Media Murder for Monday

Monday means it's time for a look at recent crime drama news from stage and screen:

MOVIES

Millennium Films is teaming up with Gerard Butler for a third installment of the thriller series that began with Olympus Has Fallen, followed by London Has Fallen. To be titled Angel Has Fallen, the new film will see Butler reprise his role as Secret Service agent Mike Banning, only this time it's not the President who is the target, it's Banning himself.

Millennium Films has also snagged John Malkovich and Antonio Banderas to star in Unchained, a Reservoir Dogs-style thriller. They'll play career criminals who trap themselves in a warehouse with the law closing in and threats from an attack dog named DeNiro that leaves them fighting for their lives.

The very busy Millennium is also planning another Rambo reboot, this time minus Sylvester Stallone. Titled Rambo: New Blood (with Brooks McLaren penning the script and Ariel Vromen directing), the new reboot would not see Stallone return as the action hero like he did in Millennium’s 2008 outing, but would see a younger actor inhabit the role. The company is looking at Rambo as a character akin to James Bond. 

Tom Hardy has signed to play the iconic American gangster Al Capone in the film Fonzo. The project centers on Capone in the final days of his life after being taken down by Eliot Ness and spending a decade in jail where dementia sets in - and his past becomes his present as harrowing memories of his violent and brutal life melt into his waking existence.

Casey Affleck is set to star in the vigilante thriller Villain, to be directed by Mikael Marcimain from a script he wrote. Set in a city overrun with crime. Affleck will play a man that loses everything after a brutal home invasion leaves his family dead and two bullets lodged in his head. He develops a unique power in the wake of his trauma — an ability to see into people’s pasts, presents, and futures — and goes on a mission of revenge to find the men who killed his family and clean up the city. But as his vigilante acts become more frequent and violent, the city’s new hero threatens to become its most prolific villain.

Kate Bosworth is attached to star in a film based on the Greg King book Sharon Tate And The Manson Murders, working with Bosworth's filmmaker-husband Michael Polish. The duo has worked together several times before in such films as 90 Minutes In Heaven and the psychological thriller Amnesiac. 

Good Time, a crime drama starring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, has been picked up for distribution. The film follows a bank robber’s race to evade the police dragnet that threatens to send him behind bars.

Well Go USA has acquired rights in North America and some other territories to Buster’s Mal Heart, a psychological thriller starring Mr. Robot Emmy winner Rami Malek. The story follows a stable family man turned mountain hermit (Malek) who squats in empty vacation homes while on the run from the authorities. The film will hit theaters in early 2017, followed by a digital and home video release later in the year.  

Olga Kurylenko has been tapped as the title character in the crime thriller Jane Millen, from writer/director Cynthia Mort. The project centers on Jane, who focuses on her job as a police detective to distract her from her family life spinning out of control. But her investigation into a murder case takes her down a rabbit hole, as affairs, jealousies and dark secrets emerge that threaten to consume her own private life.

Dan Krauss’ war documentary-turned-feature The Kill Team has landed Nat Wolff and Alexander Skarsgard to star. The story follows Private Adam Winfield, a soldier in Afghanistan who attempted to blow the whistle on members of his platoon who carry out a murderous scheme in the desolate wasteland of Southern Afghanistan. Wolff will play Winfield while Skarsgard has been cast as the fraternal and imposing Sergeant Deeks.

Paramount has snagged film rights to Ted Bell’s action espionage series of books based on British MI6 agent Sir Alexander Hawke, said to be in the same vein as James Bond and the Bourne Identity. Bell's books include nine bestsellers, and the hope is that the studio can spin them into a franchise movie series.

The third installment in the Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law has been having some trouble getting off the ground, but that may be changing. Warner Bros has assembled a writers room to "shape the script and story," with a team including Guardians of the Galaxy's Nicole Perlman, Baywatch's Justin Malen, Rogue One's Gary Whitta, Tomb Raider's Geneva Dworet-Robertson and Snowden's Kieran Fitzgerald. When we last left Sherlock Holmes in A Game of Shadows, he had just fallen into Reichenbach Falls with Professor James Moriarty, as that was the only way the detective could successfully eliminate his nemesis. However, in the movie's final minutes, moviegoers learned that Mr. Holmes had survived, though he wasn't ready to directly reveal to his best friend/partner, Dr. John Watson, that he was still alive.  

John Wick co-director David Leitch is in talks to direct Deadpool 2 after the previous director, Tim Miller, left over creative difference with star Ryan Reynolds. Insiders say Reynolds was given more creative control on the sequel and that he clashed with Miller over casting, among other issues.

The official trailer is out for Focus Features' Nocturnal Animals, written and directed by Tom Ford (A Single Man) and based on the novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. The noirish thriller stars Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal as exes with a complicated past who become involved in a symbolic revenge tale.

A first look promotional photo was released for Going Places that introduces John Turturro?
??s Jesus Quintana in the Big Lebowski spin-off film. It revolves around a three smalltime crooks and is being billed as an irreverent, sexually charged comedy.

TELEVISION

Sherlock Season 4 has finally been given its premiere date: January 1, 2017 in both the U.S. and the UK. The new episode, called "The Six Thatchers," may be based on the Conan Doyle story  "The Six Napoleons," a story about Sherlock investigating six busts of Napoleon. Fans should be prepared to enjoy the next season, since Benedict Cumberbatch hinted that it may be a long time before the next installment because the next series will be "so dramatic fans might require a break from the show afterwards."

HBO has acquired US and Canadian rights to Cormoran Strike, BBC One’s limited series based on J.K. Rowling’s bestselling crime novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. British actor Tom Burke (War and Peace, The Musketeers) stars as the war veteran turned private eye in the series, which will air as three separate event series.

