What is "crime wave"

n. a sudden rise in the crime rate

Crime Wave may refer to:

• An increase in crime - or perception of an increase in crime - in a particular period and place
• Crime Wave (1954 film), film starring Sterling Hayden
• "Crime Wave" (CSI episode), season 3 episode 8 of CSI Miami
• Crime Wave (book), a collection of short works by James Ellroy
• Crime Wave (1985 film), film aka The Big Crime Wave
• Crimewave, a 1985 film by Sam Raimi
• CrimeWave, a video game developed by Eidos Interactive
• Crime Wave (video game), a video game by Bryan Brandenburg and Bruce Johnson
• "Crimewave" (song), a 2007 song by Crystal Castles and Health
• "Crime Waves", one of The Zeta Project episodes (Season 1)

Crime Wave (also known as The City is Dark) is a 1954 film noir, directed by André De Toth. It was adapted from a short story which originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post - "Criminal Mark" by John and Ward Hawkins.

Crime Wave is a 1999 collection of eleven short works of fiction and non-fiction, all originally published in GQ, by American crime fiction writer James Ellroy. The collection, issued as a paperback original, includes a short story ("Hush-Hush"), two novellas ("Tijuana, Mon Amour" and "Hollywood Shakedown"), and eight pieces of crime reports, including "Sex, Glitz, and Greed: The Seduction of O. J. Simpson". More of Ellroy's GQ pieces can be found in the collection Destination: Morgue!.

The true crime report titled "Glamour Jungle" concerns the unsolved murder of aspiring network television actress Karyn Kupcinet that happened in her West Hollywood, California apartment in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving Day, 1963. She was 22 years old. When Ellroy visited the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in the mid 1990s to study old documents from that department's investigation of the Kupcinet case, he was assisted by Kupcinet's niece, Kari Kupcinet-Kriser, daughter of Jerry Kupcinet. Kupcinet-Kriser was born many years after her aunt's murder but became fascinated by it.

Neither Ellroy nor Kupcinet-Kriser came any closer to solving the case than the sheriffs had thirty years earlier. Ellroy's report, which was first published in the December 1998 edition of GQ, became the only published source that goes into detail about the homicide and the sheriff's investigation of it that lasted more than five years without resulting in any arrests.

Crime Wave is a 1985 film made by Winnipeg-based filmmaker John Paizs shot between 1984 and 1986.

The film is an homage to late 1940s-early 1950s "color crime pictures". Paizs plays Steven Penny, a struggling screenwriter who lives above the garage of a suburban family, and begins typing each night from the moment the street lamp comes on. Everything we learn about the character comes from Kim (Eva Kovacs), the family's daughter, who has a schoolgirl crush on him, as Penny never utters a word in the entire film.

Steven is able to write beginnings and endings, but not middles, and we are treated to some of these amusing endings and rather repetitive beginnings that introduce several characters from various geographic regions to settle upon the film's hero "from the North".

The film is designed to emulate the look and feel of educational films from the period. Randolph Peters includes a flute and glockenspiel-based score emulating such films (the film concludes with a song based on this theme that discusses the possibility of Steven and Kim getting married sung by a small 1950s-style pop chorus). When Steven Penny is brought into some shady deals, the film takes on more of a neo noir look and sound, inflected with surrealism. One of the film's signature images is of the street lamp smashed over Steven's head, which he wears home.