For Years, Journalists Have Played

A Major Role In Crime Fiction

The protagonist of a mystery or a thriller is not always a police officer or private detective. In fact, as noted by Erin Roll in an article in Novel Suspects last week, very likely the sleuth is a journalist who is writing about a particular case, asking questions, going over mountains of clues and paperwork, asking even more questions, fending off feelings of frustration, and having people accuse them of being pests, parasites, or blood-hungry ghouls. The stresses while looking into a case may carry over into the journalist’s personal life and, likewise, the stresses of home life may carry over into the case. A couple of the better-known recent fictional journalists are Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist in the late Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and San Francisco Chronicle journalist Cindy Thomas, introduced in James Patterson’s The Women’s Murder Club. Of course, who can forget the iconic real-life reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the true crime book and feature film All The President's Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (pictured left)? Plus—and please pardon the shameless plug—my upcoming international thriller Greenwich Mean Time features down-on-his-luck reporter Carter Logan, who finds himself enmeshed in a sinister plot to assassinate the president of the United States.

In NBC’s The Name Of The Game, Set At A Fictitious People Magazine,

Reporters Solved Crimes

As has been mentioned in previous issues of BunzelGram, during the late 1960s and early 1970s the three major television networks scheduled all kinds of police procedural and private detective series. One of the most innovative variations, however, was a crime show that focused on a very different kind of investigator: hard-hitting journalists (which ties in to the story, above). The Name of the Game ran for three seasons, airing 76 episodes on NBC from September 1968 to March 1971. According to Crime Reads’ Keith Roysdon, the program was an anthology series, each third week following a different lead character who worked at the same big-city publishing house named People magazine (no, not that People). Tony Franciosa played Jeff Dillon, a hot-shot investigative reporter, while Gene Barry played Glenn Howard, the owner of Howard Publications, who frequently sent Dillon and fellow reporter Dan Farrell (Robert Stack) out to tackle injustices, environmental issues, and political corruption. The other most important character to the series was Peggy Maxwell, played by Susan Saint James, who would go on to co-star with Rock Hudson in the NBC series McMillan & Wife. Interestingly, The Name Of The Game premiered in 1968, three years before the NBC Mystery Movie anthology show began airing in 1971, introducing us to such characters as Columbo and McCloud.

Rupert Holmes’ Latest Mystery Makes

Education A Matter of Life and Death

It’s taken Rupert Holmes 13 years to deliver Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, a book Publishers Weekly calls a “wildly entertaining, clever, and inventive mystery novel.” Best known for writing and recording the iconic 1979 pop song “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” Holmes—now 75—is a prolific and successful playwright whose 1985 debut production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood won five Tony Awards. Murder Your Employer is the first volume of a proposed series set at the fictitious McMasters Conservatory, a university that teaches its students the art of murder (or, to use the preferable term, “deletion”), and follows three students who are referred to as “deletists” or “homicidials.” Applicants enter McMasters to learn how to delete someone—without getting caught, of course. However, it’s essential that the person who’s to be eliminated deserves it; the world must be a better place with the target gone, and secrecy is of the utmost importance. As Holmes writes in the foreword: “The successful murderer is the unacknowledged murderer. I cannot begin to tell you how many McMasters graduates at this very moment illuminate the worlds of entertainment, sports, and politics. I cannot begin to tell you because if I did, they would all be on trial for their lives. It is a frustrating but necessary tribulation for our conservatory that we may never boast of our plethora of successful alumni. A common saying on campus is, ‘Wherever a murder goes unsolved, there goes a McMasters graduate.’”

PODCAST

Five Years Ago, A Circus Singer

Called CNN, Claiming James Brown Was Murdered

One Tuesday afternoon in 2017, CNN reporter Thomas Lake received a phone call from a mysterious woman who claimed the late Godfather of Soul, James Brown, had been murdered. The caller’s name was Jacque Hollander and, at the time, she was a singer for the B-circuit Carson & Barnes Circus. “She made one wild claim after another, and I took a few notes and politely ended the call,” Lake recalls. “Even if she was telling the truth, I couldn’t imagine how she would prove it. James Brown, one of the greatest entertainers in American history, died at a hospital in Atlanta in 2006, officially of natural causes. I had no reason to suspect foul play.” But the circus singer kept calling, insisting Brown had been murdered, and finally Lake’s editor said he might as well go see what this woman was talking about. The more he looked into it, the more the story turned out to be even deeper and stranger than it seemed. “Five years later, I’m still untangling all the threads,” he says. “I discovered that James Brown’s life was more mysterious than his death: layered with deception and intrigue, haunted by the government agents he believed were following him. After he prevented a riot in Boston in 1968, Brown was convinced he’d drawn the attention of the FBI and the CIA.” Since taking that strange phone call in 2017, Lake has interviewed more than 200 people, including the doctor who signed Brown’s death certificate and a friend who claimed to have taken a vial of Brown’s blood in the hope it would prove Brown was murdered. Check out the Podcast on CNN.

“Freeway Killer” Terrorized SoCal

During Year-Long Murder Spree

A pedophile serial killer preying on hitchhiking boys and young men confessed to raping, torturing, and murdering as many as 21 victims in Southern California over the span of just one violent year. William George Bonin, a former truck driver, began his deadly spree in 1979, leaving victims’ bodies along roadways and behind buildings in Los Angeles and Orange County. The man who would later become known as the so-called Freeway Killer had been arrested a decade earlier, in 1969, and sent to Atascadero State Mental Hospital for forcing five boys in South Bay communities to have sex with him. Just over a year after his parole in 1974, Bonin kidnapped and raped 14-year-old David McVicker at gunpoint while the boy was heading home from a friend’s house, and he again was arrested and sentenced to prison. He was released on parole from the California Medical Facility in Vacaville three years later, in October 1978, and then did his best to “make good on a promise he made to an officer that he would never let another witness get away,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Bonin’s crimes quickly escalated, and kicked off a killing frenzy that claimed the lives of at least 14 boys and men, ages 12 to 19. He later confessed to slaying 21 victims, but authorities believe the tally could be over 30.

Coming January 10, 2023:

Greenwich Mean Time

“A globe-spanning, mind-spinning thriller that will delight fans of Jason Bourne. Rōnin Phythian, an assassin with extraordinary powers and a code of his own, deserves a sequel. Make that sequels.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire

“Greenwich Mean Time is a rollicking good time of thrills and skills.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry

When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time.