One of best-selling author Nelson DeMille’s most popular protagonists, John Corey, is headed to the small screen. ABC has given a script commitment plus penalty to John Corey, a drama series project based on DeMille’s book series about the brash, quick-witted, and cocky NYPD homicide detective as he returns to the force after being shot.  

John Glenn (Allegiance) has teamed with Fast & Furious’ Justin Lin for The Evidence Room, a crime drama procedural that has landed at NBC with a put pilot commitment. The project centers on the investigations tied to objects in the Evidence Room, a secure area in a police station where evidence and seized property is stored. The items in the room will serve as engine for the stories to tackle a wide array of crimes and criminals.

ABC has trimmed the 13-episode first season of its new drama Notorious down to 10 episodes. The move is usually a sign that a show is effectively canceled, though the network has vowed to air all 10 episodes, and it could still be renewed for a second season. The drama stars Piper Perabo and Daniel Sunjata in the "provocative look at the unique, sexy and dangerous interplay of criminal law and the media."

Stana Katic is returning to television. The former Castle star is in final negotiations to play the lead in Absentia, a 10-episode straight-to-series crime thriller scheduled or a 2017 premiere on AXN’s worldwide channels, with Sony Pictures Television handling distribution in the U.S. Absentia centers on an FBI agent (Katic) an FBI agent who disappears without a trace while hunting one of Boston's most notorious serial killers. She's declared dead, but six years later, she's found in a cabin, barely alive and with no memory of the missing years. Returning home to learn her husband has remarried and her son is being raised by another woman, she soon finds herself implicated in a new series of murders.  

The online video channel Machinima has announced it is actively developing a reboot of the 1980s action series Knight Rider with Justin Lin's online brand YOMYOMF and NBCUniversal Brand Development. The original program starred David Hasselhoff the crimefighting Michael Knight, who was paired with the one-of-a-kind (at the time) artificially intelligent Pontiac Trans Am named KITT, voiced by William Daniels.

CBS has put in development two new crime dramas: Under Suspicion, based on the bestselling crime thriller book series by Mary Higgins Clark featuring a justice-seeking investigative journalism team; and Sentinels, a drama from the team behind Scorpion that centers on the world’s worst news team who are actually involved with a secret government program.

Fox has given a script commitment to Token White Male, an hourlong dramedy procedural about a fun-loving, no-filter, low-rent lawyer who, against all odds, becomes the first male associate at a groundbreaking all-female law firm.

Fox has added a pair of actors to its upcoming limited series 24: Legacy, with Raphael Acloque and Themo Melikidze set for recurring roles. Acloque will play Jadalla "Jad" bin-Khalid, a bookish scholar who rejected his father’s politics while at university, but after his father’s death, Jad embraces his jihadist campaign. Melikidze is set as Khasan Dubayev, the intimidating brother of high school student Amira (Kathryn Prescott) who is intense and worried as he works with his sister in connection with their plans.

Fox also announced the long-awaited premiere date for Season 12 of Bones, now set for Tuesday, January 3. The final season is expected to provide some closure to the Booth and Brennan storyline, as well as for the other main characters who work at the Jeffersonian. The network has hinted that fans will experience a wedding, follow an epic serial killer storyline, go undercover in a lumberjack competition and see Booth and Brennan's marriage get put to the test.

The upcoming The Good Wife sequel series has added CSI veteran Paul Guilfoyle and Tony-winning actress Bernadette Peters in recurring roles. The Good Wife spinoff series will pick up one year after the events of The Good Wife series finale, when an enormous financial scam has destroyed the reputation of a young lawyer, Maia (Rose Leslie), while simultaneously wiping out her mentor Diane Lockhart’s (Christine Baranski) savings. Forced out of Lockhart & Lee, they join Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo) at one of Chicago’s pre-eminent law firms.

Fargo has added Jim Gaffigan as a series regular for season three of the FX series. The setting is rumored to take place in 2010 wit
h Gaffigan taking on the role of Donny Mashman, a police deputy who works alongside Gloria Burgle (The Leftovers' Carrie Coon). The cast also includes Ewan McGregor playing the dual roles of brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a crafty and alluring recent parolee.

White Collar alum Tim DeKay has been tapped for a recurring role on the upcoming third installment of John Ridley’s ABC anthology drama series American Crime, playing a relative to Cherry Jones’ character. Season 3 will explore labor issues, economic divides and individual rights in North Carolina.  

The first trailer was released for HBO's Big Little Lies with its all-star cast of Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Alexander Skarsgård,  Adam Scott, Zoë Kravitz, Kathryn Newton, Shailene Woodley, and James Tupper. The limited series is the brainchild of David E. Kelley and is based on Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel that centers on three mothers (Witherspoon, Kidman, Dern) of first graders whose apparently perfect lives unravel to the point of murder.

PODCASTS/RADIO/VIDEO

Michigan Public Radio spoke with author Dennis Lehane about crime novels, race in America, and researching history.

NPR's "alt.latino" program explored the world of Latino noir, featuring crime fiction writer Carmen Amato.

CBS This Morning welcomed John Grisham to talk about his latest legal thriller, The Whistler.

THEATER

Walnut Creek, California's Center Repertory Company is presenting Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Ken Ludwig, based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, through November 19. The play, which premiered last year at Washington D.C., Arena Stage, is a comedic take on Doyle's book, in which the intrepid investigators "try to escape a dizzying web of clues, silly accents, disguises and deceit as five actors deftly portray more than 40 characters."

GAMES

The sci-fi crime story Invisible was originally envisioned as a graphic novel but has turned into a 360-degree virtual reality project. It's a scripted tale of sci-fi corporate treachery involving the wealthy and ruthless Ashland family, whose grip on the global economy has been clinched by certain family members' ability to make themselves invisible and wage mischief with this tactical advantage.

