Bookstore Sales Fell 16.6% In January

There’s bad news and good news in the world of bricks-and-mortar bookstores. The bad news is that retail sales fell 16.6% in January compared to the first month of 2020, as reported by Publishers Weekly. Sales for the month were $797 million, down from $956 million in January 2020. The good news, of sorts, is that this 16.6% drop was only slightly more than the 15% decrease that bookstore sales posted in December 2020 vs. December 2019, yet another sign that sales declines could be levelling off. February is typically the slowest month for bookstore sales—in 2020, monthly sales were $573 million—and last year's sales began to tank in March as the pandemic set in. Bookstore sales finished 2020 with a 28% decline compared to 2019. Overall, the entire retail sector continued to indicate it has put the worst of the pandemic behind it, with sales up 7.9% in the January.

First Rule Of Thriller-Writing:

Never, Ever Kill The Dog

Whether you write thrillers for a living or read/watch them as a pastime, we know there’s going to be blood. Blood dripping from the victim, blood gushing from the suspect, maybe even blood seeping from the hero/heroine. Blood is an expected part of any crime storyline, and so is death. Anyone and everyone can die (spoiler alert: just watch The Departed). Having said all this, there is one exception: the dog never dies. As Sulari Gentill writes in this recent article in CrimeReads, “Bodies are often thrown with wild abandon onto the first page, and at regular intervals thereafter. Our readers have come to accept it. Indeed, they demand it. As long as the corpse is not that of a dog. Because such an outrage, is, in contrast to the literary slaughter of humans, likely to incite the most indignant letters, pledges to never read you again, and censure on every platform.” Why is this, we might ask? Is it that all readers are dog people? Do they value the life of a canine more than that of a person, holding it in such sacred regard that even a fictional demise is unacceptable? Or is it that readers want to believe that even the most wicked would not hurt a puppy? I mean, just because he keeps decapitated heads in his freezer…"

Meet Charles Hill: One Of The

World’s Top Art Detectives

Ever since I saw Topkapi as a boy I’ve been in love with art heist movies. I love the cat-and-mouse stealth and intrigue that drives these films, everything from The Thomas Crown Affair (both versions) to Entrapment to Hudson Hawk. And if you’re a bit like me, you probably even root for the thief part of the time because he or she is such a wily and compelling character. The fact is, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art is stolen from museums and private collections every year, often in crude and violent robberies, and recovering these rarities falls to elite detectives, such as those who work for Scotland Yard’s fabled art-and-antiques squad. British investigator Charles Hill, who died last month at 73, was one of these crack detectives, responsible for solving numerous crimes, retrieving dozens of stolen masterpieces, and putting scores of criminals behind bars. During his career, profiled in this Air Mail story, he came to know Mafia mobsters, members of Irish gangs, and “Balkan Bandits.” Posing as the European agent of the Getty Museum, Hill was one of two undercover officers who recovered Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, which was stolen from Oslo’s National Museum in 1994.

Scorsese Wasn’t Always About Crime,

But Here Are His 8 Of Films That Are

Hear the name Martin Scorsese and you automatically think blood and guts. Crime. Gangs. Wise guys. More blood and guts. The fact is, as drawn to the crime genre as this cinematic master has been over the years, most of his 25 feature films had absolutely nothing to do with the underworld, double-crosses, or the mob. [Examples: Alice doesn’t Live Here Anymore and The Last Temptation of Christ.] Since BunzelGram is solely dedicated to “all things crime,” however, we’re focusing on his body of work that helped define the way we look at criminality on screen. “Scorsese brings a specificity to his crime movies that matches his well-known virtuosity behind a camera,” William Bibbiani recently wrote in The Wrap. “He may have made more films about other subjects than he has about criminals, but he keeps coming back to the subject, again and again, to refine his techniques and to approach similar topics from all-new angles.” With that in mind, here’s a list of the eight Scorsese movies that confidently can be called crime films, and are truly essential for fans of the genre.

