BunzelGram

July 29, 2024    Issue #187

 

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

This is just a final reminder [aka self-serving marketing ploy] that until the end of Wednesday, July 31, my crime thriller Beyond All Doubt [written under the pen name Hilton Reed] is a $1.99 Kindle Special at Amazon. Supplies are limited, so act now! You can follow the link, here. I thank you, my publisher [Crooked Lane Books] thanks you, and our starving little Pomeranian thanks you for putting food in his dish.

—Reed Bunzel

When, Exactly, Did The Spy

Thriller Come Into Existence?

     Sunglass-wearing secret agents running around with USB drives hidden in their shoes. High-tech geniuses briskly hacking their way into a top-secret database. A smirking evil genius with one finger on the button of a deadly superweapon. The spy thriller seems to be something that belongs strictly to an age of high tech and high stakes but, as Erin Roll recently wrote in Novel Suspects, “Spy thriller stories have been around since long before computers, lasers, and sports cars. The technology may have changed over the centuries, but the desire to find out someone else’s secrets is an ancient one: one that has existed for as long as humanity has been on the planet.”

     So…when did the spy thriller—or at the very least, the spy thriller as known to most Western readers—come into being? “James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, published in 1821, takes place during the Revolutionary War," she says, "and involves the mutual cat-and-mouse chase for spies and informers on either side of the war. Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), while perhaps best known as being a swashbuckling adventure, can also be considered an early example of a spy novel. And in 1894, Anthony Hope published The Prisoner of Zenda, which delved into the themes of royal look-alikes and deadly court intrigues.”

     The beginning of the twentieth century saw the release of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Baroness D’Orzcy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). Two deadly world wars provided lots of material for spy fiction, and the number of authors writing spy fiction skyrocketed, with such authors as Eric Ambler, Manning Coles, and Helen MacInnes. “It’s clear that generations of readers have had an appetite for spy fiction for a few hundred years at least, and the genre has been able to reinvent itself for new generations, new conflicts, and new technology,” Roll concludes.

 
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ABC’s The Streets Of San Francisco

Captured The City’s Heart And Soul

     Lately I’ve been working on the first novel in what I hope will be a crime series set in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Yes, I’m talking about San Francisco, where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars, above the blue and windy sea. While I consider the Bay Area my second home, I still conducted extensive research, and found myself watching old Dirty Harry movies, studying the chase scene in Bullitt and, of course, re-watching clips from the classic Michael Douglas-Karl Malden TV series The Streets of San Francisco.

     To those of us who remember it from its prime time run, the ABC detective program was part of the “murder of the week” series from veteran producer Quinn Martin, who at one time had four top-10 shows on the air. It was filmed almost entirely in San Francisco, with writer and producer John Wilder flying in from Los Angeles to scout locations. Wilder’s strategy included riding for a day or two with a real San Francisco homicide unit, and keeping his eyes up, he recently told SFGATE. “I quickly decided that since we were shooting in San Francisco, a beautiful city, and it's a hill city … elevation matters. First of all, I wanted to capture the city. And when you get up on a rooftop, you see all that city.”

     Coit Tower, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Embarcadero, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Japanese Tea Garden, and Alcatraz are a handful of featured local landmarks. “I would hope that in every episode there is something that makes a person think a little bit about values and actions,” says Wilder. To that end, the DVD edition of the pilot episode teaser calls the show a “series about a city and its people. Brash, bawdy, proud, beautiful, vibrantly alive and sometimes suddenly dead.” FYI, Streets is available to stream free on Pluto TV.

 
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The ’Ndrangheta: The Powerful Crime

Syndicate You’ve Never Heard Of

     When I was writing the first draft my latest Rōnin Phythian thriller, The Fall Of Vivaldi, my research introduced me to a powerful and deadly organized crime syndicate based in southern Italy known as the 

’Ndrangheta. In fact, I mention this insidious group early on in the book by noting, “State police had arrested hundreds of politicians, lawyers, and even a local police chief in an operation that took down a crime syndicate known as ’Ndrangheta, and there were rumors that several not-so-loyal members of the organization had been flipped as confidential informants.”

