Henry Patterson—AKA Jack Higgins—

Passes Away In Jersey at Age 92

Henry Patterson, the best-selling author of The Eagle Has Landed (under the pseudonym Jack Higgins), passed away last week at his home on the island of Jersey at age 92. He wrote his first novel in 1959 while still working as a teacher, earning a £75 advance for Sad Wind from the Sea. Writing under several names he gradually built a fan base until the mid-‘70s, when he came up with the idea for a World War II thriller about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill in World War Two. “Everyone I dealt with in publishing thought it was a bad idea,” Patterson reminisced in a 1987 interview with UPI, recalling that one British publishing executive told him, “Who on earth is going to be interested in a bunch of Germans kidnapping Winston Churchill? You’ve got no heroes. The public will never go for it.” The public did go for it, however, and The Eagle Has Landed eventually sold 50 million copies worldwide. It also was turned into a popular 1976 movie starring Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, and Michael Caine. HarperCollins chief executive Charlie Redmayne described Patterson as a "classic thriller writer: instinctive, tough, relentless," adding his novels "were, and remain, absolutely unputdownable." And Jonathan Lloyd, Patterson's literary agent, noted, "I had the privilege of being at Collins Publishers when we received the manuscript of The Eagle Has Landed. We all knew, with a rare certainty, that we would be publishing an instant classic.”

Gillian Flynn’s Anti-Heroines, And

The Darker Side Of Feminism

Is the Gillian Flynn novel Gone Girl feminist or misogynist? At the time of publication, the bestselling novel unleashed numerous discussions around this particular subject, and book clubs throughout the country still debate the subject today. To recap the plot: Amy, a woman falsifies rape and frames her husband for her murder because he fails to live up to her expectations and his potential, then traps him with a pregnancy. Is this the stereotype of the scorned woman revenge, or is it proof that the story is misogynist for painting a woman with such a dark brush? These are the questions posed by author Laure Van Rensburg, who in a recent Crime Reads article suggests that the same things can be asked about the protagonists of two previous Flynn novels. “Camille from Sharp Objects [is an] alcoholic reporter who cannot cope with her relationship with her mother, who sleeps with a source, and Libby, from Dark Places, sells family memorabilia and her own tragedy to true crime fetishists. Are they a misogynistic portrayal of women, too? Maybe, the answer to those questions depends if you look at Flynn’s dark heroines and their behaviors through a male or female lens…Flynn knowingly or unknowingly gave us, whether we wanted or not, the dark side of feminism: If women can be anything they want, then they can be terrible people too, selfish, unbalanced, spiteful, and be front and centered about it.”

How Actor Zach Horwitz Soaked Hollywood Investors For $227 Million

We all remember Bernie Madoff, who lured thousands of unwitting investors into believing they could get a solid return of about 10 percent a year, every year, if they were lucky enough to get him to take their money. Over time, as his Ponzi scheme grew increasingly bold, he attracted an estimated $65 billion in investments—enough to eventually earn him a sentence of 150 years in a federal prison. As Air Mail’s William D. Cohan wrote last week, promising 10 percent clearly wasn’t cool enough for Hollywood conman Zachary Joseph Horwitz, who promised a full slate of investors—many of them under-35 millennials—returns of anywhere from 25 to 45 percent, often in just six months, by investing in movie-distribution deals. By the time his scheme fell apart a year ago, he had bilked dozens of these investors—many of whom were his chums from Indiana University—out of around $227 million. On April 6, 2021 FBI agents arrested him at his $5.7 million Beverlywood home, while the SEC  charged him with securities fraud and sought an immediate freeze of his assets and disgorgement of “ill-gotten gains.” As prosecutors said in a court affidavit, Horwitz “branded himself as an industry player, who leveraged his relationships with online streaming platforms HBO and Netflix to sell them foreign film distribution rights at a steady premium … But, as his victims came to learn, [Horwitz] was not a successful businessman or Hollywood insider. He just played one in real life.”

UNSOLVED

Lost In The Ashes: The Mystery Of

The Vanished Sodder Children

The citizens of Fayetteville, West Virginia awoke to tragedy on Christmas morning in 1945. A fire had consumed the home of residents George and Jennie Sodder, leaving five of the couple’s 10 children dead. That's what the police determined, but were they? Before the sun set on that tragic December 25, nagging questions arose about the fire, questions that persist to this day—placing the Sodder children at the center of one of American history’s most infamous unsolved cases. Here are the facts: sometime late on Christmas Eve the Sodder house caught fire, with both parents and nine of their ten children inside. Jennie Sodder woke in the night to find her husband George's office completely engulfed in flames, at which point she roused her husband and the two rushed to wake the children. Though four of the Sodder children and their parents managed to escape their home, five children were assumed to have perished in the fire. Oddly, no remains of those five were ever found and, while the official cause of the fire was deemed to be faulty wiring, some have actually argued that the Sodder family was the target of arson led by the Sicilian Mafia. George Sodder, an Italian immigrant, had been vocal in his opposition to dictator Benito Mussolini, leading a traveling insurance salesman to tell Sodder that his home would go “up in smoke,” and that “your children are going to be destroyed” because of his comments.

If You Like John Grisham, You’ll

Love These Legal Thrillers

More than thirty years after publishing his first legal thriller, A Time To Kill, author John Grisham has penned enough New York Times bestsellers to place him in the rarefied stratosphere of such authors as Stephen King and James Patterson. Twenty-eight novels, in fact, and as he’s honed his craft over the decades, he’s shown quite a bit of literary dexterity and range of motion. Known primarily for such novels as The Firm, The Pelican Brief (my personal favorite), and The Chamber, Grisham has sold more than 300 million books worldwide. Additionally, nine of them have actually been adapted for the screen, some much more successful at the box office than others. [See full list here.] As Bella Wright says in a recent Best Thrillers article, “The characters in Grisham novels typically represent a noble hero with a singular, unwavering focus on delivering justice. The attorneys in his books are often sleuths, going far beyond the normal call of duty to ensure a just outcome. Innocent characters in danger are often treated with a high degree of empathy, making it nearly impossible not to root for them.” With all this in mind, she developed a comprehensive list of authors that John Grisham fans are likely to enjoy.

Now that my fifth Jack Connor crime novel, Indigo Road, is in the hands of my publisher, I invite you to catch up on the other books in the series (see link, below). Meanwhile, here’s what some notable bestselling authors have said about them:

“Palmetto Blood is a winner. It sweeps you in with intrigue and authority and never lets you go. I want to go riding with Jack Connor again.” —Michael Connelly

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

“Reed Bunzel lights up the Southern sky with taut, exciting action and a memorable cast of characters led by Jack Connor, a protagonist sure to become a major favorite of crime fiction fans.” —Michael McGarrity

"Tightly plotted and skillfully written, Carolina Heat makes clear that Reed Bunzel has created a winning series." —Alafair Burke