Colson Whitehead deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize (and a bunch of other awards) for his previous two novels. Both detailed tragic times in the history of America: The Underground Railroad (2016) was a dark fantasy on responses to slavery, while The Nickle Boys (2019) explored the impact of institutionalisation and the associated abuse of young…
I Shot the Devil by Ruth McIver was the winner of the 2018 Richelle Prize for emerging writers. Entrants must submit the first three chapters of their work and a synopsis of the rest. While the prologue of this book is a little disjointed and confusing, just the first chapter has enough style and hooks…
Despite perceptions to the contrary, art and crime are never far apart. Dark deeds plagued Renaissance painters like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. The artist Walter Sickert has been accused (posthumously) of being Jack the Ripper. And the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre is one of many “crimes of the 20th Century”….
The attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 is the jumping off point for A Voice in the Night, the debut Australian crime thriller by Sarah Hawthorn. 9/11 was a global trauma, played out on live television, the consequences of which still resonate. The events of the day are told through the…
In 2019, Ajay Chowdhury won the inaugural Harvill Secker/Bloody Scotland award aimed at discovering new crime writers from underrepresented communities. The Waiter, which appears at first to be two crime novels for the price of one, is Chowdhury’s debut crime novel (he had previously published a children’s book). And along the way it tips its…
To call Steve Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn thrillers “courtroom dramas” is to sell them well short. Sure there are some courtroom or other legal shenanigans in every one of Eddie’s outings. But what Cavanagh seems to delight in is how much pressure he can bring to bear on Eddie outside of the case itself. In his…
Set in the icy mountains of Kenosha Utah, The Killing of Two Lovers is a gritty depiction of a married couple that have decided to spend time apart. Starring Clayne Crawford, Sepideh Moafi and Chris Coy, the film has received critical acclaim worldwide. Director Robert Machoian spoke about the film’s stylistic choices, working with his…
German author Dirk Kurbjuweit’s first novel to be translated into English was Fear, based on his own experience of being stalked. His most recent book in translation (translated by Imogen Taylor) is a very different beast. Based on the shocking true story of Fritz Haarmann, the Butcher of Hannover, The Missing is more a thinly…
French cinema icon Isabelle Huppert displays her comedic side in Jean-Paul Salomé’s crime caper The Godmother (La Daronne). The film starts out as a conventional crime drama with the cops looking to intercept a shipment of drugs, but ends up in some pretty wild territory. Huppert plays Patience Portefeux*, a translator with the Paris police….
Inga Vesper’s debut crime novel The Long, Long Afternoon takes readers into the Stepford world of 1950s Los Angeles and then blows it up from the inside. When the book opens, seemingly devoted housewife Joyce Hayney has disappeared. The investigation into that disappearance will reveal cracks in the façade of her marriage and the community…
