Reading Time Increased 21%

In Last Six Months Of 2020

For the past year, publishers have been saying that unit book sales increased last year because people were reading more, a theory borne out by the latest report from the American Time Use Survey. Fact is, the amount of time spent reading by people 15 years and older increased by 21% in the May-December period in 2020 over the same period in 2019, and reading of all kinds grew from 28 minutes per day in that timeframe in 2019 to 34 minutes in the comparable period last year. The biggest increase in daily reading was seen among 20- to 34-year-olds, and in readers over 65. People older than 75 spent by far the most time reading last year (and every year), reading an average of 95 minutes per day in the 2020 May-December period. Men increased their daily reading habit by 30%, to an average of 30 minutes per day, while the time women spent reading rose 18%, to 38 minutes daily. Additionally, people who could be considered upper middle class—defined as those in the 50th to 75th percentile of weekly earnings—had the biggest increase in reading, jumping 131%, to 37 minutes daily, the longest time spent reading among all groups. Daily reading fell 27% for those in the lowest 25th percentile. Time spent reading remained flat, at 20 minutes, for the wealthiest Americans.

Agatha Award Winners Announced

The winners of this year's Agatha Awards for mystery writing were announced last week during a virtual convention of mystery writers and readers convened by the organizers of the Malice Domestic conference. The winners were:

Best Children's/YA Mystery: Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, by Richard Narvaez

Best Non-Fiction: Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock, by Christina Lane

Best Short Story: "Dear Emily Etiquette," by Barb Goffman (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Sep/Oct)

Best First Novel: A Murder at the Mena House, by Erica Ruth Neubauer

Best Historical Novel: The Last Mrs. Summers, by Rhys Bowen

Best Contemporary Novel: All the Devils Are Here, by Louise Penny

For those who are new to The Agatha Awards, they celebrate the traditional mystery, best typified by the works of Agatha Christie. The genre is loosely defined as mysteries that contain no explicit sex, excessive gore, or gratuitous violence, and would not be classified as "hard-boiled."

2020 Hammett Award Winner

The International Association of Crime Writers-North America has announced the 2020 Hammett Prize Winner, presented for “literary excellence in crime writing. This year’s winner is When These Mountains Burn by David Joy, described by publisher Penguin/Random House as a “fierce and tender tale of a father, an addict, a lawman, and the explosive events that come to unite them. When his addict son gets in deep with his dealer, it takes everything Raymond Mathis has to bail him out of trouble one last time. Frustrated by the slow pace and limitations of the law, Raymond decides to take matters into his own hands. [Meanwhile], Denny Rattler has spent years chasing his next high. He supports his habit through careful theft, following strict rules that keep him under the radar and out of jail. But when faced with opportunities too easy to resist, Denny makes two choices that change everything. [At the same time]. the DEA has been chasing the drug supply in the mountains to no avail, when a one-word lead sets one agent on a path to crack the case wide open. As chance brings together these men from different sides of a relentless epidemic, each may come to find that his opportunity for redemption lies with the others.” I’ve already ordered my copy.

Despite 2nd Weekly Slump, Print Book

Sales Should Grow This Year

For the second week in a row, unit sales of print books were down 3.9% year over year compared to the same week in 2020, according to Publishers Weekly. Following two good quarters, the decline has many folks in the publishing industry worrying that the strong annual growth predicted earlier this may have been too optimistic, and Kristen McLean—an analyst for NPD Bookscan—last week said sales will continue to slow through the third and fourth quarters of 2021. Following what she called an historic first quarter, the year-to-date growth rate has lost about one point per week, as growth was up 29% vs. 2020 at the close of the first quarter, and ahead 18% at the end of the second quarter. Sales currently appear to be gliding steadily back to a more normal performance, suggesting that print unit sales will finish 2021 with an 8% gain over last year. If sales return closer to 2019 levels—which means a decline in sales in the last months of the year compared to 2020—sales would still finish the year ahead up 2% over 2020. The fastest growth rate, at 10% for the year, will be possible only if higher infection rates result in more lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, she said. “Publishing performed well with people at home,” McLean said in explaining why lockdowns may be good for the industry. She noted that she believes the 10% increase to be the least likely scenario, predicting that unit sales will finish the year with gains between 2% and 8%.

La Piscine: French Noir

On the Côte d’Azur

Recently I came across a French film I had heard of during cinema class in college, but had never had the opportunity to see. Still haven’t, but renewed interest in Jacques Deray’s erotic summer thriller La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) has me searching through all the usual streaming services so I can watch it. Described by The New York Times as “pretty, rich people behaving badly,” the movie is set in a villa overlooking Saint Tropez, and stars Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, and 23-year-old Jane Birkin—all of whom engage in what Air Mail’s Michael Hainey calls “the tale of a tidy little ménage à trois that becomes a messy (and mortal) ménage à quatre. Released in 1969, with a score by Michel Legrand, it’s long been considered a masterpiece of French noir. This movie is like the heat of an August holiday in the South of France—it will linger beneath your skin for years afterward.” And Jacques Deray, writing for Criterion, observes that the film “unleashes a gathering wave of sexual tension, jealousy, and sudden violence….La Piscine dives deep to reveal sinister undercurrents roiling beneath its seductive surfaces.”

Joan Harrison: Early Noir’s

Mistress of Suspense

When Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood in 1939, he introduced the town to Joan Harrison, a female protégé who would become a crucial figure in noir. Her controversial presence on studio lots caused quite a stir, as she was one of only three female  producers in a male-dominated business (Virginia Van Upp and Harriet Parsons were the others). And, given Hitchcock’s propensity for chasing just about anything in a skirt, industry naysayers “worked themselves into a lather describing how this ‘feminine fireball’ challenged the status quo while ‘wearing an evening gown with the same eye-filling éclat as Lana Turner.’” The bottom line, according to Novel Suspects’ Eddie Muller, was that “Joan Harrison was essential to development of the film noir movement. Her sensibility was attuned to psychological thrillers and she crafted them with a keen story sense and a strong guiding hand, every bit the equal of her counterparts Mark Hellinger, Hal Wallis, and Jerry Wald. Over the entirety of her professional life, Harrison rarely strayed from the shadows—her career arc tracing, precisely, the trajectory of noir in the culture’s bloodstream.”

8 True Crime Podcasts To Binge

Before The End Of Summer

Just six weeks to go before the official end of summer, and much less than that before Labor Day and the kids go back to school. If you’ve found yourself with some spare time to lounge by the pool, sunbathe on the back deck, or drive to a distant family reunion, true crime podcasts are a magnificent way to pass the time. To that end, and Crime Reads’ Lizzy Steiner has compiled a list of eight can’t-miss chilling, binge-able adventures. From Chameleon (“that squishy space where the psyche and cyberspace meet”) to High Rollers (“a wild tale of strippers, threesomes, and gunrunners”) to Transportista (“pulls back the curtain on the underground world of drug trafficking and cartels”), all of these binge-worthy offerings invite you to “fall down a long, winding rabbit-hole full of thoughtful, complex storytelling.”

     “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