BunzelGram

July 19, 2021    Issue #51

 

This Week's Thoughts On Mysteries, Thrillers, and All Things Crime

 

Marketing and promotion are critical elements of the publishing business, and social media is vital in building a brand and reaching potential readers. I get that, and I find Facebook good for engaging with friends and fellow writers. But Twitter? Seriously? Either I’m doing something incredibly wrong, or the world has been struck—hard—with a stupid stick. The film Idiocracy comes to mind. I could go on about #Hashtags and #WritersLifts, but I’ve wasted too much time on tweets. Time to get back to writing. As always, thank you.

—Reed Bunzel

 

Print Book Sales Soared In The First
Half Of 2021, Bit Slipped Last Week

There’s good news and bad news in the latest sales data for print books through the end of June 2021. The good news: Publishers Weekly reports total sales for the first half of the year were up 2.9% vs. the same period last year, when Q2 business slumped with the onset of Covid-19. The bad news: The long run of unit sales of print books posting weekly year-over-year sales gains came to an end last week, with sales falling 1.3% compared to the corresponding week last summer. The decline was the result of continued pressure on nonfiction sales, as the number of units sold in that category fell 10.2% vs. the previous year. That said, unit sales of adult fiction increased 22.1% over the comparable week a year ago, helped by the release of several new bestsellers. Danielle Steel’s Nine Lives sold just over 24,000 copies in its first week, putting it in second place on the bestseller list. Miranda Cowley Heller’s novel The Paper Palace sold nearly 23,000 copies in its first week, and Falling by TJ. Newman sold over 22,000 copies in its debut.

 
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2021 CWA Dagger Award

Winners Announced

The U.K.-based Crime Writers Association earlier this month announced the winners of its annual Dagger Awards during an online ceremony. Covering eleven categories, the winners are:
Gold Dagger: We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker (Zaffre)
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: When She Was Good, by Michael Robotham (Sphere)
John Creasey Dagger: The Creak on the Stairs, by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (Orenda)
Sapere Books Historical Dagger: Midnight at Malabar House, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction: Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind, by Sue Black (Doubleday)
Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger: The Disaster Tourist, by Yun Ko-eun (Serpent’s Tail)
Short Story Dagger: “Monsters,” by Clare Mackintosh (The Dome Press)
Dagger in the Library (“for a body of work by an established crime writer that has long been popular with borrowers from libraries”): Peter May
CWA Debut Dagger (for as-yet-unpublished novels): Deception, by Hannah Redding. Highly commended: Underwater, by Fiona McPhillips
     Additionally, Martina Cole received the 2021 Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement.

 
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Tarantino’s New Hollywood Novel
Digs Into Film’s Characters, Not Plot

Any Quentin Tarantino aficionado know that he obsesses over each and every cinematic scene, which he often refers to as chapters (see Kill Bill 1 and 2). As a writer and director, he’s been known to flesh out back stories for secondary and tertiary characters, and sometimes work up entire storyboards or screenplays for fictional elements that exist within the world of the movie, but are never filmed. As noted by Polygon’s Chris Stanton, his 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one prime example, “showing off some of that legwork, digressing repeatedly into voiceover recaps about the acting career of protagonist Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), and tracking the arc of Rick’s made-up filmography with IMDb-like specificity.” It would only seem natural, then, for him to novelize his own film, which he has done with the nearly 400-page thriller of the same title. Formatted and branded to read like an old-time pocket paperback, the book allows Tarantino to dig into various minutiae that the (quite long) film didn’t leave room for. This way the reader learns conclusively the truth behind Cliff Booth’s (Brad Pitt) alleged murder of his wife, gets a bizarre peek into the mind of Charles Manson, and explores Rick Dalton’s thoughts on his fading Hollywood career. 

 
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Harry Bosch: The Ultimate
L.A. Cop [Step Aside, Joe Friday]

I’ve been binge-watching the Amazon Prime Video series Bosch these last few weeks, and as a major fan of Michael Connelly’s writing I can tell you it’s been gripping. The casting of Titus Welliver in the title role is impeccable, and every one of the supporting characters is authentic and true to those in the original books. Dialogue is crisp, scenes are brisk, the multiple plots really move, and the various twists and turns keep the viewer (aka me) truly engaged. The entire production is intelligent, almost to a point of elegance, and Welliver’s sober portrayal of a detached and unflappable veteran L.A. homicide detective almost smacks of apathy, until he allows just a sliver of empathy to seep through—a reminder that he, too, is human. Oddly, there were times when I found myself comparing Harry Bosch to Dragnet’s Joe Friday: two entirely different characters played by two accomplished actors, with some of the same indifferent and stolid attitude toward witnesses, perps, and colleagues. [Watch Bosch Season 1 trailer here, and a clip of Dragnet here.] In my mind Bosch is far more compelling, but comparing the two is a fascinating study of the evolution of L.A. police dramas.  

 
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COLD CASE

Almost Two Decades Later,
Missouri Teen Is Still Missing

In the summer of 2004, Ashley Martinez and her younger brother were ending the Fourth of July weekend with a day at the pool at Krug Park in St. Joseph, Missouri. As reported by NBC Dateline, their mother, Tammy Mack, put 15-year-old Ashley in charge, dropped them off around 12 noon, and told them she’d pick them up at the end of the day. When she returned, however, her son was waiting for her, but Ashley had vanished. According to Ashley’s brother and other people at the pool that day, Ashley was there for a few hours before borrowing a friend’s cell phone to make a call before leaving the pool area. Tammy told Dateline that several people saw her daughter get into an unknown vehicle with an older man, who later was identified as 32-year-old Christopher Matthias Hart. During the weeks and months that followed Ashley’s disappearance, Hart was arrested multiple times on unrelated charges, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Missouri for assault and tampering with a motor vehicle. He was released in 2015, but Ashley has not been seen since the day she disappeared. 

 
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The 30 Best Diner Scenes

In Crime Movies

For some reason, diners evoke a nostalgia, an intimacy, a time in our lives when things seemed simpler and more straightforward. For me, it will always be Miss B’s in Brunswick, Maine, when I was in college, where a "trucker’s special" at 2:00 in the morning consisted of three eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, an optional pancake, and bottomless coffee, all for $2.25. But the food on those early morning outings was second only to the conversation and camaraderie, which seemed so vital at the time, but quite distant all these decades later. Still, movie diners provide an elemental, almost-visceral sense of place and immediacy, where confidences can be shared and strategies hatched. As Crime Reads’ Olivia Rutigliano wrote last week, “diners are the sites of hushed threats, whispered revelations, casual flirtations—and sometimes the origin of cheap crimes, or hideouts for dangerous characters.” With all this in mind, she ranked the thirty most memorable, most moving diner scenes in crime films. 

 
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     “Reed Bunzel hits all the right notes in Seven-Thirty Thursday (Suspense Publishing), an intensely personal tale that has echoes of both Greg Isles and John Hart. 
     "Rick Devlin is living proof of the old Thomas Wolfe adage that you can’t go home again, especially in the wake of his mother’s murder at his father’s hand in his once-beloved Charleston, South Carolina. That is, until new evidence surfaces suggesting that his father may be innocent, leading Devlin to launch his own investigation. It turns out pretty much everyone involved is hiding something, and it’s up to him to sort through the grisly morass to get to the truth.
     “This is Southern gothic writing extraordinaire, establishing Bunzel as a kind of William Faulkner of the thriller-writing world. His effortless prose crackles with color and authenticity as the brooding Charleston skies set the stage for the storm that’s coming.”

—Providence Journal

 
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