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In the early years of the 1980s, the East Village, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had a population of roughly sixty thousand. But the worlds of art, music, and literature operating east of the Bowery and Third, south of Fourteenth, and north of Houston felt far smaller. The neighborh...

Monday, March 27, 1871 “At ten minutes to ten o’clock, the Bailiff of the Court entered the door and flung wide both its leaves. A figure entered, dressed in black and thickly veiled, leaning upon the arm of Dr. Trask. It was Mrs. Fair, and behind her walked her mother and little daughter. When she ...

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Headlines such as “Fairies and Imps Invade Hills of Anti...

The moment “A Test of Courage” was released, America fell in love with Helen Gibson. Critics loved the new star of The Hazards of Helen and had effusive praise for her performance. Motion Picture News reported that “Miss Gibson, by exhibition of unusual feminine daring”…”gives foretaste of excitemen...

I’m tired of living in this world. Let’s take some time to imagine others. These authors have done so in spades, crafting immersive narratives full of possibility (and also at least some kind of nefarious doings because this is a CrimeReads list). Whether you’re looking for fantasy noir, science fic...

Cornell Woolrich was a worker. He produced a large amount on the printed page in a relatively short window of time. He wrote, by my count, twenty-seven novels and countless short stories in various genres, which were later compiled in numerous collections. The books and stories were a natural source...

Do you enjoy mysteries with real historical figures as the amateur detective? I love learning about history while I’m tearing through the pages of a good mystery. It makes me feel virtuous and adds to the mystery as I speculate on which aspects are real or fictional. I always end up searching the in...

While some may say that historical fiction is a place to seek refuge, the following titles, immersed as they are in eras of chaos, war, brutality, and inequality, should read as anything but comforting (except, perhaps, for the solace of solidarity, given the difficulties of our own era). They are a...

At 7 p.m. on the evening of September 21, 1991, a veteran FBI agent named Robert Marston received a phone call at his suburban Connecticut home from Al D’Arco, the acting head of the Lucchese crime family. “I was told you were someone I could talk to,” D’Arco said. D’Arco began to speak in anxious, ...

On a hot summer day in the early 1980s, I followed two women I worked with in the communications office of the White House out to the South Lawn for a media opportunity with President Ronald Reagan. I was in my early twenties, and my role that day was routine and minor, ensuring I got […]

Imagine waking up one morning and deciding to become William Shakespeare. You have fantasized about it for years and now you’re taking the fateful step. Overcome by a heady mixture of zeal, naivete, and hubris, you’re freed from feelings of shame or guilt. Although you live in the late eighteenth ra...

Researching my historical mystery novel The Betrayal of Thomas True required me to go to some very murky places, and there are few places in Georgian London so very dark as a stretch of scrubland to the East of London. Tyburn was no stranger to the cries of a baying mob, being home to the […]

Catharine Read Arnold Williams was a fearless woman. Her multi-layered skirt firmly in hand, she gingerly stepped over ground littered with broken maple limbs before coming to a stop and gazing down at the green, well-trodden grass. Hoofprints marked various spots where cattle had grazed. I hovered ...

I came to writing novels late in life but I was born to be a storyteller. It came naturally. I’m an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe, known as the Orators of the Plains. Like most Plains Indian Tribes, the Kiowa did not have books documenting our history, legends or important events. Instead, we h...

On January 27, 1943, the first American women’s expeditionary force in history landed in North Africa. This company, the 149th Post Headquarters Company, had been specifically requested by General Dwight D. Eisenhower to work at his Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers. At the time, the Women...

While good historical fiction is never comforting, this year has made the lessons and parallels from history more abundantly clear than ever before. Paradoxically, this year’s best historicals are set further back in history than in previous lists, cutting off after the 1950s. It’s perhaps no surpri...

