Bestselling Children’s Author

Norman Juster Passes Away

Norton Juster, the bestselling author known for his young adult novels, died last Monday following complications from a recent stroke. His first and best-known work, The Phantom Tollbooth, won the George C. Stone Centre for Children's Book Award; it subsequently was made into a feature film in 1970, and later a musical. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Juster spent three years in the Navy and then began working as an architect in New York City. He applied for a grant to write a book for kids about cities, after a number of fits and starts, created Tollbooth, with illustrations provided by his then-roommate Jules Feiffer. Not everyone in the publishing world of the 1960s embraced the book, saying the vocabulary was much too difficult for children, and the ideas were beyond them. It also was said that fantasy was bad for children because it disoriented them, and that no child should ever have to confront anything that he or she didn't already know. “My feeling was that there is no such thing as a difficult word,” Juster wrote several years ago in an NPR essay. “There are only words you don't know yet, the kind of liberating words that Milo encounters on his adventure. Today's world of texting and tweeting is quite a different place, but children are still the same as they've always been.”

Is China The Next

Spy Fiction Supervillain?

Time was, U.S. spy fiction had a common enemy, and virtually every political thriller focused on defeating the evil Soviet empire. The Cold War offered so many opportunities for crafty government agents to infiltrate KGB cells, exchange prisoners in Berlin, or serve as double- or triple agents to catch devious Russian moles. When the Wall came down, however, Americans no longer could look to Moscow for all things villainous, and espionage writers had to work all that much harder to create the next diabolical adversary. “Cue the next wave of thriller plot lines, decades of paramilitary-style manhunts, raids, and drone strikes to bring down sleeper cells and desert-dwelling al-Qaeda offshoots,” says Matt Miksa, former FBI analyst-turned writer. “Americans were fully rewired with a new common enemy, complete with a fresh collection of tropey antagonists. [But] I predict a coming onslaught of U.S.-versus-China storylines that will irrefutably transform the nation from an occasional clever opponent to a ubiquitous supervillain in the American collective psyche." Read Miksa's full article in CrimeReads here.

TRUE CON

Anna Sorokin, Fake Heiress

Says Crime Pays, In A Way

You may remember the headlines: A Russian-born twenty-something named Anna Sorokin showed up in New York City in 2013 and quickly achieved fame—and some fortune—posing as a wealthy socialite under the pseudonym Anna Delvey. By staying in expensive hotels and presenting a jet-set lifestyle on Instagram, she managed to trick others into believing her con and picking up her bills. She claimed to be raising funds for an arts foundation, for which she fraudulently sought a $22 million loan to try to get it off the ground, and falsely claimed to have the backing of celebrity artists, such as the late Cristo. Using fake documents, she also convinced a bank to give her a $100,000 overdraft, before the police finally tracked her down. Sorokin was found guilty of eight charge of theft or larceny, and was sentenced to 4-12 years in prison (she was released last month). Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story, although she had to forfeit more than half that amount because of New York state law. "[The media] portrayed me as someone very manipulative, which I don't think I am," she recently told the BBC. “I was never too nice of a person. I was never trying to talk my way into anything. I just told people what I wanted and they gave it to me, or I would move on … In a way, [crime] did pay.”

John Gilstrap Calls ‘Em

As He Sees ‘Em

You may know John Gilstrap as the New York Times bestselling author of over twenty thrillers, including the Jonathan Grave series, which first appeared in 2009. He’s also an excellent editor, and one of my great pleasures and instructional exercises when researching content for BunzelGram is to study his critiques of the first 200-300 words of an aspiring writer’s work-in-progress. Often blistering, always enlightening, his commentaries typically slather the submission with virtual red ink, while offering encouragement and reassurance wherever possible. As a writer I find these assessments: a) highly educational and instructive, b) helpful in refining my own wordiness, c) sometimes as cringeworthy as a train wreck, and d) something I would never, ever subject myself to. I admire the brave souls who submit a page for Gilstrap to review, and hereby present this most recent example from his Killzone blog.

TRUE CRIME

A Grisly Murder Straight Out

Of James Lee Burke Country

Hitmen. Botched assassination plots. Mistaken identity. Sex crimes in Louisiana. It all sounds like the plot of a Dave Robicheaux crime novel, but it’s actually the true story of a grisly murder in the small bayou town of Montegut, just 30 miles southwest of New Orleans.  According to police, in September 2019, a convicted sex offender names Beaux Cormier allegedly raped his niece, and subsequently engaged in witness intimidation before being arrested the following March. In an effort to silence her, he hired Dalvin Wilson and Andrew Eskine to kill her, but they mistakenly executed Cormier’s sister Brittany and Hope Nettleton, a neighbor. Days after the shooting, Cormier—who has a long and extensive criminal history that includes charges of forcible rape, cyberstalking, armed robbery, and animal cruelty—actually served as a pallbearer at his sister’s church service. Last week, a Terrebonne Parish grand jury heard the double murder case, and District Attorney Joseph L. Waitz Jr. said he expects first-degree murder indictments to be handed down against Cormier. “This is a horrible crime; it needs to send a strong message to the community that this will not be tolerated at any level,” he told The Daily Beast. Both Wilson and Eskine have confessed their involvement in the incident.

The 20 Best Film Noir Classics Ever

The phrase film noir was first coined in the 1940s by movie critics to describe the emerging movement of mainly black and white Hollywood films with dark, pessimistic themes and signature motifs, populated with alienated antiheroes and femme fatales, and defined by rain-slicked streets and dark shadows. Borrowing heavily from the hard-boiled but literary detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, film noir attracted some of cinema’s greatest craftsmen, including Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder and John Huston, as well as directors who came to specialize in the genre (think Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, and Otto Preminger). The classic noir era is considered to span from the early 1940s to the end of the 1950s and its parameters were infinite, hence the inclusion of a couple of debatable entries in this list of the 20 greatest from the classic era of film noir, from Double Indemnity to Shadow Of A Doubt.

Skeleton Key—#4 In The Jack Connor Series—Is Now Available

“Sweeps you in with intrigue and authority and never lets you go. I want to go riding with Jack Connor again.” —Michael Connelly

"Raw, irreverent, and witty, Jack Connor is someone you want with you in a foxhole or the bloody back roads of South Carolina." —Former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen

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

“Lights up the Southern sky with taut, exciting action.”

—Michael McGarrity