BunzelGram May 3, 2021 Issue #41 This Week's Thoughts On Mysteries, Thrillers, and All Things Crime |
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More than 45 years have passed since three college friends and I joined in the search for a four-year-old boy named Kurt Newton, who disappeared from his family’s campsite near the Canadian border in northern Maine. We joined hundreds of other volunteers who marched shoulder-to-shoulder through heavily wooded terrain, checked under rocks, spied into holes, and retraced our steps over and over. It’s an experience that has haunted me to this day, and a more detailed version of the story appears below. Kurt would be turning 50 next month, and there’s every reason to believe he’s still alive. —Reed Bunzel |
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MWA Announces Edgar Award Winners The Mystery Writers of America last week announced the winners of its 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television published or produced in 2020. Due to the pandemic, this year’s event was a live presentation on Zoom and can be found here. Here are some of this year’s winners: Best Novel: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Random House – Random House) Best First Novel: Please See Us, by Caitlin Mullen (Simon & Schuster – Gallery Books) Best Paperback: When No One Is Watching, by Alyssa Cole (HarperCollins Publishers - William Morrow) Best Fact Crime: Death in Mud Lick, by Eric Eyre (Simon & Schuster - Scribner) Best Critical/Biographical: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, by Christina Lane (Chicago Review Press) Best Short Story: "Dust, Ash, Flight," Addis Ababa Noir, by Maaza Mengiste (Akashic Books) Best Juvenile: Premeditated Myrtle, by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Workman Publishing - Algonquin Young Readers) Best Young Adult: The Companion, by Katie Alender (Penguin Young Readers – G.P. Putnam’s Sons BFYR) A full list of the award winners can be found here. | | |
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Jason Matthews, Author Of The Red Sparrow Thrillers, Dies Jason Matthews, an award-winning spy novelist who drew upon his long career in espionage in crafting his popular “Red Sparrow” thrillers, died April 28 at age 69. Matthews worked 33 years in the CIA’s highly secretive Operations Directorate before retiring a decade ago and following the path of such authors as John le Carre and Charles McCarry in fictionalizing their time in intelligence. Red Sparrow, published in 2013, was a neo-Cold War tale that introduced readers to CIA man Nathaniel Nash and to the former Russian ballerina Dominika Egorova, recruited by her uncle as a “sparrow,” trained in the art of “sexpionage - sexual entrapment, carnal black-mail, and moral compromise.” Matthews wrote two more “Sparrow” novels, Palace of Treason and The Kremlin’s Candidate, which came out in 2018. “How a bestselling, critically-acclaimed spy novelist sprung from the head of a quiet CIA operations officer appeared to be a great mystery,” Colin Harrison, Matthews’ editor at Scribner, said in a statement. “But when you learned Jason Matthews spoke six languages, had read widely for decades, was an astute observer of human behavior, and was adept at composing long classified narratives, it all made sense. His books were not only sophisticated masterpieces of plot and spy craft, but investigations into human nature, especially desire in all its forms.” | | |
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Gang Members Killed Her Daughter; She Found Them On MySpace On Feb. 24, 2006, Belinda’s daughter Crystal was gunned down in Riverside, California, by assailants in a white Ford Expedition. With little trust in the police, and with the formal investigation going nowhere, Belinda took matters into her own hands by initiating her own hunt for daughter’s killer. Fortunately, she had the answers right at her fingertips—courtesy of the then-popular social media site MySpace. A new Netflix documentary titled Why Did You Kill Me? details how Belinda enlisted the services of her niece Jaimie to create a fake online account that she could use to covertly meet members of the local gang Varrio 5150, which Belinda’s son Nick had heard was responsible for the homicide. The ruse worked, and it culminated with a conversation in which Belinda—posing as a girl named “Angel”—questions an online paramour if he loves her. When he replies in the affirmative, she follows up by asking, "Why did you kill me?"—thus giving the show its title. As The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager points out, “The original MySpace may be dead and gone, but its legacy lives on with Facebook, Twitter, TikTok…and it’s that dynamic that Belinda exploited to expert sleuthing effect. She may not have known it in 2006, but by using social media to entice, to con, and to encourage candidness from others, she was ahead of her time.” | | |
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MWA Publishes How to Write a Mystery The Mystery Writers of America last week launched a guidebook designed to help authors navigate the ever-shifting publishing landscape, from pacing, plotting, the business side of publishing, to the current demand for diversity and inclusivity across all genres. How To Write A Mystery, edited by Lee Child with Laurie King, features essays by a new generation of bestselling experts on various elements of the craft, and shorter pieces of crowd-sourced wisdom from the MWA membership. The topics covered can be categorized as follows: - Before Writing (rules; genres; setting; character; research; etc.)
- While Writing (outlining; the plot; dialogue; mood; etc.)
- After Writing (agents; editors; self-pub; etc.)
- Other than Novels (short stories; true crime; etc.)
- Other Considerations (diverse characters; legal questions; criticism)
Authors who contributed to the book include Jeffery Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, T. Jefferson Parker, Louise Penny, and Charlaine Harris, responding to the overall theme of “What piece of writing advice do you wish you’d had at the beginning of your career?” | | |
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UNSOLVED COLD CASE Whatever Happened To Kurt Newton? On September 1, 1975, four-year-old Kurt Newton went missing from his parents' campsite near Chain of Ponds, Maine, six miles from the Canadian border. He was with his parents, his older sister, and three other families, all from their hometown of Manchester, Maine. Kurt was riding his Big Wheel near the family's campsite when he disappeared between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m.; that same morning the tricycle was found at a dump site eight-tenths of a mile from the campsite. The largest search and rescue mission in the state's history was launched, and several college friends and I drove up from Bowdoin to pitch in. We walked shoulder-to-shoulder through miles of deep woods for hours on end, but the boy was never found. Kurt's parents speculated that someone abducted him and took him across the Canadian border into Quebec. French-language missing-child posters were distributed in Quebec, and when he turned six his parents mailed posters with his picture to every school district in the United States. There were many reported sightings of the child in the United States and Canada, but none could be substantiated. Kurt has never been found and is presumed to have been abducted. His case remains unsolved. | | |
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Producer/Writer Michael Brandman: The 10 Best Movies Adapted From Crime Novels Crime writer and producer Michael Brandman has produced and/or adapted for the screen the works of numerous masters of their craft, including Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, Louis L’Amour, Jack Schaefer, and Arthur Miller—prompting him to ask himself which films turned out to be at least as good as their source material. In a recent Crime Reads article he says, “It occurred to me that it might be fun to undertake a survey of which films I considered to be the finest adaptations of the most cherished mysteries—a survey that would allow me to read some pretty heady novels, and also see some amazing motion pictures. That survey resulted in my top ten book-to-film adaptations, listed chronologically. Whether or not you agree with my findings, there’s no denying the absolute pleasure in settling in to either read the books or watch the movies… or both.” | | |
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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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