Hulu's Only Murders In The Building

Offers Comedic Take On True Crime

As periodically noted in BunzelGram, true crime is growing increasingly popular among podcast enthusiasts. Seizing on this widespread acceptance and fervor, comedy legend Steve Martin, longtime collaborator Martin Short, and ex-Disney pop princess Selena Gomez have teamed up for what NBC calls a “screamingly funny take on New York City life [that’s] both a parody of true crime and podcasting, and a great fictional true crime story.” The series begins with the story of an unlikely trio of lonely city dwellers living in one of New York’s famed Upper West Side residential hotels. The three are brought together when a fellow apartment dweller is murdered in the building. The NYPD says it’s a suicide, but these “three amigos” know a suspicious death when they see one. Being fans of true crime podcasts, and this being the 2020s, the three do the only logical thing and launch their own audio investigation as they round up a building full of suspects. Only Murders in the Building, streaming on Hulu, winds up as much a series for Broadway and theater enthusiasts as it is for true crime fans.

Harry O: One Of The ‘70s

Best Private Eye Series?

The week of September 13, 1974, one of television’s moist iconic private eye series—The Rockford Files—premiered on NBC. Starring James Garner, the show ran for five seasons and ranks as #39 on TV Guide’s list of the best TV shows of all time. The night before, however, another P.I. series—Harry O, starring David Janssen—debuted on ABC to much less fanfare, and lasted only two years in network prime time. Four and a half decades since the show’s final episode aired, its reputation has been burnished by retrospective reassessment and patent nostalgia. Writing in The New York Times in 1977, David Thorburn, a literature professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted that Janssen’s eponymous sleuth, Harry Orwell—with his twisted smile, tweed sports coat and khaki pants, and contemplative nature—was “more credibly and richly imagined than nearly all the TV detectives who preceded him, a true successor of the private eyes in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.” More recently, crime writer Robert Randisi said, “As much as I liked the more successful Rockford Files, I still preferred Harry O’s more serious tone, and Harry’s loner persona….The only other [show] I find comparable in the slightest is Darren McGavin’s The Outsider.” Unfortunately, Harry O is not yet available on any streaming services.

Was 1975 The Greatest Year

In The History Of Crime Fiction?

What was the greatest year in the history of crime fiction? If you ask authority Kevin Mims, short-story writer and literary historian, the answer is easy: 1975. Some critics could argue the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841 was a seminal event, while others might point to 1953, the year in which Raymond Chandler published his final novel (The Long Good-Bye) and Ira Levin and Ian Fleming published their first (A Kiss Before Dying and Casino Royale, respectively). But Mims insists 1975 takes the crown, based on Publishers Weekly’s list of the ten best-selling novels in the U.S. for 1975. #1 that year was E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, which he claims “most definitely a crime novel,” while #2 was The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey, with its foundation in banking and the temptations that go with it. In third place was Curtain by Agatha Christie. No explanation needed. #4 was Judith Rossner’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar (pictured left), one of the most famous crime novels of the decade. In the fifth spot 5 was Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys, “a stone-cold masterpiece of American crime fiction.” Numbers 6-10 were: Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed, Irving Stone’s fact-based The Greek Treasure (not a crime novel), Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery, James Clavell’s epic historical novel Shogun, and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, a literary work that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

Family Secrets And Skeletons

Rattle These Psychological Thrillers

There is no such thing as the perfect American family. You probably know yours isn’t, and no matter how well you think you know your friends and neighbors, they likely have skeletons hidden somewhere, as well. That was the background for my Southern crime novel Seven-Thirty Thursday, and it’s what makes the mysteries in psychological thrillers so exciting and realistic. Sometimes the storyline is over the top and full of shocking details and scary suspense, but the idea that you can never truly know another person is one element that makes suspense books truly frightening. Maybe it’s a mom with a long-buried secret from when she was in college, or a husband who’s sitting on a terrifying mystery he hasn’t told his new family about. Maybe a brother is involved in organized crime and he can’t find a way out. Whatever is being hidden, these compelling psychological suspense novels—as noted by Novel Suspects—are sure to keep you reading on the edge of your seat.

The 50 Best Slasher

Movies of All Time

Why would I mention slasher flicks in BunzelGram? Do they even qualify as thrillers or crime novels? The answer is a resounding yes, even though they have their own specific sub-genre and devoted fan base. As author Jim Vorel points out in a recent issue of Paste magazine, “What do you think of, when you read the words ‘slasher movie? A killer in a mask, perhaps. A group of horny, not-so-bright teens in a secluded setting, sure. Gallons and gallons of red tempera paint or corn syrup—that’s almost a given. But more than anything, slasher movies are an exploration of intimacy—the intimacy and invasiveness of physical violence in our lives, and ‘the morbid intimacy in the act of killing.’” They also have three very distinct characteristics: 1) Slasher villains are human; 2) Slasher films have a body count, and 3) Home invasion movies are not automatically slasher movies. [Paste is somewhat protective of its lists, so visit the magazine's homepage here, then click on "movies" and scroll down to "lists."

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Jack Connor Mysteries

"Bunzel peels away the layers of mystery like a master of the genre” —T. Jefferson Parker

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"Raw, irreverent, and witty, Jack Connor is someone you want with you in a foxhole or the bloody back roads of South Carolina." —Secretary/Defense William Cohen

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