Coffee Table Crime

 

Before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9-11 attacks, New York City was the epicenter of other violent acts. In 1920, Wall Street was targeted by a bomb that killed 39 and injured hundreds; in 1940, a bomb killed two NYPD officers at the World's Fair in Queens; in that same year, George "Mad Bomber" Metesky embarked on a 16-year reign of terror that kept New Yorkers on edge until Metesky was finally caught; and in 1975, the bombing of Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan killed four and injured 63, an act later discovered to be the handiwork of a Puerto Rican nationalist group.
 
Fans of true crime and photojournalism, as well as urban historians, crime buffs, and even crime fiction authors will appreciate a reference book hot off the presses from Hachette that tells those tales and more. Robert Mladinich, an investigative journalist and retired NYPD detective who was named Cop of the Year in the South Bronx in 1985, Bernard J. Whalen, a long-serving lieutenant in the NYPD, and crime reporter Philip Messing have teamed up to cull through over 175 years of true crimes in the NYPD's police blotter. The result is Undisclosed Files of the Police: Cases from the Archives of the NYPD from 1831 to the Present, which looks through some of the most horrific and shocking moments in crime but also turns a lens on the evolution of one of the oldest and largest police departments in the U.S.
 
From atrocities that occurred before the establishment of New York's police force in 1845 through the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 to the present day, this visual history is an insider's look at more than 80 real-life crimes that shocked the nation: arson, gangland murders, robberies, serial killers, bombings, and kidnappings. Some of the highlighted cases include:

• Architect Stanford White's fatal shooting at Madison Square Garden over his deflowering of a teenage chorus girl.
• The anarchist bombing of Wall Street in 1920, which killed 39 people and injured hundreds more with flying shrapnel.
• The 1928 hit at the Park Sheraton Hotel on mobster Arnold Rothstein, who died refusing to name his shooter.
• Kitty Genovese's 1964 senseless stabbing, famously witnessed by dozen of bystanders who did not intervene.
• Son of Sam, a serial killer who eluded police for months while terrorizing the city, was finally apprehended through a simple parking ticket.
• The Great Taxicab Robbery of 1912 that was solved with the help of Isabella Goodwin, who became the country's first female detective.

The 320-page chronological tour in coffee table format prevents each case in a succinct but nonetheless riveting manner that offers a step-by-step overview of the events, from the discovery of the crime to how the police went about trying to solve them (and sometimes not succeeding). The narrative offers up a personal take on the otherwise horrific material by letting readers know what happened to the accused after the trial and later in life.
 
The project is well-timed to take advantage of the recent true-crime trend in popular culture, particularly with television documentaries such as those on Investigation Discovery and the award-winning Serial and Making of a Murderer series. In addition to essays and behind-the-scenes analyses of investigations, there are more than 500 photographs rarely seen outside the archives along with mugshots, courtroom sketches, newspaper clippings, and even paintings from the earliest cases that predated modern documentary techniques.
 
For more information, visit the book's Facebook page.

Mystery Melange

The winner of the inaugural $25,000 MysteriousPress.com Award was the action-packed heist novel by Mike Cooper, The Downside. Mysterious Press President and CEO Otto Penzler added, "We got some incredible manuscripts but in the end, Mike’s story was everything we were looking for: Fast, exciting, and well-written."

The Irish Book Awards’ Crime Fiction Shortlist was announced yesterday. The list includes: Distress Signals by Catherine Ryan Howard; Little Bones by Sam Blake; Lying In Wait by Liz Nugent; The Constant Soldier by William Ryan; The Drowning Child by Alex Barclay, and The Trespasser by Tana French. (HT to Declan Burke.)

The recipients of the first-ever Whistler Independent Book Awards recognizing self-published Canadian authors were announced at the 15th annual Whistler Writers Festival Oct. 13–16. Ontario writer Gerry Fostaty won the crime-fiction category for Stage Business.

Cecilia Ekbäck has won the 2016 Historical Writers' Association's Goldsboro Debut Crown for her Nordic noir thriller, Wolf Winter, which tells the story of a vicious murder that threatens to tear apart an isolated community during the coldest of winters.

Coming up on November 5 in Paris, the American University of Paris is sponsoring a Noire is the New Noir one-day conference which will tackle the topic of the serie noire and the Franco-American detective tradition.

The deadline is approaching for submissions to the Minotaur Books/Malice Domestic Best First competition. If you are an unpublished author and have a cozy mystery manuscript lying around, send it along by November 15 for a chance to be published by Minotaur. Previous winners have included Donna Andrews and Julia Spencer-Fleming.

Janet Rudolph has a listing of Halloween-themed crime fiction on her Mystery Fanfare blog so you can spare the candy and get both tricks and treats from some scary reads.

Did you know that Charles Dickens' pet bird inspired Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"?

In another bit of macabre historical literary lore, the gun that the poet Verlaine used to shoot fellow poet Rimbaud is up for auction at Christies and may fetch up to €60,000 (about $65,000).

Author Ian Rankin (the Inspector Rebus series) chose his list of the best British thriller movies for The Telegraph.

Also in the spirit of Halloween, Electric Literature asked several authors—including James Hannaham, Lynne Tillman, and Teddy Wayne—to share their favorite scary stories.

Bookriot chimed in with "5 Halloween-Appropriate Books to Read If You Don’t Like Horror."

David Morell (the Rambo series, spy novels, and various horror works) joined Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! to discuss what he has learned in his more than four decades as an author.

Milwaukee Public Television is hosting Murder at the Mansion in January with mystery writer Jack Pachuta and the Milwaukee Entertainment Group creating an interactive murder mystery set in 1936 England after the death of King George V. Ask the suspects questions, explore the nooks and crannies of the mansion, then work alone or in a group and solve this nefarious crime.

James Lasdun profiled the "Genius of a Mid-Century Classic  How Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley Rises from Genre to Myth."

Author Tana French selected "6 mind-blowing mystery books" for The Week.

