My fifth [and probably final] Jack Connor mystery, Indigo Road, is now officially a Silver Falchion finalist for Best Mystery. I can’t describe how thrilled I am that this novel has been nominated for such a prestigious award, and I want to thank everyone along the way who has made this possible. Specifically, Jennifer McCord and Phil Garrett, my wonderful colleagues at Epicenter Press; bestselling author S.A. Cosby, for writing such a stellar cover blurb; my magnificent agent, Kimberley Cameron, for working her magic; Clay Stafford and all the judges and staff at Killer Nashville; and, of course, my loving and supporting wife, Diana, for giving me the space and confidence for doing what I do. Whether I win or not, it’s comforting to know I have such marvelous people in my corner. Thank you!

—Reed Bunzel

The Irishman Contains “The Most

Gangster Scene” Of Any Scorsese Film

     It would be inaccurate to say that Martin Scorsese has exclusively worked in the crime genre for his entire career. [Think Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and The Last Temptation of Christ.]  However, the iconic director has been associated with gangster cinema ever since his 1973 classic Mean Streets became a sensation, and kicked off his working relationship with Robert De Niro. The 21st century saw him working on many prestigious biopics, but Scorsese made an epic return to the gangster genre with his 2019 masterpiece The Irishman.

     Described by Collider’s Liam Gaughan as Scorsese’s “most gangster movie,” this film—based on Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses—tells the epic tale of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), an Irish-American veteran of World War II who becomes a truck driver during the postwar era. “After forming a friendship with Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), Sheeran becomes a loyal member of his crime family, and performs several hits on sensitive targets,” Gaughan says. “One of the only close relationships Sheeran has is with the American labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino, who gives one of the best performances of his career.”

     At one point, Bufalino insists that Hoffa needs to be executed. The scene in which Bufalino explains the assassination to Sheeran is, Gaughan continues, “the most gangster scene of Scorsese's entire filmography. Sheeran had seemingly worked his way to a position of authority within the mafia in order to protect those he cared about, and to take ownership of his decisions. However, Russell indicates that he still has no agency; at the end of the day, Sheeran is another hired gun, and his friendship with Hoffa won’t save him.”

Some Trivia About Pulp Fiction

You May Not Have Known

     With a cast led by John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, and many others, Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 crime film Pulp Fiction merges four parallel stories—told in non-chronological order—into an iconic cinematic favorite of critics and fans alike. While more than a few folks know almost every scene line-by-line, journalist Raquel Lekic recently pointed out in an article in First For Women, that ere are a few facts about the movie you might not have known about.

1. Samuel L. Jackson got creative: When Jules (Jackson's character) reads Ezekiel 25:17 before a particularly brutal scene, he isn't actually reading the verse from the Bible. Instead, the passage came from the 1976 film The Bodyguard.

2. A record number of swear words: The movie contains 265 instances in which the F-word is used, out of the 431 curse words within the entire film.

3. Movie magic: The scene in which Uma Thurman's character of Mia is stabbed with a syringe actually came to life in post-production. The needle was first placed and then removed by Travolta, and with a little bit of modern movie technology, the scene was put in reverse.

4. Showing off his moves: The famed dance scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman in the film was totally improvised by Travolta himself.

5. Among the actresses who were considered for the role of Uma Thurman’s Mia were Isabella Rossellini, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, and  Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

6. Uma Thurman wasn't too sure she wanted to be in the film, telling Tarantino that some aspects of the subject matter concerned her.

Meet Mrs. Mandlebaum: The Matriarch

Of Mid-19th Century New York Crime

     Few people today have ever heard of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, reputedly the matriarch of organized crime in New York’s mid-19th century underworld. Functioning as a criminal fence to many of the city’s street gangs, she handled between $1–5 million in stolen goods between 1862 and 1884, and also was instrumental in financing and organizing numerous burglaries and other criminal operations throughout the post-American Civil War era. Teamed up with with George Leonidas Leslie, she was involved in the 1869 Ocean National Bank robbery and the 1878 Manhattan Savings Institution robbery.

