Jake Adlestein, an American reporter working the police beat for a Japanese newspaper, begins his true crime story with a meeting he took with two members of the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime group.

“Either erase the story, or we will erase you. And maybe your family. But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die,” one of the yakuza members said to Adelstein.  

Adelstein writes that this seemed like a straightforward proposition. [Read more →]

Tags: on thrillers and crime
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I was told that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was thrilled with being a naval intelligence officer back in 1964. James Bond-mania was in full swing and Fay was a big fan of the novels and films.

Fay was pleased to learn that his true-life hero, the late President John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, was also a fan of the novels and once dined with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, on thrillers and crime
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Back in the early 1970s I was stationed in Southern California while serving in the Navy. Although I’m a die-hard South Philly guy, I loved my time on the West Coast.

I particularly loved my weekends in Los Angeles, a city I read about as a teenager in the novels of Raymond Chandler and was at that time reading about the city in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh. I had also seen LA as a backdrop in a good number of movies and TV shows growing up. From crime stories to tales of Hollywood, LA was almost a mythical place to me.

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Tags: on thrillers and crime
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My wife and I recently watched Donnie Brasco on cable TV. We’ve seen the film about four or five times, but we like it so much we watch it again every couple of years.

The 1997 film, stars Johnny Depp as Donnie “the jeweler” Brasco, aka Joseph Pistone, the FBI special agent who went undercover in 1976 in the New York Bonanno Cosa Nostra crime family, and Al Pacino as mobster Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero. In my view, the film is one of the two most realistic films, along with Goodfellas, about organized crime.  

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Tags: on thrillers and crime
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As a crime reporter and writer of a regular column, I was compelled to look into a report of a burglary of an unemployed construction worker on Christmas Eve in South Philadelphia.

The burglar or burglars broke into the home early on the morning of the 24th. They stole the family’s TV and other household goods. They also took a dozen or so wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree that were intended for the family’s two children.

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As any cop will tell you, the full moon brings out the crazies. And if you are working the streets of Hollywood, California - well, the moon makes them even crazier.

Joesph Wambaugh, a former LAPD detective Sergeant, is the master of tales about cops, crooks and crime. He once again offers us a novel with stark realism, blunt language and abundant humor. Hollywood Moon is the last in a trilogy of novels that began with Hollywood Station and continued with Hollywood Crows.

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I have a couple of unread books on my nightstand next to my bed and about a dozen more on a table in my basement office.

Instead of reading these new novels and nonfiction books, I’m rereading Raymond Chandler’s classic crime thrillers. As I recently read a newspaper piece about Robert Altman’s somewhat loose film adaptation of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, I had the urge to read the novel again for what is perhaps the 12th time since I first read all of his novels as a teenager so long ago. Chandler is that good, in my view.

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Tags: books & writing, on thrillers and crime
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I’ve been watching the very interesting Mob Scene videos on Philly.com that feature George Anastasia, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s ace organized crime reporter. 

Anastasia has been covering organized crime in Philadelphia and South Jersey for more than 25 years. He has also written several books on organized crime, such as Blood and Honor , The Last Gangster and his latest, Mobfiles: Mobsters, Molls and Murder.

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Last year was the centenary of Ian Fleming (1908-1964). It was a very good year for the creator of Bond, James Bond.

To celebrate his life and work, a good number of events took place in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and around the world.

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Tags: books & writing, on thrillers and crime
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Andrei Chikatilo is not as well known as his fellow serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and if the Soviets had their way, no one would have ever heard of him.

According to the Soviets, crime did not exist in their worker’s paradise. But as the dead bodies piled up, the killer who came to be known as The Rostov Ripper  was finally caught and convicted of brutally murdering 52 women and children between the years 1978 and 1990.

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My late father enjoyed the repeated telling of old, corny jokes to his children. I, in turn, often told the same old jokes to my children.

One of the old jokes was about an armed robber who confronted a man in an alley and said “Stick ‘em down.”