The Guardian's Ben Child scared up a list of "the most horrifying movie monsters of all time," from Alien to Nosferatu.

The ghoulishly delightful new issue of Yellow Mama is out, with plenty of "escape, poetry and some of the most macabre horror stories, ever."

The Mystery Lovers' Kitchen's Cleo Coyle will teach you how to make a Candy Apple Cocktail for Halloween.

Which slasher film killer are you? Take the quiz over at Criminal Element to find out.

This week's devilishly good crime poem at the 5-2 is "Cardboard Justice"  by Karlo Silverio Sevilla

In the Q&A roundup, BK Stephens discussed her young adult mystery novel, Fighting Chance, with Amy M. Reade; and Rob Hart sat down with the Mystery People to chat about his Ash McKenna series.

Media Murder for Monday

Here's the latest in crime drama news to start off your week:

MOVIES

Daniel Radcliffe has landed the starring role in Beast of Burden. The film focuses on Sean Haggerty (Radcliffe), a character who’s used to lying and keeping secrets from everyone, including the feds, the cartel, and even his wife, Julie. But now he’s ready to get out of this illegal business — after he finishes carrying 55 pounds of cocaine across the border in a small aircraft.

Billy Flynn, Chris Mulkey, and D.B. Sweeney have boarded D.O.A. Blood River, the thriller written and helmed by Stephen C. Sepher. Inspired by Rudolph Mate’s 1950 noir thriller, the film follows pharmaceutical salesman Sam Collins as he travels from Los Angeles to a small town in Louisiana to sign the business deal of his career with Dr. Alexander, a doctor specializing in Vaccine Research. However, the outcome is not at all what he expected

Josh Gad has joined the all-star cast of Fox's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh. The story centers on a murder onboard the famous train and introduces Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh), who must solve the case while being surrounded by duplicitous passengers. Gad will play Hector McQueen, a skittish man who drinks too much and works as an assistant/translator to Depp's character. 

Ronnie Gene Blevins has been cast in Death Wish, the remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson film. Bruce Willis will take on the starring role about a father seeking justice after his family is torn apart by a violent act. Vincent D’Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Dean Norris, Mike Epps, Kimberly Elise and Camilla Morrone are set to co-star. 

TELEVISION

Lee Child is on a roll with his broadcast projects. Just as Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is heading to theaters, NBC has given a script commitment to Last Hope, a drama from Child, former CSI executive producer Andrew Dettmann, EuropaCorp Television, and Universal TV. With a script penned by Dettmann, the project centers on Hope Wesson, a highly trained but disenfranchised former military police investigator leading a team of fallen heroes who get justice for people with nowhere else to turn.

CBS is developing Stingray, a thriller drama from James Patterson, David Marshall Grant (Code Black) and Timberman-Beverly Productions (Elementary), based on Patterson’s upcoming book (which he co-wrote with Duane Swierczynski). Patterson also sold a cop drama based on his best-selling book series NYPD Red (co-written by Marshall Karp) to ABC with writer Michael Horowitz (Burn Notice). Stingray is described as a fun, adrenaline-fueled drama in the tradition of Mission: Impossible and Ocean’s Eleven that centers on a group of ex-con artists who work for the FBI, while NYPD Red centers on the eponymous special division of NYPD tasked with investigating Manhattan’s highest profile crimes.

NBC has put in development the hacker drama Sneakers from former The Mentalist executive producer Tom Szentgyorgyi, that's based on the 1992 movie starring Robert Redford. The storyline centers on computer hacker Martin, who heads a group of specialists that test the security of various San Francisco companies. Martin is approached by two National Security Agency officers who ask him to steal a newly invented decoder, but Martin and his team soon discover the black box can crack any encryption code, posing a huge threat if it lands in the wrong hands. 

CBS has canceled dramas BrainDead and American Gothic after one season each. The Washington, D.C.-set political horror satire BrainDead marked the first post-The Good Wife series for showrunners Robert and Michelle King and starred Elizabeth Winstead, Danny Pino, Tony Shalhoub and Aaron Tveit. American Gothic starred Juliet Rylance and Justin Chatwin in a family drama with a serialized whodunnit twist. The cancellations came the same day CBS handed out full-season orders to three of its new fall shows including crime dramas Bull, starring Michael Weatherly, and MacGyver, starring Lucas Till.

How to Get Away with Murder star Viola Davis is attached to produce thriller drama Head Games for ABC. The series, which is being adapted by Chuck Rose based on his book of the same name, follows Park Avenue psychiatrist Dr. Jonah Hoffman, who is approached by the government to come work for them as a spy, feeding them crucial intel on one of his patients, a potential national security threat. As Jonah enters a duplicitous world filled with danger and paranoia, he begins to realize the only way to save the world is trust himself and take action.

Shades of Blue star Jennifer Lopez is reteaming with NBC for a new series, C.R.I.S.P.R., with a script order. The series is a procedural with a futuristic twist and has Bates Motel’s Anthony Cipriano attached to the script. The title stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" and is set five minutes into the future, focusing on the crime of DNA hacking.

Tony Scott's 1998 film Enemy of the State is getting a sequel series penned by Morgan Davis Foehl for Jerry Bruckheimer and ABC Studios. The drama is set two decades after the film that starred Will Smith and Gene Hackman and follows an idealistic female attorney who must partner with a hawkish FBI agent to stop a global conspiracy that threatens to expose dark secrets and personal mysteries.
 
Fox has put in development a legal drama from producer Neal Baer and writer Robert Specland. The untitled project is set in the San Francisco Bay Area and centers on two attorneys from opposite upbringings facing off on opposite sides of the courtroom, and a young woman between them — an ex-con who joins the law firm in the hopes of putting her troubled past behind her. It explores the many shades of grey in the legal system and keeps you guess
ing, down to the last minute of each episode, letting the viewer be the judge before the verdict is revealed.

