BunzelGram

November 8, 2021    Issue #65

 

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

 

A lot of publishers print their books in Asia, which means that thousands—probably millions—of copies are sitting in containers on board ships waiting to be unloaded on Long Beach (and elsewhere). If you’re thinking of giving a book during the holidays, you’d better start shopping now…using these guides to help you pick that perfect present: New crime novels coming this month [from Crime Reads], eight novels that mix spec fiction and noir [Novel Suspects], and 22 notable new books [from Book Browse]. And, as always, try to buy local whenever you can!

—Reed Bunzel

Bonnie and Clyde Changed The

Way American Movies Are Made

It’s been almost 55 years since Bonnie and Clyde—the lethally disruptive and provocative gangster saga directed by Arthur Penn and starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty—was released in theaters. As Owen Glieberman wrote in a retrospective article in Variety, the picture actually stumbled out of the gate, and Warner Bros. had to reboot its opening. Once that happened, however, “Bonnie and Clyde dunked the cinema in a baptism of style and blood and glamour and adulthood. It was a revolution both holy and unholy. From that moment on, American films would reach higher than they ever had — and lower. They would turn into a more towering art form and, in a number of cases, a more sensational and debased one. They would evolve into shoot-for-the-skies art, grindhouse pulp, and everything in between.” The film exploited “the magnetism of Beatty and Dunaway; the ’30s desolation set to a jaunty bluegrass vibe; the bursts of violence and quick stinging death; the burnished colors; the screwball neurotic players (Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, Estelle Parsons, Gene Wilder); and the fantastic doomed recklessness of it all. Nowhere does that come across more powerfully than in the film’s dance-of-death climax, where Bonnie and Clyde, ambushed by a Texas Ranger and his men, are riddled with bullets, their bodies jerking around like rag dolls. It’s the sequence that changed movies, because it blasted away any last vestiges of the Hays Code, opening the floodgates to a fearless movie culture in which anything could be shown.”

 
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Ben And Stella Dickson:

The Time Clock Bandits

Bonnie and Clyde weren't the only couple robbing banks and capturing hearts in the 1930s, but they grabbed most of the headlines of the time. In fact, few people have ever heard of Bennie and Stella Mae Dickson, two young outlaws who in late August 1938 walked into the Corn Exchange Bank in Elkton, South Dakota with guns drawn. They were faced with having to wait thirty minutes for the vault’s time lock to release and eventually—without a shot being fired—they robbed the bank of just over twenty-one hundred dollars. Driving to his family’s farm, across the state line to Tyler, Minnesota, Bennie hid the money on the property. Author Dietrich Kalteis, who novelized their exploits in the book Under An Outlaw Moon, says in a recent Crime Reads article that they lived a relatively normal, quiet life until the money dwindled. Bennie taught his 16-year-old bride how to shoot, and they then entered the Northwest Security National Bank in Brookings, just a few miles from their first job. Again, they found themselves having to wait out the vault’s time lock, this time for an hour and a half while the bank staff dealt with customers as if nothing was wrong. They made off with $17,000 in cash and about $16,000 in securities. The media dubbed them ‘the time lock bandits,’ and Bennie and Stella were bumped to the top of the FBI’s most wanted list, becoming the focus of a massive manhunt—wanted dead or alive.

 
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Beer Can DNA Leads To Arrest

In 1996 C-Store Murder Case

Florida officials last week announced a breakthrough arrest in the 1996 cold case murder of a man who was brutally stabbed 73 times, all because of DNA found on several beer cans. As reported by NBC News, Terence Paquette, 31, was found murdered on Feb. 3, 1996, in the bathroom of the Lil' Champ convenience store on Clarcona Ocoee Road in Orlando, where he worked. His throat had been cut and cash was missing from the store, in a scene that Orange County Sheriff John Mina described as “gruesome.” The case remained unsolved for 25 years until 2021, when officials enlisted the help of a genetic genealogy specialist with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They used a DNA sample from a bloodstain on a freezer handle in the store, built a family tree from the sample, and narrowed the search for the suspect down to three brothers. Further investigation determined that Kenneth Robert Stough Jr., now 54, previously worked at the store and lived across the street from it in 1996. Armed with a judge’s order, deputies began watching the suspect last August, and saw him toss a bag containing beer cans into a dumpster. Analysts determined DNA on one of the cans matched the blood on the beverage handle door from 1996. With the new evidence, authorities arrested Stough on Nov. 2. A judge ordered him held without bond.

