Follett’s Eye of the Needle Is A Sublime

And Deliberate WWII Character Study

One of the most intelligent and believable World War II spy thrillers is Ken Follett’s The Eye Of The Needle. Published in 1978, the award-winning bestseller follows a Prussian-born German spy known as “The Needle”— due to his signature use of a stiletto when killing his victims—who is tasked with uncovering the details about the Allies’ plans for their expected D-Day invasion of Europe. If they can land a force on mainland Europe and take the Nazis by surprise, they will gain the upper hand in a war that has ravaged the world for years. “The Needle" is Hitler’s prize undercover agent, who learns that one scheme involves nothing more than an elaborate decoy of ships and planes intended to mask the real Normandy attack. In the process his cover is blown, and he flees—only to stumble into an unforeseen romance that might be his ultimate undoing. This is one of those cases where both the book and the 1981 film [starring Donald Sutherland] are marvelous, primarily due to the story's methodically pacing and contemplative character study. As reviewer Roger Ebert said at the time, ”The film builds at a deliberate pace, giving us time to meditate on the character of the Needle, and to ponder his very few, enigmatic references to his own behavior.”

Daytime TV’s The Edge Of Night

Started Out As Daytime Perry Mason

Last week’s BunzelGram featured a story about the daytime TV phenomenon Dark Shadows, but I had actually started out writing a piece about another soap opera that often focused on noir-ish tales of murder and madness. When The Edge of Night premiered on CBS in April 1956, it was supposed to be a daytime drama based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous defense attorney, Perry Mason. However, Gardner didn’t want his protagonist to be featured in a five-day-a-week daytime TV drama, nor did he like the idea of Mason being saddled with a romantic partner. As Keith Roysdon recently wrote in Crime Reads, Irving Vendig—the show’s creator—retooled the hour-long program around attorney Mike Karr, initially played by actor John Larkin, who also had played Mason on the radio series. The show’s focus was always on crime, criminals, cops, attorneys, and prosecutors, and often “borrowed” story themes from Perry Mason while layering them with traditional soap elements of love, marriage, jealousy, infidelity, and divorce. Edge has been off the air since 1984 but, before its cliffhanger finale, the show ran for nearly 30 years on two different networks.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities Comes To Netflix

Over the last two decades, writer-director Guillermo del Toro has mapped out a territory in the popular imagination that is uniquely his own, astonishing audiences with Cronos, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth, and a host of other films and creative endeavors. In 2013 his book titled Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions was published by Harper Design, in which he revealed the inspirations behind his signature artistic motifs, sharing the contents of his personal notebooks, collections, and other obsessions. The result is a startling, intimate glimpse into the life and mind of one of the world's most creative visionaries. Next month the anthology comes to Netflix in an eight-episode series the Oscar-winning filmmaker says “showcase[s] the realities existing outside of our normal world: whether they come from outer space, the underground, behind the closed door, or simply in our minds. [There are] different delights; some of which are savory, some of which are sweet. You get a surprise from each of the bites.”

TRUE CRIME

Was Tommy Gilbert Legally Insane

When He Shot His Rich Father?

Thomas Gilbert Jr. grew up in extreme privilege. enjoying an elite private education at the Buckley and Deerfield schools before following his father and grandfather to Princeton, where he majored in economics. In early January 2015, Tommy—30 at the time—arrived unannounced at his parents’ Upper East Side home, whereupon he sent his mother out to get a sandwich. While she was gone, he shot his father point-blank in the head, then staged the murder as a suicide. As John Glatt wrote last week in Air Mail, the sensational patricide made lurid front-page tabloid headlines for days, bewildering New York society, which had embraced the Gilbert family for decades. Tommy was instantly branded as a spoiled rich kid, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It soon emerged, however, that the young Gilbert was also being investigated by the Southampton police for burning his estranged best friend Peter Smith Jr.’s historic 17th-century family house, in Sagaponack, to the ground several months earlier, after Peter had taken out a protection order against him. After several court-ordered mental health evaluations, Gilbert went on trial, where he actively sabotaged his own defense and ignored the advice of his lead attorney. The judge was convinced that Tommy was merely putting on an act and treated him like a naughty schoolboy, and a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder and two weapons charges, rejecting an insanity defense. Others weren’t so sure…

What Writers And Viewers Can Learn

From Rick’s "Anti-Hero" In Casablanca

Don’t bother arguing with me: you’ll lose. Casablanca, without question, is the best-written American film ever made. Not only because it has more entries in the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 movie lines of all time, but because it is a gem of tight construction, succinct plot, and memorable characters. Author James Scott Bell recently wrote a blog post about the film, wherein he offers great insight to every thriller writer, and to every moviegoer, as well. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is an American expatriate running a café-saloon-gambling hall in French Morocco during World War II. As such, he is a classic anti-hero who stands for himself and cares only about the ragtag staff in his café, especially his one friend, Sam the piano player (Dooley Wilson). He has chosen to exile himself in Casablanca after being betrayed—he thinks—by Ilsa Lund, the love of his life. Thus, when Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) walks into his café with her husband, the resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), he—along with everyone else—is forced to take sides, throwing everything in his world off kilter. Blaine, who begins the film by declaring that he “sticks his neck out for nobody,” now has to decide whether to reclaim the woman he loves, or sacrifice all—including his life—for a greater cause.

Coming January 10, 2023:

Greenwich Mean Time

“A globe-spanning, mind-spinning thriller that will delight fans of Jason Bourne. Rōnin Phythian, an assassin with extraordinary powers and a code of his own, deserves a sequel. Make that sequels.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire

When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time.