In yet another legal drama pickup, CBS has given a script commitment plus penalty to Incognito, an action-driven legal procedural from writer Rashad Raisani and producers Will Packer and Adam Rifkin. Written by Raisani, Incognito is based on the Swedish series Inkognito and follows a crusading U.S. Attorney who leads a skilled team of misfits into life and death situations to find critical evidence the prosecution needs to even the playing field with the corrupt and the mighty.

The third season of American Crime Story will examine the shocking July 1997 assassination of legendary designer Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by sociopath and serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who eight days later killed himself in a house boat as the Miami Dade police force moved in to capture him. The episodes will be based on the book Vulgar Favors by Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, with Tom Rob Smith (London Spy) set to write the first two and multiple subsequent episodes.

SundanceTV has ordered the four-part true crime documentary series Murder in the Heartland: In Cold Blood Revisited (working title), a reexamination of the crime chronicled in Truman Capote's landmark book and Oscar-nominated film. The series is set to premiere next year, which marks its 50th anniversary of the book.

Veteran showrunner Neal Baer and writer Cathryn Humphris are developing an untitled legal drama at Fox that follows an FBI task force consisting of a cop, lawyer, psychologist, and social media expert as they travel across the country to investigate and solve hate crimes. 

Freeform canceled the crime drama Guilt after just one season. Starring Billy Zane, Daisy Head, Emily Tremaine, Kevin Ryan, Cristian Solimeno and Naomi Ryan, the whodunit series was inspired by real-life murder cases such as those involving Amanda Knox, JonBenet Ramsay and Casey Anthony.

Danish crime author Anna Grue’s Nordic noir Dan Sommerdahl book series is being developed for Denmark’s TV2 with The Bridge (Bron/Broen) co-creator Nikolaj Scherfig attached as head writer. Set in a picturesque coastal town, each episode will revolve around a murder case solved by the titular Dan Sommerdahl and his best friend, Detective Superintendent Fleming Torp. 

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

This week, The Reading Life on WWNO (New Orleans Public Radio) chatted with Tana French, who continues to chronicle the adventures of the Dublin Murder Squad in her new book, The Trespasser, and also James Lee Burke, creator of Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, who writes about his native Houston in The Jealous Kind.

The latest Suspense Radio podcast featured a trio of bestselling authors: Jon Land, Tasha Alexander and Daniella Bernett.

Mark Billingham, author and host of A Stab in the Dark podcast, interviewed David Morrissey, star of BBC's The Missing, State of Play, Sky1's Thorne and The Governor from The Walking Dead. Paul Hirons also spoke with Lee Child about the forthcoming Jack Reacher novel and film.  

THEATER

The Baltimore Choral Arts Society will present the Baltimore premiere of "Dark Bells," an Edgar Allan Poe-based work for the unusual combination of solo viola, chorus, and orchestra by Baltimore-based composer Jonathan Leshnoff. The viola soloist will be longtime Baltimore Symphony Orchestra member Peter Minkler, who commissioned the work, which is based on three of Poe's poems: "The Bells," "Eldorado," and "Alone." Click here for more information and tickets about the event, scheduled for October 30.

Mystery Melange

The crime fiction community lost one of its own last week when author, editor, and blogger Ed Gorman died following a long battle with cancer. Ed penned dozens of mystery novels, including the Sam McCain, Jack Dwyer and Dev Conrad series. Tributes have been pouring in since about Ed's decency and his tireless support for and encouragement of newbie authors. You can read some of those tributes via The Rap Sheet, Bill Crider, Mike Stotter, Todd Mason, James Reasoner, Mystery Fanfare, and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. If you'd like to celebrate Ed's life and literary legacy, the Mystery File has an extensive bibliography, and Beat to a Pulp is featuring one of Ed's stories, titled "Stalker."

Sadly, mystery author Larry Karp also died this past week. Karp was the author of medical thrillers and novels based on music, especially ragtime, and lived in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. Puget Sound's Sisters in Crime chapter had a tribute on Facebook.

The Noir at the Bar events are coming at a fast and furious pace, which means I sometimes miss a few. But this one looks particularly fun, to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 3 and hosted by Night Owl Mysteries and Crimespree Magazine. The featured authors scheduled to appear include Dana Camera, Matthew Clemens, Ed Kurtz, Nicholas Petrie, Todd Robinson, and Johnny Shaw. Plus, in honor of this Noir at the Bar also being the launch for the Crimespree beer, Cherry Moon, everyone buying a Cherry Moon during the event will get a free hardcover book with their beer.

Irish crime writers Alan Glynn and Declan Hughes will take part in a commemoration of Raymond Chandler's Waterford connections at the city's annual Imagine Arts Festival on October 23, reading from their work and discussing Chandler's influence on their writing and contemporary crime fiction.  

Last week, the CWA handed its annual Dagger Awards, with Bill Beverly's novel Dodgers being the big winner, awarded both the Goldsboro Gold for the best crime novel and John Creasey New Blood for the best debut crime novel. Don Winslow's The Cartel was also honored with the Ian Fleming Steel for the best crime thriller of the year. For the full list of winners, check out the Eurocrime blog or the official CWA website.

Book Riot is celebrating the launch of its new biweekly newsletter for all things mystery and thriller, Unusual Suspects, with a giveaway open through October 23 (the winner will receive 10 new mystery and thriller releases). Unusual Suspects will include crime fiction news, reviews, and interviews, with the first issue scheduled for November.

In honor of its 75th anniversary, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine recently held an anniversary symposium. For those of you who weren't able to attend, EQMM has since made the video and audio from the first panel available online, and you can read more about the celebration via Vicki Weisfeld's piece for Crime Fiction Lover.

