BunzelGram November 9, 2020 Issue #17 |
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This Week's Thoughts On Mysteries, Thrillers, and True Crime Just a quick note to thank all you readers of BunzelGram for your support and encouraging comments. I couldn’t do this without you, and I’m humbled and thrilled that you find time to read these words every week. I also invite you to check out my website (www.reedbunzel.com), my author’s page on Facebook (Reed Bunzel Books), and my new BookBub page. Much appreciated! —Reed Bunzel |
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Novel Ways That Bookstores Are Surviving Covid-19 According to online publication Vox, more than 20% of all independent bookstores in the U.S. have either closed, or are in danger of closing, due to Covid-19. It’s easy to understand why, but it’s equally amazing that more of them aren’t closer to the precipice of financial collapse than they are, given recent changes to the entire publishing industry. Several factors have come into play, including some fast-thinking on the part of many merchants who quickly transformed in-store browsing to online ordering and curbside pick-up. Others began virtual readings with authors, at the end of which they would sign books that could be purchased by fans. The Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program loans helped many of them make ends meet, and between mid-April and June, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC) distributed $2.7 million to store owners and employees in need. | | |
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If Clothes Make The Man, Threads Made The Spy Signing Sean Connery purely on the strength of his performance in the 1961 BBC adaptation of Anna Karenina, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli—the producers of Dr. No—sought to establish a suave and sophisticated James Bond who could win over a broad international audience. As Guy Trebay wrote in the New York Times last week, “Everything concerning the most stylized spy in history was as meticulously assembled as his Walther PPK. Naturally they started at the tailor. Later spies like Jason Bourne would dress as anonymously as a garage attendant or lawn boy, but Bond was fitted for suits at the Anthony Sinclair establishment on Conduit Street at the northern end of Savile Row…[Director] Terrance Young preferred the military-inspired cut of Sinclair’s single-breasted jackets, with their natural shoulders and gently nipped waists.” Young also favored “cavalry-cut trousers with crisp reverse pleats; cocktail cuffs turned back like the French type, although fastened with buttons rather than links; tight polos and blousy camp shirts seldom worn by anyone outside the leisured classes in that era. Even the crisp pocket handkerchiefs Bond wore neatly squared did not go unobserved by the style-conscious. | | |
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How Twin Peaks Gave Rise To The “Dead Girl” Sub-Genre Over 30 years ago, in the Spring of 1990, ABC’s Twin Peaks debuted with a tale of the mysterious killing of a teenage homecoming queen with a deeply troubled personal life. The series, created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, quickly captivated the nation and—according to reporter Niela Orr—spawned an entire genre that now includes Law & Order: SVU, The Killing, Veronica Mars, True Detective, Top of the Lake, and a host of other programs. True crime “dead girl” shows also have found a large following, and author Alice Bolin, in her book Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, explores the proven theory that intimate partners are overwhelmingly responsible for murdering women, a pattern observed on Dateline and other crime docuseries. “It’s clear we love the Dead Girl," Bolin says. "Enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again, but not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery." | | |
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Critics’ 50 Worst Movies Of All Time Have you ever walked out of a movie? I don’t mean just turning one off if you’re watching at home, but actually paying the price of admission and then realizing it’s not worth your time. “Great movies are few and far between, [while] mediocre movies are a dime a dozen,” journalist Richard Evans wrote last week for Yahoo News. “But truly bad movies—meaning the honestly unwatchable—are special.” To refresh movie fans’ memories, he compiled a list of the 50 absolute worst movies of all time—including some mysteries and thrillers—that he says are “so abysmal, it's hard to believe anyone made it through them at all.” The list comes from Rotten Tomatoes' compilation of worst movies ever, based on their cumulative score (most hover around a 0 rating), as well as how many bad reviews they got. This is not a click-bait list, so I invite you to scroll through and see how many you’ve seen—and maybe walked out on. For the record, I have not wasted a second’s time on any of these. | | |
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TRUE CRIME How An 1843 Attempted Murder Became A #MeToo Cry Of The Times On November 1, 1843, a young woman named Amelia Norman approached her former lover on the steps of Manhattan’s magnificent new Astor House Hotel, had a brief conversation with him, then stabbed him with a folding knife. Norman was a 25-year-old servant, seamstress, and sometime prostitute from New Jersey, while the man she tried (and failed) to kill was thirty-one-year-old Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant originally from Boston. The entire city was mesmerized by the attack and subsequent trial, which came at the same time that several organizations—such as the American Female Moral Reform Society—were working to criminalize seduction. At that time, only a woman’s father or master could sue her seducer on the basis of loss of services to himself, and reformists were seeking to make it possible for a woman to sue on her own behalf. This profile of Norman by CrimeReads’ Julie Miller examines how the case came to be a #MeToo movement of the times. Spoiler alert: Amelia Norman was acquitted. | | |
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John Gilstrap: Buyers Do Judge A Book By Its Cover It’s long been said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. While it’s true that some truly excellent novels and works of nonfiction have been marketed with remarkably ugly wrappers, few of them find broad readership without an extensive—and expensive—marketing campaign. As thriller writer John Gilstrap points out, whoever coined the "cover trope" had to have been an academic with no knowledge of what actually sells books. “People buy books in steps,” he says in his Killzone blog last week. “First, they have to know to look for it. This is the unicorn hair in the mix. Next, there has to be an instant attraction, [and] this is where the cover comes in. A thriller has to look and sound like a thriller. Ditto a romance or horror novel. In that brief second of instant attraction, the artwork makes a connection and causes the reader to move to the next step . . . They read the plot description. In just a few words, the pressure is on to pull the reader into the story. To make them gamble their hard-earned money that the ride you’re going to provide is worth the money. As an author, my job is to entertain my readers by giving them a helluva ride. To get that chance, I need to convince them (trick them?) into picking out my book from among all the others on the shelf.” | | |
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Alfred Hitchcock’s 25 Finest Films Last week’s BunzelGram featured an 80th-birthday tribute to Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s superb adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s psychological thriller. That squib got me to thinking about other movies that indisputably earned Hitchcock the title of “master of suspense,” and in no time I found this list of his 25 best movies. While unseemly tales have raged for decades that he was a cruel genius who treated his actors like cattle, there’s no question that he had a visual flair, a distinct style, and a talent for coaxing magnificent performances out of his actors. As IndieNews points out, Cary Grant especially excelled at playing charismatic men whose motives and true nature were open to interpretation, from Suspicion to Notorious—and one of my favorites, North By Northwest. | | |
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PROMOTION “Reed Bunzel’s Seven-Thirty Thursday is an emotional, tension-filled roller coaster that holds the reader’s attention from the first page. Bunzel’s voice is his own, but with a bit of Pat Conroy and James Lee Burke thrown in. This is a writer that every mystery fan should follow.” —Joseph Badal | | |
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