Media Murder

 

RADIO/PODCASTS

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Agency, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, recently returned to the Beeb and will be broadcast during this month. Fortunately for latecomers, they also have the latest episode archived on the web site.

Investigation Discovery's David Lohr was a recent guest on True Crimes, a radio show hosted by Edgar Award winning true crime writer Burl Barer.  The archives can be found via on that same link.

TV

Author Henning Mankell provides insights into his creation Inspector Wallander, who will soon come to life on the TV screen as played by Kenneth Branagh. Although Branagh doesn't necessarily fit the image one would expect of Wallander, who is "astonishingly miserable, fairly ugly and so monumentally unhealthy, he should have his own dedicated obesity czar," the show's executive producer, Andy Harries, hopes the show could become a new Prime Suspect — “Maybe three every two years,” he says.

Gawker Online takes a guilty pleasure in enjoying the new TV series The Mentalist, saying rather grandiosly that it has "helped revive the mystery genre."  (And here I was thinking the mystery genre was doing rather well—on TV or otherwise).

NBC is reshuffling its schedule to create a Wednesday lineup into "wall-to-wall satisfying mysteries," with Knight Rider at 8pm, followed by Life at 9pm—the new series featuring Detective Charlie Crews, who returns to the force after serving time in prison for a crime he didn't commit—and Law and Order at 10. (I guess NBC has taken a tip from the Mentalist and already knows you'll find these shows "satisfying." Satisfying—Isn't that damning with faint praise? But I digress...)

THEATER

Broadway recently saw the premiere of Anthony Horowitz's acclaimed thriller, Mindgame, starring Keith Carradine and directed by Ken Russell. The plot involves a writer of pulp crime novels who gets an interview with a notorious serial killer, believing he has snared the coup of his career, only to discover while at the asylum that nothing can be trusted.

Mystery Melange

 

Marcus Sakey offered his Top 5 Favorite Movies on the Chicago Collective Blog, reprinted in the Chicago Trib.

Michael Connelly is fresh off his appearance as part of the Thurber House "Evenings With Authors" series. He paused long enough for a Q&A with the Columbus Dispatch, saying "I don't have a complaint about how the crime novel is viewed. It's largely responsible for keeping book publishing in business. I think it garners professional respect from the business angle. I think more and more, . . . it's harder and harder to write a story or a book about American society that doesn't have crime in it."

Another Chicago paper, the Sun-Times, profiled Lori Andrews, a law professor who has authored 13 books, most of them non-fiction works about biotechnology and genetics. But she's also written three mysteries, all of which feature her high-tech sleuth, geneticist Alexandra Blake. she said, "When it comes to [biotechnology] policy, people's eyes glaze over. They don't think they are entitled to an opinion," said Andrews, who also is director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "When they can see the technology set in a mystery novel and see how greed and policy and emotion play out, people really get enraged."

Here are a couple of crime writing news tidbits from East Tennessee, since I hail from them thar parts. Criminal Brief wrote about Louis Willis, who retired after 42 years of government service and then earned his master’s degree in English literature from the University of Tennessee. A voracious reader and fan of various genres, including crime fiction, he’s writing a nonfiction book which will be a critical analysis of black mystery writers "before shuffling off to the Great Library" in the Sky. And the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame just inducted four new writers, including David Hunter, nominated for an Edgar for his first mystery novel, The Jigsaw Man.

In 2009, the U.S. Postal Service will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe and will unveil a new Poe stamp January 16 in Richmond, Vorginia. Look for a large spate of other Poe celebrations coming up next year.

The Independent included a pair of reviews recently of Japanese noir writer Natsuo Kirino, one reviewing her book Grotesque and the other Real World (both books in translation), adding that "Western stereotypes of Japanese femininity take a battering in the fiction of Natsuo Kirino – a crime writer who has placed some decidedly non-submissive female protagonists at the heart of her noirish thrillers."

How many crime fiction authors do you hear who schedule a prison as a stop on their book tour? Surprisingly few (prisoners tend not to have a lot of money to buy books, after all). But thriller writer and former SAS sergeant Chris Ryan is doing just that at Risley prison in the UK as part of the 2008 National Year of Reading.