CrimeReads Brief: Week of May 31, 2018
THIS WEEK:THIS WEEK: In 1946, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published “Find the Woman,” a short story by Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) featuring the PI who would later become noir legend, Lew Archer.
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- Why HBO’s Barry might be the best new show on TV, and a new archetype for fictional criminals. | Criminal Element
- Anne Hillerman on taking up the mantle of her father’s beloved mystery series and figuring out how to bring women to the fore. | The Christian Science Monitor
- Alex Segura and Monica Gallagher are teaming up to write a scripted crime podcast about a young podcaster investigating a serial killer. | The Hollywood Reporter
- How cell phone and surveillance footage helped build a virtual crime scene for investigators studying the deaths of protesters. | The New York Times Magazine
- “Gorgeous shades of asphalt gray and snow white”: Emily Nussbaum on saying goodbye to FX’s The Americans. | The New Yorker
- Adrienne Sharp on the last days of old Las Vegas, in all its seedy, run-down, over-the-top neon glory. | CrimeReads
- Are crime novels inherently conservative? Michael Niemann looks at stories about justice and restored order and asks whether they have a political slant. | CrimeReads
- With high society con artists in the news, Lincoln Michel looks at literature’s greatest grifters and swindlers, from Jay Gatsby to Tom Ripley. | CrimeReads
- Summertime stirs up the fugitive feeling in all of us. Find a few hours to escape with 10 of the greatest road trips in crime fiction. | CrimeReads
- Can we trust bloodstain-pattern analysis? Part 2 of Pamela Colloff’s investigation into the conviction of Joe Bryan. | New York Times Magazine / ProPublica
- Does crime fiction have a political slant? Michael Niemann asks whether seeking resolution in fiction is inherently conservative. | CrimeReads
- “PI Woman lived in the world, not on its fringes.” Tracy Clark on growing up on the South Side of Chicago during the golden age of feminist private detective series. | CrimeReads
- Walter Mosley on L.A.’s changing neighborhoods, legalizing drugs, and what advice he offers young writers. | Vulture
- Hard-boiled J.K. Rowling, Three Days of the Condor reimagined, and a family empire come undone: your guide to the essential crime TV of June 2018. | CrimeReads
- Pamela Everett investigates a family story and finds a notorious triple murder, a groundbreaking trial, and the possibility that the wrong man was executed. | Salon
- Tod and Lee Goldberg discuss growing up in a family of writers, and why they come at crime fiction from very different perspectives. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Is a new puppet murder mystery muscling in on Sesame Street’s hallowed turf? The puppet masters battle it out in the court of law. | The Hollywood Reporter
- Critic Ismail Muhammad on the first time he read Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, and the “paranoia that racism can breed in its victims.” | Book Marks
- How Russia cultivated organized crime then unleashed it on the world. | Vice
- “The secret is, crime, noir, and horror are all rooms in a sprawling mansion.” Laird Barron on the secret passageways between genres, and why he turned from horror to crime. | CrimeReads
- Anna Delvey lived fabulously in New York City, a fixture of the downtown party scene. Was it all funded by an elaborate confidence game? | The Cut
- Levi Stahl on what he learned delving into Donald E. Westlake’s letters. It turns out the crime master had movies on his mind. | CrimeReads
- Beth Gutcheon, mystery novelist and self-proclaimed audio addict, surveys the very best series and performers in the world of crime audiobooks. | CrimeReads
- Michael Gonzales discovers the novels of Charlotte Carter, “a former poet turned noir novelist whose amateur detective Nanette Hayes was a middle-class, college-educated New York City jazz musician who made money blowing her saxophone…” | Catapult
- Ruth Ware on locked-room mysteries, and how researching her latest book persuaded her that reading tarot cards can be a “tool for self reflection.”| Crime by the Book
- How diplomatic services and identity thieves get entangled. | The Marshall Project
- Peng Shepherd celebrates literature’s most mysterious libraries, from Ruiz Zafón’s “Cemetery of Lost Books” to Mr. Penumbra’s basement.| Electric Literature
- Ranking the 42 best covers of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. | CrimeReads
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