“Don’t you mean stick ‘em up?” the would-be-victim asked the robber.

“Don’t confuse me,” the robber said. “This is my first job.”

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I’ve been a student of crime since I was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia in the early 1960’s. As a teenager I read crime fiction and thrillers and that led to my closely following crime stories in newspapers and magazines. I also read books about true crime and crime history.

I began covering crime as a crime reporter and columnist for the South Philadelphia weekly papers some years ago and I later moved my crime column to other newspapers and finally to the Internet.

And after all of these years, I’m still interested in the crime beat. Crime stories are dramatic, tragic and funny. They are the stuff of thrillers.

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Tags: books & writing, on thrillers and crime
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Newsweek, it goes without saying, is a tedious, dreadful rag which nobody on earth should buy unless threatened with death or — at the very least — castration. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, on the law, on thrillers and crime
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In Ellery Queen’s Book of Mystery Stories, first published under the title The Literature of Crime, the crime stories presented in the collection are written by writers generally not recognized as crime, mystery or thriller writers.

Edited by Ellery Queen, the pseudonym of the writing team of Frederic Dannay and James Yaffe, as well as the name of thier fictional detective character, the book offers crime stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and a dozen other writers.

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David Ignatius wrote this book before the eruption of street protests in response to the rigged elections in Iran and the Iranian government’s subsequent violent crackdown on the protestors.

The Increment (Norton), a political novel as much as it is a spy thriller, concerns an Iranian scientist, “Dr Ali,”  who contacts the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via their public web site and offers to provide information about Iran’s nuclear program. [Read more →]

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“Bond,” said the dark, cruelly handsome man in a tuxedo as he lit a cigarette languidly. “James Bond.”

And so film-viewers in 1963 were introduced to the suave yet rugged fictional British secret agent James Bond. Portraying Bond in the film, Dr. No, was a young Scottish actor named Sean Connery.

Dr. No and the subsequent Connery-Bond films in the 1960’s inspired millions of film-viewers to go on and read Ian Fleming’s thrillers. I was one of them.

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Many years ago when I was a young bachelor I brought home to my apartment a young girl I met in a bar.

While I was preparing a couple of drinks for us she looked over the books in my library.

“You have a lot of books on death,” she said in a questioning tone, noting the numerous titles of books on crime history, true crime and crime fiction, as well those on espionage, terrorism and military history.

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“They put Foley and the Cuban together in the backseat of the van and took them from the Palm Beach County jail on Gun Club to Glades Correctional, the old redbrick prison at the south end of Lake Okeechobee,” my friend and former editor, Frank Wilson, read to the audience at the Central Library in Center City Philadelphia prior to introducing crime writer Elmore Leonard on May 14th.

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Robert Leuci, the former New York City detective who was the subject of the book and film Prince of the City, is a crime writer who lives in Rhode Island, far from the mean streets of New York.

Robert Daley’s Prince of the City  was a first-rate true crime book and Sidney Lumet’s film based on the book with Treat Williams portraying Leuci when he was a young detective and a member of the elite narcotics Special Investigating Unit (SIU) was brilliant and haunting. [Read more →]

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In my first column here I noted that as a teenager in the 1960s I devoured crime fiction and thrillers. I bought hardbacks from the book clubs and I purchased a good number of paperbacks books.

I recall a second-hand bookstore where I picked up scores of vintage pulp paperbacks dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. With their lurid covers depicting guns, gore and girls, the novel’s atmosphere was established well before you turned to page one. [Read more →]

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Dominic Fortino was forced to serve out many after school detentions in the school’s small library.

Fortino was ordered to detention again on this particular day due to his attempt to push Mr. Pidot’s desk out of a second story classroom window.

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Tags: creative writing, on thrillers and crime
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I’ve been a student of crime since I was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia in the 1960s.

I devoured crime fiction and thrillers. I read, and reread, Ian Fleming, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ed McBain, and of course, Edgar Allen Poe. [Read more →]

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