When I arrived in the city of Perm in the Ural region in 1994, I went to live in a students’ hostel. It was certainly not for the first time in my life. I had lived in undergraduate rooms at the University of Bologna, where the main activities were staying up all night, smoking and […]

The big, balding man who visited Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean in March of 1932 claimed he could solve a shocking, mysterious crime that was making headlines around the world. Gaston Means, a fifty-three-year-old former detective who had served time in federal prison for fraud, told McLea...

Seeking the Pearl of the Orient What would have impressed Wallis Simpson on her arrival in Shanghai, as it did most visitors, was its modernity. In 1924, the International Settlement (largely run by the British) and the adjacent French Concession were significantly more developed than Canton, while ...

At this time of the year, anyone can wear an outlandish mask. You can also carry a huge ax, or a machete, or wear gloves with knives for fingers, and no one will bat an eyelid. People will throw open their doors and hand candy to beasts and maniacs that, at any other time, would […]

I’ve lived in Dublin for many years, an innocent abroad, a fish out of water. It’s my home, but it’s never been home home. Like for every immigrant, home home is a mixture of fantasy, history and old geography. A shining memory of childhood hard to discern through the lens of reality, no matter wher...

Since I was little, I’ve been raised on stories of my parents’ history and the controversial romance between my mother, the daughter of South Indian immigrants, and an Irish-German nobody from the green ridges of Tennessee. You might say there was friction on both sides of the family tree over an un...

At the Civil War’s end, under a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by the end of the Great War, the proportion was almost exactly half. All those people moving to the cities—both from rural America and from abroad— changed things. Size created anonymity, the possibility of losing yourself in the ...

Imagine you’re an ambitious doctor in 1820’s Edinburgh. You don’t know anything about germs or anesthesia, but you have a medicine chest of calomel, blue pills, mercury and arsenic. You lance and bleed and carry a bag with all kinds of scalpels, forceps and syringes. Unlike the men you apprenticed t...

As Elyse Graham recounts in her new book Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, with the Nazis gaining ground across Europe in the early years of the Second World War, the United States and United Kingdom drew on an unlikely reserve of combatants to b...

During my training as a clinical psychologist, I grew to understand that we humans are always affected by our history. Our families shape our stories with their presence or absence, their quirks and patterns, their healthy traits and unhealthy, and sometimes their serious trauma. We carry our family...

On 14 June, prompted by the Good fiasco, Commissioners Mayne and Rowan sent to the Home Secretary a ‘Memorandum relative to the Detective Powers of the Police’. It laid out plans for a new branch of Scotland Yard comprised of two detective-inspectors and eight sergeants. The document has been lost t...

If Dudley Clarke had done nothing else in the war, his final job in London in 1940 would have secured him a place in history. On his return from Ireland he’d been appointed as military assistant to Sir John Dill, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Dill and Clarke were old comrades. In […]

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Nicholas Meyer, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (Mysterious Press) “Nicholas Meyer’s stirring tale of the turning point of the Great War reveals the pivotal roles of Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson. ...

Shad White is the Mississippi state auditor who exposed the misspending of nearly $100 million in funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program — federal money meant to aid the poorest people in the nation’s poorest state. Eight individuals have pleaded guilty to crimes in th...

For those of us who love witch-related history and lore, the last few years have been the literary version of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Dozens of novels have explored witches and witchcraft, and there’s something to appeal to every taste. Whether you like your witches unjustly accused or full to th...

In 1917, the seventy thousand residents of San Diego had a decision to make: “Smokestacks versus Geraniums.” Few cities have the chance to define their future, but the candidates in the 1917 election for mayor made the two possibilities clear. Gilded Age bankertype Louis J. Wilde—for whom no industr...

Historical mystery with its portrayal of life in another time and place has long been one of the most popular subgenres of crime fiction. From ancient Rome and medieval monasteries to the pre-Civil War South, the foggy streets of Victorian London, and the trenches of WW1, readers like me relish the ...