Forty years ago, music writer Paul Nelson interviewed the iconic crime fiction author Ross Macdonald (a/k/a Kenneth Millar), creator of one of the most famous fictional private eye in literary history, Lew Archer. Their interaction resulted in forty hours of interviews that have been collected into a book by Kevin Avery and Jeff Wong, and LitHub arranged for Avery to speak with one of Macdonald's surviving friends, New York Times bestselling writer Jonathan Lethem, about Macdonald and how the book came together.  

Ahead of Halloween, the AMC Network is celebrating the 20th anniversary of FearFest, one of TV’s longest-running annual thematic programming celebrations. As part of the big bash, the network will offer the largest collection of horror and genre film titles in its history.

For the next two weekends, Genesee Country Village & Museum will bring some of Edgar Allan Poe's wonderfully creepy tales to life with its Spirits of the Past theatrical tours. Using the historic village as its canvas, this 75-minute, all-new theatrical tour revisits chilling scenes from such works as "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Berenice," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and others. Costumed guides lead visitors by candlelight through the village where they encounter short vignettes in and around the historic homes.

Strand Magazine compiled a listing of "Ten Great Books by Up-and-Coming Crime Fiction Writers," from traditional hard-boiled to pulpy southern noir to "drug dealers doing battle with inhuman gangbangers."

Lithub profiled "the man who invented bookselling as we know it," James Lackington. If you've ever bought a remaindered book at deep discount, or wandered through the over-stocked shelves of a cavernous bookstore, or spent an afternoon lounging in the reading area of a bookshop, then you’ve experienced some of the ways that Lackington revolutionized bookselling in the late 18th century.

Author Louise Millar talked about the "The creepy truth about b
eing a female crime writer" for the Telegraph.

Placing Literature has created two new digital interactive literary maps: Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes. Site visitors can follow the adventures of Oliver Twist or Edwin Drood in Victorian London and see the locations that the Baker Street detective visited in his stories. The website has been creating literary maps since 2013 and has already created maps for Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, New York City, and others, with more than 3,600 literary places of interest mapped on its site.

Really neat idea: at one store in Ypsilanti, a working-class town just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, kids get a $2 discount if they read a book aloud to their barber.

Hopefully, you'll get to see them in person, but in the meantime, here's your chance to peek inside some truly famous bookshops.

This week's featured crime poem over at the 5-2 is "Midnight Preparation" by Michael Arnzen.

In the Q&A roundup, J.R. Lindermuth stopped by Omnimystery News to chat about his new mystery novel, Shares the Darkness; Crimespree Magazine sat down to talk wth Gary Phillips, the "Hardest Working Man in Crime Fiction"; Stay Thirsty Publications grilled Edgar and Shamus nominated author Duane Swierczynski about his latest noir tale, Revolver, which follows three generations of cops and crimes in his home city of Philadelphia (officer worker cubicle warning: this piece starts off with audio of gunfire); and This is Writing interviewed prolific author O'Neil De Noux about his many books and over 350 short stories.

Media Murder for Monday

Starting off the week with the latest in crime drama news:

MOVIES

Warner Bros. is developing Impossible Odds, based on a memoir written by Jessica Buchanan and her husband Erik Landemalm and set to be adapted by Brian Helgeland and directed by Clint Eastwood (who previously worked with Helgeland on Mystic River). The story centers on Buchanan, an aid worker who was captured and held by Somalia land pirates until President Obama sent in Seal Team 6 to rescue her and a colleague.

Oscar-winning writers Joel and Ethan Coen are developing the techno-thriller Dark Web for Fox. Based on a two-part Wired article by Joshuah Bearman and adapted for the screen by author Dennis Lehane, the story follows Ross William Ulbricht, who developed "The Silk Road" illegal online marketplace for drugs and was eventually arrested in 2013.

Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer has been brought on board to put the finishing touches on the script for the Sylvester Stallone action thriller Godforsaken, based on an original treatment from Daniel Casey. The story centers on an aging ex-con (Stallone) who is forced out of his self-imposed isolation to protect the only family he has left and avenge the death of the son he hardly knew.

Netflix has the lead in an auction to acquire The Helicopter Heist, with Jake Gyllenhaal attached to star and produce with his Nine Stories Productions partner Riva Marker. The project is based on a manuscript for a yet-to-be-published book written by Swedish author Jonas Bonnier that follows the true story of the the infamous Västberga robbery of 2009 where a gang of brazen robbers used a stolen Bell 206 Jet Ranger to land on the roof of a building and abscond with more than $5 million.

The first trailer was released for Werner Herzog's Salt And Fire starring Michael Shannon and Gael García Bernal in the eco-thriller about a scientist and CEO who must come together as a volcano threatens to explode.

TELEVISION

John Grisham’s novel The Rainmaker is in the works at CBS with a put pilot commitment. The story follows a young lawyer right out of college whose life is turned upside-down as he takes on a fraudulent insurance company. It was previously adapted into a film by Francis Ford Coppola starring Matt Damon, Claire Danes, and Danny DeVito.

Showrunners and producers David E. Kelley and Jonathan Shapiro are reuniting for a new legal drama for streaming giant Amazon. Goliath, which launched its eight-episode first season this past week, follows Billy (Billy Bob Thornton) and Donald Cooperman (William Hurt) who play former law partners turned courtroom opponents.

Legal dramas are apparently the latest craze:  NBC has put in development Reversible Error, an hourlong legal drama from The Boy Next Door scribe Barbara Curry and Fast & Furious franchise writer Chris Morgan. Written by Curry, Reversible Error follows a former high-powered attorney who is freed from prison after her conviction for murdering her husband is reversed. Now she must piece her shattered life back together and find her husband’s true killer before a vindictive D.A. finds a way to prosecute her again.

