My new novel, When the Corn is Waist High, is a crime thriller set in rural Indiana in the 1980’s, and is inspired by a lot of my favorite crime films. Most crime fans, even if they aren’t film buffs, are familiar with the most famous crime thriller movies like Chinatown, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, or Heat. Today I wanted to take a moment and recommend a handful of lesser-known crime films for genre fans to check out.
Brick
Written and directed by Rian Johnson after he graduated film school, Brick is a classic noir detective story set in the modern day and told by teenagers, featuring an incredible performance by Joseph Gordon Levit. You have never heard high schoolers talk like this before, and you may never again. But in addition to a flashy blend of “high school movie” and “film noir” style, this movie also offers a gripping mystery that is well thought out and pays off big in the end.
Road to Perdition
In a rare turn as a complicated anti-hero, Tom Hanks plays a mob heavy forced to go on the run with his son after his wife and other son are murdered by the mob boss’s son. Loyalties are tested and then dissolve, while Hank’s Mike Sullivan gets an unexpected chance to bond with his oldest son while they go on the road, robbing banks together and trying to stay ahead of Jude Law’s electric hitman sent by the mob to hunt them down.
Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels
Guy Ritchie’s first hit film sees a lot of misunderstanding, mistakes, and assumptions as a criminal exchange goes wrong. Costarring the likes of Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones, Lock Stock is about an overly-confident card player who loses bigtime to a dangerous man. In order to pay off that debt, he and his friends turn to an ill-conceived plan to rob their neighbors. Virtually everything that can go wrong does, and if you aren’t delighted by the end of this movie then you have a gaping need for joy in your life.
Bad Times at the El Royale
Almost everyone checking into this hotel is a criminal, though they all have different reasons, and some are worse than others. The hotel itself, on the literal edge between states so that half the rooms are in California and the other half are in Nevada, is far removed from its heyday. And yet on one fateful night, it ends up playing host to a cast of characters that will forever change each other’s lives as well as the history of the hotel. Violent, hilarious, surprising, and stylistic as hell, Bad Times at the El Royale is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
A Simple Plan
A crashed plane. A remote snowy wasteland. A dysfunctional group of friends. And a fateful few bags of found money. If you found a small plane full of dead people and millions in cash… what would you do? This film is a study in incremental morality and a master class on shifting loyalties. What begins as a very simple plan indeed… quickly unravels, threatening everyone involved.
Jeremy Scott’s When the Corn is Waist High is a crime thriller about a priest-slash-sheriff in over his head investigating a series of serial murders. It has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, releases April 19th , and can be pre-ordered wherever books are sold.