Down on the East Side, far from the Broadway of Arnold Rothstein’s New York, Lillian Lieben and Antonia Rolnick lived on “Jewish Broadway,” or Grand Street. Back in 1900, the New York Tribune wrote that “Grand Street is Broadway plus Fifth Avenue, only very much more so. Its wide sidewalks show more...

Gore Vidal was intellectual culture’s reigning champion of social liberalism and secular advocacy for decades. His famous wit indicates that he would appreciate the irony of someone awarding him the title of “prophet,” but it was well-earned. His series of novels chronicling American history act as ...

If there’s an all-business town in Italy then it’s Turin. Capital of Piedmont, northern Italy, it sits impressively on the Po River. Just under two million inhabitants in the wider urban area. Like everywhere in Italy there’s a lot of history – the capital of the Duchy of Savoy before the Risorgimen...

New York, July 22, 1884 They were detectives, accustomed to plunder, But they’d never seen anything like this. It had taken some doing to open the safe. After bursting into the modest haberdashery shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, they’d demanded the keys from the shopkeeper, Fredericka Mandelbau...

Fredericka Mandelbaum was a mother of four, a successful shopkeeper, an employer who appreciated unusual talent—and one of her era’s great criminal pioneers. The ingenious, imposing subject of Margalit Fox’s rollicking new book—The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized...

It all began with a black binder. When I first started writing A Darker Mischief, I’d never heard of Dark Academia. It wasn’t a trending aesthetic yet, or notable sub-genre, even if the many books that seemed to define it had come out years (or decades) before, like its unofficial blueprint, The Sec...

“Going down the steps with a gun in his hands” Our family’s criminal history used to be a secret. Before Google, it was easy to hide your past. When my grandmother Effie Satterwhite was 17, she had a boyfriend named Jim. According to her brother’s court testimony, he once caught them “conducting the...

Arthur Barry was a precocious and versatile lawbreaker. As Dean Jobb tells it in his brisk, beautifully written new book, Barry was a beer-drinker at seven and a safecracker’s errand boy at 13. He made his first theft at 15, breaking into a house and stealing some cash. In time, Jobb writes in A Gen...

Long Island and Manhattan • 1924 A man in a tuxedo and winged collar navigated a room filled with black-clad men and elegant women in Parisian gowns, sparkling with jewels. He docked alongside a group of guests who had formed a cordon around a punch bowl. Someone offered him a drink, and as names we...

The third book of my ‘Hooke & Hunt’ series, The Bedlam Cadaver, includes a building designed by Robert Hooke. And, indeed, includes the shortened version of its name in the title. The Priory of the New Order of our Lady of Bethlehem was founded in 1247, its main purpose to collect alms to support th...

We’re halfway through 2024, but in these books, we’re still in the (generally terrible) past! Its been, as usual, a great year for historical fiction, and I’ve assembled the best historical fiction of the year so far. The following books are as great as the history they depict is awful, and the beau...

Boosters of the CIA like to talk up its American ancestry, pointing out that spies helped win the Republic’s founding struggle against the British Empire as well as all its subsequent victories in major wars. But this is not the whole story. The CIA was, after all, a foreign intelligence agency, so ...

Miami is a crime writer’s paradise. This city has seen it all, and her denizens have definitely done it all, so there’s no shortage of inspiration to fuel the imagination. The Magic City often feels more like a fictional metropolis than an actual, real-life place. Our history is tumultuous, our popu...

The Planet of the Apes series, which has just released its tenth installment with Wes Ball’s new film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is for my money one of the most consistent franchises in cinema history. Every entry has at minimum something worthwhile about it (even the maligned 2001 Tim Burto...

Dark academia is a literary genre that has its origins in Donna Tartt’s seminal 1992 novel. The Secret History is set in the elite Hampden College in Vermont where a scholarship student attempts to create a new identity among a select group of wealthy and privileged Greek scholars. The gothic archit...