How Mario Puzo Wrote The Godfather

Almost In Spite Of Himself

The Godfather is widely considered the best crime film ever made, followed closely by The Godfather II. Fortunately, these are two examples of a movie being as good as the book upon which they were based, the magnificent mafia epic written by Mario Puzo. What few readers or moviegoers realize, however, is that the novel was a long time coming, and very well might never have happened at all except for the intervention of fate. As Mark Seal points out in a recent issue of Airmail, Puzo was “going downhill fast” because of his gambling, his addiction to food, his health, and the “the endless drudgery and humiliatingly low wages for literary fiction, the kind that took forever to write well.” Puzo grew up poor, in a tenement flat in Hell’s Kitchen, then the roughest part of the city. Crime was the route—for some, the only route—for the poor, stuck in dead-end jobs with lousy pay, to move up to the middle class. “I had every desire to go wrong, but I never had a chance,” he once wrote. “The Italian family structure was too formidable.” Puzo’s writing career was going nowhere when, on one agonizing Christmas Eve, he suffered a severe gallbladder attack. Upon arriving at the hospital alone in a taxi, he opened the door and stepped onto the street. “I got out and fell into the gutter,” he said at the time. Writhing in agony, his mind turned to his failed ambitions. “There I was, a published writer, and I was dying like a dog. That’s when I decided I would be rich and famous.” As Paul Harvey would say, this is the rest of the story.

The Bizarre Rise Of True-Crime

Makeup Videos On Social Media

True crime is not a new genre, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with true crime media—at least in theory. When something terrible and unnatural happens, there is an innate desire to get to the bottom of things, and media is one of the more harmless ways to scratch the itch. But thanks to the “true crime boom,” mysterious disappearances and murder cases that once filled the late-night hours of cable have inundated social media platforms, where it’s become more common for tragedy to be handled with insensitivity and, often, flagrant disrespect. As Hannah Jackson recently wrote in The Daily Beast,” Influencers have amassed millions of followers giving makeup tutorials while describing the grisly details of murder cases. It all feels very icky.” Case in point: In January 2019, YouTuber Bailey Sarian uploaded her first “Murder, Mystery & Makeup” video blog about the case of Chris Watts, a man who murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters. Sarian was already a seasoned YouTuber in the makeup arena and decided to talk about the case while getting ready, though it is clear that she wasn’t sure how the macabre shift would sit with viewers. “Let me talk about somebody getting murdered while I do my makeup,” Sarian says in the video, her voice dripping with self-derision. “I don’t even know how to approach this without sounding insensitive at all,” she admits. Sarian’s gamble proved successful, as reflected by her social media success. To date she has over 5.65 million YouTube subscribers and boasts an additional 2.1 million followers on TikTok.

COLD CASE

Man Charged In 1992 Murder;

Was Registered Sex Offender

On November 8, 1992, Helen Cardwell was found dead in her room at the Leaning Tower YMCA in Niles, IL, a small town bordering Chicago to the northwest. Police determined the 35-year-old woman, who had recently moved from New Jersey to start work at Lutheran General Hospital, had been strangled with a sweater. Detectives worked the case for the next year, but eventually it went cold due to a "lack of investigative leads"—until it was reopened late last year. Police submitted numerous pieces of evidence to the Northeastern Illinois Regional Crime Laboratory in Vernon Hills, and DNA from some of the samples matched that of Richard Sisto, who was a registered sex offender at the time of the killing. Sisto had been living and working in the Niles when Cardwell was murdered, and was on parole for a 1977 aggravated rape conviction in Dallas. Investigators initially had no luck finding Sisto after the DNA match, but this past August a database search revealed that the suspect, now 72, was in jail in Texas, on a 2006 parole violation warrant. "He had completely gone off the radar,” Niles Detective Sgt. Michael Boba said. “He was living dark. He was nowhere to be found.” Sisto was charged last month with Cardwell's murder and is awaiting extradition to Illinois.

YA Speculative Thrillers That

Will Completely Blow Your Mind

“If you’re anything like me, the books that tend to stick with you are the ones that simply blow your mind…the ones that take you away from reality and make you think about everything in a completely new way.” That’s how Sacha Wunsch begins this recent Crime Reads article about “speculative fiction,” which she contends includes any genre that has elements that do not exist in reality—sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, etc. “The best thing about speculative thrillers is that you can explore all those crazy ‘what- if’s’ from your favorite reading chair,” she says. With that in mind, Wunsch has put together a list of recent and upcoming Young Adult Speculative Thrillers that promise to send you on a wild ride—"even with those comfy reading slippers on.”

Seven Unsettling Gothic Mysteries

To Read On The Day Of The Dead

What makes for a good gothic mystery suspense book? Dark, atmospheric settings. Unsettling and often supernatural storylines. A sense of horrifying dread that leaves the reader wondering who they can trust. Gothic mystery books and suspense books have been around for centuries, and writers and readers alike continue to love gothic sensibilities in their fiction. From Henry Farrell’s What Ever Happened To Baby Jane to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Rebecca James’ The Woman in the Mirror, Novel Suspects compiled this list of seven gothic mystery suspense novels—both new and classics—that you absolutely have to read if you’re going to immerse yourself in this genre.

The 30 Most Popular True-Crime

Books Of The Past Five Years

The true-crime genre is experiencing a huge boom, and it comes as no surprise as podcasts, documentaries, and TV shows have us all addicted to learning about the darkest and most labyrinthine excesses of the human psyche. Plenty of fresh, exhaustively researched pieces have populated the Goodreads shelves over the past few years, as readers have fixated on harrowing, fascinating accounts of cult compound murders, Ivy League bludgeonings, and even a notorious killer who was finally captured after three decades due in part to the tireless work of the book's author. Here’s a collection of the biggest and most popular true-crime books of the past five years, based on Goodreads’ members' additions to their “Want to Read” shelves.

PREVIEW

Greenwich Mean Time

By Reed Bunzel

On assignment to photograph the Baltoro glacier in Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains, Monica Cross literally stumbles into the grisly wreckage of a long-lost airplane crash. She unwittingly becomes privy to a dangerous secret that a sinister dark web outfit known as the Greenwich Global Group will do anything to prevent from ever seeing the light of day. Meanwhile, in the plains of the Tanzanian Serengeti, the retired assassin who crashed the plane and killed all those on board learns of the discovery of the wreckage. Long thought dead, Rōnin Phythian possesses a unique and mystical skillset that for years made him the most lethal man alive, and his reawakening conscience (also long thought to be dead) convinces him that he alone has put Monica Cross in danger—and is the only force that can save her. [Note: Cover image is watermarked and subject to change]

Scheduled for publication in 2022.