Masterpiece will feature a Prime Suspect prequel titled Prime Suspect: Tennison, serving as co-producer alongside ITV Studios and NoHo Film & Television. Created by Lynda La Plante, who wrote the early installments of the original series, the new six-part drama portrays the early career of iconic, tenacious detective Jane Tennison — the role that established Helen Mirren as a household name. Stefanie Martini now stars as the ambitious 22-year-old Jane, a probationary officer in 1970s London who’s starting out in an environment where chauvinism and rule-bending are the norm. No airdate has been announced yet for the show.

After taking on one hot-button issue with the drama Shots Fired which deals with police shootings, Fox is taking on another timely topic: college rape. The network has given a put pilot commitment to Controversy, an investigative thriller drama about a successful crisis-management consultant brought in to advise a university when a co-ed accuses football players of gang-raping her. Facing a crisis of conscience, she partners with a lawyer for the university to seek out the truth.

Scottish novelist Tony Wood’s London-based Buccaneer Media is teaming with Irvine Welsh on the adaptation of Woods' book Crime, with Dougray Scott attached to star in and exec produce the six-part drama. Crime is the sequel to Welsh’s 1998 novel Filth, which was made into a 2013 movie (starring James McAvoy) and is set in Miami with Scott taking on the role of Detective Inspector Ray Lennox who becomes embroiled in a case involving a ring of pedophiles.

Idris Elba is heading to Africa for his next TV series for Brazza, a Narcos-like drama set in the criminal underworld of Brazzaville, the capital of Republic of the Congo. Paul Viragh (Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) is attached to write the series, in which a Congolese man living in Paris is forced to return home after his father dies under suspicious circumstances. Back home he gets drawn into a bloody family feud that threatens the country's uneasy truce.

CBS could be breaking new ground for Asian-American actors with Exhibit A, a legal drama from former Castle co-showrunner Alexi Hawley, Hawaii Five-0 co-star Daniel Dae Kim, and Jane The Virgin producer Ben Silverman. The project, written by Hawley, is based on the South Korean series My Lawyer, Mr. Jo, and centers on a disgraced Korean-American prosecutor who finds redemption as a defense lawyer when he pairs with a young idealistic attorney and the two fight for the underdogs of Los Angeles. The show would be a rare U.S. broadcast drama with an Asian lead and the first U.S. dr
ama series outside of the action genre where the main lead is Asian American.

Milo Ventimiglia, one of the stars of the new NBC/20th TV drama This Is Us, has teamed with Royal Pains co-creator Andrew Lenchewski for Kin, a 20th TV-produced drama project which has been set up at Fox with script commitment plus penalty. Written and co-executive produced by Kevin O’Hare, Kin is loosely based on Cundiff’s extended family growing up and will center on a tight-knit Florida law-enforcement family who become the primary suspects in the disappearance of a notorious drug cartel leader following a DEA plane crash.

Graham Norton's debut novel, Holding, is being produced for television by the former boss of EastEnders, Dominic Treadwell-Collins. He's partnering with Blueprint Television, which won the rights to the chat show host's book about a murder in a rural Irish community.

Netflix’s drama Mute has tapped The Leftovers star Justin Theroux to join previously announced cast members Paul Rudd and Alexander Skarsgard in the sci-fi thriller, to be directed by Duncan Jones, who also co-wrote the script with Mike Johnson. Set 40 years in the future, the film centers on a mute bartender (Skarsgard) in a world that has become a roiling city of immigrants, where East crashes against West. His character will be looking for a woman who has disappeared — and when his search takes him deep into the city’s underbelly, an odd pair of American surgeons seem to be the only recurring clue.

TNT has cancelled another one of its staple programs: Murder in the First, the drama starring Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson as two homicide detectives who have looked into a different big case each season.  

But fans of Bosch on Amazon have happier news: Amazon renewed the series based on Michael Connelly's books for a fourth season.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Crime writer Peter James has launched his own "crime-hub" YouTube channel, Peter James TV, promising to feature exclusive interviews with household names in crime including RL Stine, Martina Cole and Paula Hawkins, as well as behind the scenes research footage for his bestselling Roy Grace series.

Lee Child explored the writing and legacy of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series for a Radio 4 program,"21 Shades of Noir: Lee Child on John D MacDonald."

THEATER

Broadway production company The Araca Group and global toy-and-games makers Hasbro Inc. are bringing Col. Mustard and the rest of the suspects from Clue to the stage. The show will mark their second live entertainment collaboration, after the Broadway-bound musical adaptation of Monopoly announced earlier this year. Clue will be adapted by writer/director Jonathan Lynn from his 1985 Paramount Pictures film and premiered at Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Playhouse next May, followed by a U.S. national tour and a potential U.K. tour.  

A play by Rosemary’s Baby and Deathtrap author Ira Levin is being staged by the UK's Norwich based Baroque Theatre Company. Veronica’s Room tells the story of Susan Kerner, a young beautiful Boston college student who is on a date with the charming Larry Eastwood in 1973. The young lovers find themselves at The Brabissant mansion owned by the Mackeys, an elderly Irish couple instantly struck by Susan’s strong resemblance to long since dead Veronica Brabissant. Together they enter Veronica’s room, untouched since 1935, and nothing will ever be the same.

The Playhouse Theatre in Northampton is staging Mindgame through October 22. The play, written by Anthony Horowitz (Foyles War and Midsummer Murders) centers on true crime author Mark Styler who visits Fairfields Hospital to interview the notorious serial killer Easterman - but Dr. Farqhuar, head of the hospital, seems unhelpful and quixotic, and the place hostile and unnerving.

GAMES

Sony Pictures and Google have teamed up to launch the "Inferno Journey Through Hell" online game based on the Robert Landon thriller novel by Dan Brown. Finding clues hidden throughout Google products and the world’s most popular social platforms, players will complete up to three puzzles each week and will have the opportunity to win weekly prizes, culminating in one grand prize – an Italian getaway with stops in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice. As each new set of puzzles are unveiled week-to-week, the experience will become increasingly difficult to solve as the 'Inferno Journey Through Hell' progresses to its ultimate mind-bending final challenge.