 
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“A Dark And Stormy Night”

Is Rooted In English Literature…

Not Just The Weather

The August 23 issue of BunzelGram mentions the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, named (somewhat in whimsy) for the author of what is widely considered the most scorned opening line in fiction: “It was a dark and stormy night.” When he put pen to paper, it’s likely Edward Bulwer-Lytton had no idea just how infamous the phrase would become, even though it already was a cliché when he used it. As April Snelling wrote recently in Mental Floss, versions of the line had appeared in English literature for at least a couple hundred years before publication of his novel Paul Clifford; Edward Herbert’s poem “To His Mistress for Her True Picture,” written sometime around 1631, contains the line “Our life is but a dark and stormy night.” Ann Radcliffe used variations of the phrase at least twice, in her 1790 gothic novel A Sicilian Romance (“a very dark and stormy night”) and in 1791’s The Romance of the Forest (“The night was dark and tempestuous”). Edward Anderson’s poem “The Sailor,” which predates Paul Clifford by at least 30 years, includes the phrase “This cheers us in the dark and stormy night.” Victorian writers such as Bulwer-Lytton were famously preoccupied with England’s soggy weather, so it’s not surprising that he’d seize on it to open his crime novel…the first sentence of which actually reads, “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

 
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7 Thanksgiving Horror Movies,

Ranked According To IMDb

Hollywood isn’t known for producing thrillers that deal with Thanksgiving. Offering prayers of gratitude for a bountiful harvest, feasting on turkey and stuffing, and binge-watching football is what the holiday is all about, right? Love, hearth, home, family. Not even the presence of a razor-sharp carving knife and a tabled filled with unruly relatives who disagree on just about everything can interfere with the conventions and customs that have arisen from the Pilgrims’ first harvest. When it comes to Thanksgiving horror movies, pickings are slim...save for this list of seven Thanksgiving thrillers—presented by Screen Rant and ranked by IMDB’s audience.

 
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ALSO:

 

Meet The Season's Hottest Debut Mystery Authors

To help readers sleuth out a new read, Goodreads asked the authors of seven of this season's buzziest mystery and thriller debuts to tell you about their new books and share their best recommendations for the perfect whodunit. [Goodreads]

 

Mystery And Thriller Books Coming This November

If you’re looking for chilling mystery suspense novels to get your heart pulsing and keep you on the edge of your seat this November, here are a few new mystery books coming out this month you won’t want to miss. [Novel Suspects]

 

How Columbo, One Of TV's Most Iconic Detectives, Got His Start

Columbo got a trial run on “Alfred Hitchcock” – and so did his first quarry. [Crime Reads]

PREVIEW

Greenwich Mean Time

By Reed Bunzel

On assignment to photograph the Baltoro glacier in Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains, Monica Cross literally stumbles into the grisly wreckage of a long-lost airplane crash. She unwittingly becomes privy to a dangerous secret that a sinister dark web outfit known as the Greenwich Global Group will do anything to prevent from ever seeing the light of day. Meanwhile, in the plains of the Tanzanian Serengeti, the retired assassin who crashed the plane and killed all those on board learns of the discovery of the wreckage. Long thought dead, Rōnin Phythian possesses a unique and mystical skillset that for years made him the most lethal man alive, and his reawakening conscience (also long thought to be dead) convinces him that he alone has put Monica Cross in danger—and is the only force that can save her. [Note: Cover image is watermarked and subject to change]

Scheduled for publication in 2022.

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