     As author Margalit Fox recently noted in Crime Reads, “Working from her humble Manhattan storefront, Mandlebaum presided over a multi-million-dollar criminal operation that centered on stolen luxury goods and later diversified into bank robbery. Conceived in the mid-1800s—long before the accepted starting date for organized crime in the United States—her empire extended across the country and beyond. In 1884, the New-York Times called her ‘the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New-York.’” Her network of thieves and resale agents was reported to extend throughout the United States, into Mexico, and as far away as Europe.

     At her death, in 1894, she had amassed a personal fortune of between half a million dollars to one million, the equivalent of $14-28 million today. As the New York police chief George Washington Walling said at the time, “The ramifications of her business net were so widespread, her ingenuity as an assistant to criminals so nearly approached genius, that if a silk robbery occurred in St. Louis, and the criminals were known as ‘belonging to “Marm Baum,”’ she always had the first choice of the ‘swag.’”

New Streaming Series Follows The Life

And Crimes Of Vegas Double Murderer

     A new limited series available from Investigation and Discovery depicts the life and crimes of Thomas Randolph, the man twice convicted for the murders of his wife and another man in Las Vegas more than 15 years ago. As reported by News 3 Las Vegas, Judge Tierra Jones earlier this year handed down a sentence of 60 years to life, ruling that his prison terms for each charge—two counts of murder with a deadly weapon and a count of conspiracy to commit murder—will run consecutively. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that Randolph, now 69, likely will never see the outside of prison again.

     Randolph initially was charged with the 2008 murders of his wife, Sharon, and Michael Miller, a man he allegedly hired to kill Sharon. Prosecutors argued that he enlisted his friend to kill Sharon so he could collect her life insurance. A jury convicted him in 2017, and he was sentenced to death, but the Nevada Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on an appeal. The justices said prosecutors should not have used evidence during his trial that Randolph was also accused of killing his second wife in Utah in 1986.

     The high court remanded Randolph to a new trial in Clark County District Court, and he was convicted for a second time last year. "At the end of the day, 24 jurors have decided this case, and I'm here to impose sentence based on what the jury in 2023 decided," Judge Jones told the court after the verdict was read.

     Watch Investigation and Discovery’s limited series, The Black Widow: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph, on Max.

British Library Crime Classics: The U.K.’s Golden Age Of Detective Fiction

     Launched a decade ago under the guidance of U.K. crime writing expert Martin Edwards, British Library Crime Classics is a series of lovingly re-published mystery stories and novels that involve country house stranglings, poisonous goings on in picturesque villages, gunshots at the seaside, and bloody revenge in first-class railway carriages. As Murder-Mayhem’s Harry Pearson recently wrote, “This is British crime at its most well-mannered. There’s nothing here to put the characters off their scones and clotted cream, which is a pity, since they may well be laced with arsenic.”

     Example: if you’re a railroad buff, don’t miss Martin Edwards’ compilation of crime classics titled Blood On The Tracks. As trains feature heavily in Golden Age mysteries, it should be no surprise that there are some genuinely memorable yarns here—including R Austin Freeman’s superb Dr John Thorndyke tale, “The Case of Oscar Brodski” and Baroness Orczy’s characteristically smart “The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway” featuring her armchair sleuth, The Old Man in the Corner.

     Then there’s George Bellairs’ The Body in the Dumb River, one of 50 mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard detective Inspector Thomas Littlejohn. As Pearson notes, “The intelligent and compassionate Littlejohn is called in to investigate the death of Jim Teasdale, an apparently blameless and ordinary Yorkshireman whose stabbed body has inexplicably turned up in a river in Cambridgeshire. To solve the crime Littlejohn must piece together the details of Teasdale’s humdrum life, to uncover both motive and criminal.”

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”...