     Thus, I was captivated when Juliet Grames recently wrote about the notorious gang in Crime Reads, explaining that “Europol labels the ’Ndrangheta among the most threatening OCGs [organized crime groups] at a global level. Thanks to the 2023 maxi-trials, in which over 300 members were arrested, the world is a little more aware of the enormous net of ’Ndrangheta influence—a 'quasi-monopoly' in drug trafficking between Europe and South America. But they’ve been involved in a lot of other enterprises, too: sex trafficking, intimidation, protection rackets, and armed robberies.

     “The ’Ndrangheta first came to international attention with the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III,” Grames says. “Over the forty years following, they emerged from the subtext of Italian organized crime with two mafia wars, acts of terror, and high-profile murders. The Europol report goes on to state that ‘all profits have skillfully been reinvested in sophisticated money laundering techniques.’ One of the most sophisticated of these is the education of ’ndrina children, whose college degrees and white-collar pedigrees have put them in positions of political and economic power to help smooth the bumpy roads to profit for the boys back home.”

 
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Killer Nashville Announces

Nominees For Silver Falchion Award

Last week I noted that my crime novel Indigo Road was a finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for best mystery; here, officially, are those who also are nominated in that and several other categories:

Best Mystery:

• Mouse in the Box, by Lewis Allan

• Indigo Road, by Reed Bunzel

• Beautiful Death, by John Deal

• Secrets Don’t Sink, by Kate B. Jackson

• BeatNikki’s Café, by Renee James

• The Empty Kayak, by Jode Millman

Best Suspense:

• Don’t Close Your Eyes, by Mary Alford

• Deep Fake Double Down, by Debbie Burke

• Deadly Tides, by Mary Keliikoa

• Perspectives, by Matthew Minson

• Dead West, by Linda L. Richards

• The Rule of Thirds, by Jeannee Sacken

Best Thriller:

• Checkout Time, by John Bukowski

• The Followers, by Bradeigh Godfrey

• The Trap, by Catherine Ryan Howard

• Implied Consent, by Keenan Powell

• Breaking Apart, by Wanda Venters and Mary Rae

• Kyd’s Game, by Marc Rosenberg

 
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The Strand Magazine Announces

2023 Critics Award Nominees

The Strand magazine last week announced the nominees for its 2023 Strand Magazine Critics Awards. They are:

Best Mystery Novel:

• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly

• All The Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby

• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper

• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head

• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron

• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman

Best Debut Mystery:

• The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S. Berry

• Adrift, by Lisa Brideau

• Fadeaway Joe, by Hugh Lessig

• Don’t Forget the Girl, by Rebecca McKanna

• The House in the Pines, by Ana Reyes

• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon

Lifetime Achievement Award:

Max Allan Collins and Kathy Reichs

 
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ALSO:

 

What Are The Best Film Noir Movies of All Time?

Film noir is a cinematic style that has captivated audiences with its shadowy visuals, morally ambiguous characters, and cynical narratives. With these parameters in mind, here are some of the best films in the genre ever to hit the silver screen. [No Film School]

 

Gated Community Thrillers That Conceal Dark Secrets

If you’re looking for a summer read that’s concerned with uncovering the incipient rot and corrupt agenda behind the proliferation of so-called Nice Neighborhoods [think Stepford Wives], here are a few that might make you think twice about the conformity and rules of your local HOA. [Crime Reads]

 

The Thursday Murder Club: Everything You Need To Know About The Movie

If you’re a fan of Richard Osman’s mystery novel The Thursday Murder Club, here are all the things you need to know about the upcoming movie from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, coming to Netflix sometime next year. [Deadline]

Coming Tuesday, September 10

The Fall Of Vivaldi

 

On a rainy night across Europe, several seemingly unrelated

incidents unfold in quick order:

• In the City of Light, a beautiful young Parisian newscaster

named Gabrielle Lamoines is brutally murdered in her bed,

just as…

• A disgraced British billionaire takes a dive from the top floor

terrace of a luxury resort on the island of Cyprus, at the same time that…

• Reporter Carter Logan causes the death of a former lieutenant

of the Italian mafia in a narrow street in Rome, not far from…

• The Tuscan farmhouse where Alessandro Bortolotti, the head

of a hard-right neofascist movement, is plotting a deadly

attack on the G20 global summit, while…

• A notorious Russian oligarch named Georgy Sokolov plans to

auction off a kidnapped American teen named Abby Evans in

an online event streamed from his villa on the island of Ibiza.

Each of these random events has one thing in common: Retired assassin Ronin Phythian, once known as “the most dangerous man alive”...

 
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