Media Murder for Tuesday

 

Robert De Niro and Mel Gibson are teaming up for the first time in a new movie, in which Gibson plays a detective who discovers his daughter led a secret life after she is murdered on his doorstep and De Niro plays the operative sent to clean up the evidence. Titled The Edge of Darkness, it will be be directed by Casino Royale filmmaker Martin Campbell and is due for release in 2009.

Seattle's KUOW-FM featured J.A. Jance talking about her three mystery series with J.P. Beaumont, Joanna Brady, and Ali Reynolds, including her latest novel, Damage Control, the 13th Brady installment—a series she started writing when her publisher offered the chance to write a second series. (Would that all writers could get that lucky...)

The Yorkshire Post interviewed Zoe Sharp about her protagonist Charlie Fox, a bodyguard with special forces background, in which she discusses women in crime fiction, the origins of Fox and just how far she would push her.

NPR's "Talk of the Nation" broadcast a program on "How to Write a Great Mystery" with guests Tana French author of In The Woods and The Likeness, and Louis Bayard, author of Mr. Timothy andThe Pale Blue Eye. French says that although she wanted to write a mystery, she didn't think she could write an entire book, but she figured she could probably write one little section, then another little section, and then the next thing she knew, she had the first chapter. The reason she get kept going was because she wanted to "discover how it turned out." What it turned out to be was a good idea, as her first effort was last year's Edgar Award for best first novel. Since she comes from an acting background, she says she tends to focus on character. Bayard, on the other hand, adds he didn't set out to write mystery, but he realized along the way that mysteries are great for setting change in motion, which fit his unusual idea of making an adult Tiny Tim (from Dickens) set in a more noir environment.

CBS is developing a new action drama hour-long project with CSI vet Josh Berman and non-fiction crime writer Katherine Ramsland, Daily Variety reported, a project titled The CRU which is based on a character from the James Patterson novel, Step on a Crack.

Cold Case star Kathryn Morris, via her Hotplate Productions, has sold her first series pilot which is based on mystery writer Harry Hunsicker's novel Crosshairs.

And in an unusual source for a film project, Paramount has purchased a New York Times article, "Mystery on Fifth Avenue," based on a couple of parents in an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that they redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.