Crime Reads
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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 writing from the worlds of crime, mystery, and thrillers.
Crime Reads
22h ago
Here at CrimeReads, we ask the important questions. It’s how we’re trained. This weekend, I rewatched The Living Daylights and was struck (yet again) by the singularity of Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This prompted a conversation between myself and my partner, comparing the different elements of each Bond. But then we realized… each Bond has a ..read more
Crime Reads
1d ago
I’m so old that I think of the art and science of modern-era movies according to whether they came before or after “Jaws” (1975) and “Star Wars” (1977). Partly that’s because those films made so much money that they changed the way films were marketed and released, but also because they were so proficient, in ..read more
Crime Reads
1d ago
Family secrets are the skeletons in the closet of crime and thriller fiction. They’re the whispered confessions, the buried truths, and the lies that fester over generations, only to explode into chaos when the past comes knocking. From Agatha Christie’s intricate family dramas to Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, family secrets have long been the lifeblood of ..read more
Crime Reads
1d ago
wi”It’s very satisfying to the human ego to discover the truth; ask Adam Dalgliesh. It’s even more satisfying to human vanity to imagine you can avenge the innocent, restore the past, vindicate the right. But you can’t. The dead stay dead.” “Life has always been unsatisfactory for most people for most of the time. The ..read more
Crime Reads
2d ago
In 1857, British scholars held a contest to decipher the inscriptions on a 3,000-year-old clay artwork. Today, this would be considered a rarefied pursuit, but in Victorian London, the event enjoyed a keen audience. Mid-19th century Britons were besotted with the distant past, their fervor stimulated by remarkable objects from since-vanished civilizations, which were being ..read more
Crime Reads
2d ago
It’s the puzzle of mystery novels that attracts me the most. The details that make me analyze and think critically and try to make sense of the world. But why not add a whiff of romance? Personal relationships give detective stories that extra spice to make us even more engaged or pull us back to ..read more
Crime Reads
3d ago
Sherlock Holmes, like many Englishmen, was wildly suspicious of the French. In the 19th Century, it was a great source of cultural anxiety in England whether to imitate or disavow French policing styles. As Sita A. Schütt notes, “It is not for nothing that Moriarty was otherwise known as the Napoleon of crime, that Poe’s ..read more
Crime Reads
3d ago
Elon Green’s first book, Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, won the Mystery Writers’ of American Best Fact Crime Award. The book brings together a deeply researched police investigation into the serial killings of gay men in Manhattan in the early 1990s, with a deep concern for ..read more
Crime Reads
3d ago
Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such challenging things to read or ..read more
Crime Reads
3d ago
We’ve always been fascinated by the blurry boundary between what we call sanity and what we call madness. We think about it in our books and we think about it in our lives. All of us need sadness in our lives. It’s part of what makes us human. In Keats’ great poem on melancholy, it ..read more