Cheap Dime Novels Got The

American Public To Read

If you’ve ever heard the term “dime novels,” you might think of the cheap pulp fiction paperbacks you’d find in the local grocery store or neighborhood pharmacy. If so, you’d be wrong. Dime novels actually began to appear in the U.S. around the early 1860s, and their cheap, booklet-like composition was designed to make reading more accessible to a broader range of consumer. At a cost of 5–15¢ each, they helped get books into the hands of working-class people who previously couldn’t afford hard cover versions that sold for $1.00 or $1.50. An estimated 50,000 dime novels were published between 1860 and 1915, with many of the earliest stories focusing on Native Americans, shifting over the year to cowboys, bandits, and train robbers. Dime novel romances always followed a similar course for their female fans, using common plot devices (affairs, lovers torn apart, unhappy marriages), and usually ending happily ever after. While some of these stories were panned by “hacks´ who churned out thousands of words a day, some of the era’s most notable authors also engaged in their creation. As Rachel Rosenberg wrote last week in Book Riot, “The industry paid well, and that drew famous authors to the easy money. Some, like Jack London, wrote under pen names. But Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were some of the well-known names who contributed” to the cause.

COLD CASE

Tipster Helps Solve 1984 Murder

Of Elementary School Cook

Thirty-seven years ago, Virginia Hannon, a 59-year-old cook at an elementary school in Pembroke, Massachusetts, was found dead in her home. Known as the “lunch lady” at Bryantville Elementary about 30 miles south of Boston, she took care of stray cats, kept biscuits in her house for neighborhood dogs, and loved bingo. Her nephew Richard Hannon described her as a “great woman,” and noted that she was “very family-oriented and loved the area, loved the people around her, and was very generous.” For almost four decades family members couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to kill her, and the police were unable to determine who had beaten, stabbed, and strangled her. Detectives interviewed more than 50 people but didn’t solve the crime until a tipster called them last year and said that a man named Jesse Aylward, who had died the previous day, had confessed that he killed someone in Pembroke many years earlier. Last week, DNA evidence collected from Aylward’s body definitively linked him to the crime scene and proved that he was responsible for Hannon’s brutal murder Feb. 13, 1984. Earlier attempts to identify a suspect through forensic genealogy, which uses genetic evidence to identify the relatives of criminals and eventually the criminals themselves, were not successful, investigators said.

Fairy Tales Were The First Thrillers

We Ever Encountered In Life

Some of the first thrillers we ever read—or had read to us—were fairy tales, often of the darkest kind. While we might think of the last line of Cinderella as “They lived happily ever after,” nothing could be further from the truth. The last line was, in fact: “Thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.” This punishment, meted out to the ugly conniving, stepsisters, actually followed an earlier part where “pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them.” [Check out this article in Crime Reads]. As Amy Richau points out in an article in Screen Rant, a fairy tale by definition is “a children's story about magical and imaginary beings and lands”—but unspeakable things can, and do, happen therein.  When the Brothers Grimm collected and compiled many of the beloved fairy tales—including Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood—they were far darker and scarier than the stories we remember from our childhood. Here's a list of  ten Fairy Tale Movies Too Scary For Kids, some of which are cinematic adaptations based on old fables, while others are merely inspired by the ideas and the imagination behind them.

Seven-Thirty Thursday:

"Former star athlete Rick Devlin left Charleston in the rearview mirror just days after his father was sentenced to life in prison for killing his mother. Now—thirty years later—he returns home to care for the reviled old man, who on his death bed insists the trial was a sham and the jury convicted an innocent man. Against his better judgment, Devlin investigates his mother’s death, uncovering the roots of a decades old hate crime and revisiting some painful memories from his past. As he digs deeper and deeper, he encounters two generations of family lawyers, a corrupt state cop, a hypocritical televangelist, the ghosts of several racist rednecks, and the specter of a young black boy who died a most horrific death. He also runs into his old high school flame, an intense heat that has lingered all these years."