Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver have bought the rights to The Galton Case, a novel by Ross Macdonald featuring his iconic private investigator Lew Archer, in hopes of launching a new franchise. Galton Case, in which Archer is hired by a wealthy old woman to try and find her long-missing son and heir to her fortune, is actually the eighth book in the series.

Paramount Pictures has bought the film rights to two Tana French novels, the author's 2008 debut In the Woods, about the investigation into the murder of a 12-year-old girl in Dublin, Ireland, and the sequel, The Likeness, with the same detective, Cassie Maddox, investigating the death of a young woman who is a dead ringer for Cassie herself.

Jason Statham has signed to star as a damaged ex-Special Forces soldier trapped in London's criminal underworld who becomes an avenging angel when he is able to assume another identity. The movie is titled Hummingbird and will serve as the directorial debut of screenwriter Steven Knight, who penned the crime thrillers Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises.

Coming soon to a movie screen near you could be an adaptation of Glen Larson's 1981 TV series The Fall Guy, which starred Lee Majors as a stuntman who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. Rumor has it that director Martin Campbell (who helmed the Bond film Casino Royale) is in talks to take on the project.

Colin Farrell is joining Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish-language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, in Niels Arden Oplev's film Dead Man Down. The project, a mob drama about a hitman (Farrell) who falls in love with a "disfigured former beauty" (Rapace) and goes on a killing spree, was written by J.H. Wyman, of Fox TV's Fringe.

Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (the writers behind the Saw movies) are adapting for film their thriller Black Light, just published by Mulholland Books. The novel is about a private eye whose gifts make him suited to solve supernatural cases, at the same time he's obsessed with contacting the parents who were killed while he was a child by using a special "black light.

Alona Tal and Natalie Martinez have signed on to play two female leads in the noir thriller Broken City, to be directed by Allen Hughes (From Hell). They join actor Mark Wahlberg, who stars as a former police officer turned private investigator who "finds himself up to his neck in scandal while tailing the mayor's wife because she's suspected of infidelity." Also signed to the cast are actors Russell Crowe and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

TV

Author Patricia Cornwell will appear as herself on an episode of Criminal Minds in January. She filmed the show this past week and tweeted her experiences.

Here's the first trailer for the debut of TNT's new Mystery Movie Night, starting off with a production of Scott Turow's Innocent starring Bill Pullman as a judge charged with the murder of his wife 20 years after he was cleared in the death of his mistress.

TV Line is running a 64-bracket tournament of "Ultimate Male Law Enforcement Crushes." Follow the bracket here and join in the voting as new pairings pop up, e.g. this one.

PODCASTS/RADIO

John Powers talked with NPR's "Fresh Air" program, giving his reasons why Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy is the greatest spy story ever told.