down at my desk and began to write the story that became my first published novel, Maisie Dobbs, I didn’t really have a distinct literary form in mind. I wasn’t thinking “mystery” and certainly wasn’t thinking “crime.” I had a story in my head about a young girl who makes a transition from one social class to another, and who has a life-changing experience of war that effectively removes any vestiges of youthful innocence. As she was now thirty-two, I had to give her a job, and within a few lines, I knew she was an investigator of sorts, one who had a deep sense of the human condit ..read more

The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Vibhuti Jain, Our Best Intentions (William Morrow) The characters in Our Best Intentions are immigrants under the powerful sway of the American Dream. Babur Singh—call him Bobby—is a single dad who owns a rideshare business, Move with Bobby, which would also be a good name for a man with a van or a dance class. Bobby dotes on his daughter, Angie, and they live in a wealthy suburb where Angie never feels comfortable. When she stumbles on a body, a classmate named Chiara Thompson, on her wa ..read more

There’s nothing quite like a messed up student-teacher relationship when it comes to stirring up drama.  First of all, it’s relatable. Most of us have been a student or a teacher at some point, so we understand the inherent dynamics. Even if we’ve never filled those roles officially, you’d have to be a serious loner not to have interacted with someone either as a mentor or a mentee. Second, it’s loaded. The desire to emulate someone we admire is fraught with tension, and the urge to mentor can be just as complicated. Mix some deep-seated parent/child pathos with the struggle to prove one ..read more

The Knapp Commission into corruption in the New York City Police Department started public hearings on October 19th, 1971. Established by then mayor John Lindsay, the proceedings were televised live on public television across the five boroughs of New York and covered in the print media. The Commission’s final report, handed down in December 1972, was damning. Months of testimony from low level pimps and narcotics dealers who paid regular bribes to the police in return for protection, to police whistleblowers, and the flamboyant escort and madam Xaviera Hollander, revealed that the city had a ..read more

Last month, San Francisco’s distinguished Castro Theater provided the setting for a birthday party of sorts. The Long Goodbye, a 1973 neo-noir thriller, based on the 1953 novel by celebrated pulp scribe Raymond Chandler, was about to turn fifty. The guest of honor, star Elliott Gould, preceded the screening with fun and happily meandering reminiscences about the film and his exceptional career. Besides being the sort of occasion that made you grateful for a return to inhabiting other people’s physical presence, the screening highlighted what a valuable and challenging contribution to popular ..read more

This week we’re highlighting the recently 50 years-old crime movies of 1973, and if you haven’t gleaned this already, it was a hell of a good year for robbery on film. Heisters, hustlers, scammers, confidence artists and thieves of all stripes were all the rage on the silver screen, so much so that some have practically been forgotten to today’s viewers. (Seriously, consider the Gene Hackman picture below.) Fortunately, you’ve got a weekend to get caught up on the action. Maybe you’re in the mood for a little robbery-implicated gun-running in the Boston area? Or a classic vengeance tale? How ..read more

My debut novel, A Flaw in the Design, has at its center a character who was a terrible, violent child, who grows into an arrogant, possibly dangerous, possibly even murderous teenager. My Matthew is part of a long literary tradition of what are known as bad seeds, children who seem not just troublesome in the normal, run-of-the-mill sort of way, but who are, possibly, truly evil. There’s something irresistible about this for me as a reader, and as a writer: What if evil were innate, a person’s truest self? How would that person fit into the world, or fail to fit in? How would the people aroun ..read more

Did you know that this fall will be the fortieth anniversary of the worst nuclear war crisis in world history? You may remember that 1983 was the year that Microsoft Word was introduced but are completely unaware of the nuclear war crisis. After all, American school children didn’t practice ‘duck and cover’ drills under their desks in 1983, as their predecessors had in 1962. The events in 1983 were at least as dangerous as the Cuban Missile faceoff between the Untied States and the Soviet Union in October 1962, yet they remain largely unknown. Unlike in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy’s ..read more

In the spring of 1961, Georges Lemay, a dapper thirty-six-year-old French Canadian, spent his days holed up in his cottage on a private island on a river in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, devising his greatest feat yet: the perfect bank burglary. Emerging in a crowded field encompassing every kind of Montreal criminal, from competing mobs to well-organized groups of bank robbers, Lemay clawed his way to the top of the heap. Maybe claw wasn’t the right word. Lemay was from an upper-middle-class family and had never wanted for anything. Joseph Louis Georges Etienne Lemay was born ..read more