Mystery Melange

Thanks to Altus Press, three of the most historic pulp fiction magazines of the Twentieth Century are set to return to magazine format. This November, Altus Press will relaunch full-length magazines of Argosy, Black Mask, and Famous Fantastic Mysteries in periodical format, with both classic fiction tales and new stories and articles. Each of these magazines enjoyed decades-long publications by a variety of publishers with several thousand total issues. Now owned by Steeger Properties, LLC, these titles will be published on a regular schedule and in print and e-magazine formats.

Three weeks remain to submit your work for consideration in the William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant Program for Unpublished Writers. The grant is designed to foster quality literature in the Malice Domestic tradition and assist the next generation of traditional mystery writers on the road to publication. The grant includes a $2,500 cash award and a comprehensive registration to Malice Domestic 29, including 2 nights' lodging at the convention hotel. For submission information, check out the official website.

Libraries throughout the Aberdeenshire regions of Scotland are participating in a CrimeFest during the month of October. Authors Ann Cleeves and James Oswald offered up talks earlier in the month, but there are still plenty of events to come, including panels on crime writing, forensics, a talk on "Cosy Crime Noir" by journalist and author Sara Sheridan, and more.

Two crime fiction authors are being honored by their respective states: Margaret Maron is being inducted into the North Carolina Writers Hall of Fame, and Tod Goldberg is this year's recipient of the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

The New Yorker had a meaty profile of Scottish crime fiction author Philip Kerr, best known for his Berlin Noir trilogy of novels.

This year's volume of America's Best Mystery Stories has just been released. Edited by Elizabeth George and Otto Penzler, the roster of authors includes Megan Abbott, Steve Almond, Matt Bell, Bruce Robert Coffin, Lydia Fitzpatrick, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Evan Lewis, Robert Lopresti, Dennis McFadden, Michael Noll, Todd Robinson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Georgia Ruth, Jonathan Stone, Susan Thornton, Brian Tobin, and Saral Waldorf.

Novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz has been invited to write a second official James Bond novel by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd after the success of his 2015 bestseller, Trigger Mortis, published by Orion in September last year. As yet untitled, the setting will be "period Bond" and the story will again feature previously unpublished material by Fleming. Horowitz is the fourth author in recent years to be invited by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd to write an official Bond novel, following in the footsteps of William Boyd (2013's Solo), Jeffery Deaver (Carte Blanche in 2011), and Sebastian Faulks (Devil May Care, 2008).

If you can't get enough about Agatha Christie during her 12th anniversary, here are "126 remarkable Agatha Christie facts" (you get a bonus!) compiled by Christie expert John Curran.

Writing for The Guardian, John Mullan takes a look at "How we got to The Girl on the Train" and the rise of the psychological thriller, explaining that the themes of adultery, murder and secret identity in Paula Hawkin's book are rooted in the Victorian era.

In honor of the release the Girl on the Train movie, based on Paula Hawkin's novel, Signature Reads chose the "7 Best Train-set Thrillers."

The Seattle Times printed a report about a puzzling case of an identity thief that was solved, in part, thanks to the work of a forensic genealogist. (HT to Sisters in Crime).

Psychological crime novels are still "a thing," if you go by recent major advances handed out to books vying to the next Gone Girl, ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The October issue of Plots With Guns is out, scaring up new stories from Jeff Kerr, Joe Kraus, Andrew Gibbons, Nick Kolakowski, James Pate, Steven Nester, David Rachels, and Donald McCarthy.

The September/October issue of Suspense Magazine includes interviews with authors Jonas Saul, Blake Crouch, Craig Johnson, Sophie Hannah, Sean McFate, Richard Chizmar, and Linda Castillo, plus Dennis Palumbo asks the question "Is your Psycho Killer...just Psycho?", and a look at the Sisters in Crime publishing summit report on diversity in the mystery community.

Something to pass along to your kids and other young folk: Barnes and Noble compiled a list of "7 Awesome Diverse YA Thrillers."

Think homo sapiens is a dangerous species? A new study found that we don't even crack the top thirty of the most murderous mammals.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Testimony" by Lida Bushloper.

In the Q&A roundup, Omnimystery News welcomed Don Bruns to introduce his New Orleans homicide detective Quentin Archer in Casting Bones and also Leslie Nagel to chat about her latest, The Book Club Murders; Australian Andrew Nette talked up heist novels and his latest, Gunshine State, with the Mystery People; My Central Jersey spoke with Otto Penzler, editor, publisher, bookstore owner, and one of the most influential proponents of crime fiction; and Declan Burke welcomed author Ruth Downie for some grilling.

Media Murder for Monday

Monday greetings! Here's the latest wrap-up of crime drama news from stage and screen:

MOVIES

In a bid to be considered for the Oscar chase, Ben Affleck's latest directorial outing, Live by Night, will hit select theaters on Christmas Day before opening wide on Jan. 13. Based on Dennis Lehane's novel, the project stars Afflect, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana and Chris Cooper in the period piece that features the son of a Boston police captain who moves to Florida and becomes an infamous gangster.

Warner Bros Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures have set an opening date for the female-driven caper spinoff of Ocean’s Eleven, titled Ocean’s 8, on June 8, 2018. The all-star lineup includes Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina, and Sarah Paulson. 

EuropaCorp has set an April 28 release date for the thriller The Circle, starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, and John Boyega. Based on the international best-seller by Dave Eggers, the story centers around the founder of the world’s largest tech and social media company (Hanks) who encourages Watson’s character, who’s rising through the company ranks, to live her life with complete transparency — but no one is really safe when everyone is watching. 

A teaser trailer was released for the upcoming John Wick: Chapter Two. The sequel sees the eponymous protagonist being pulled out of retirement yet again and traveling to Rome to help an old friend take control of a "shadowy international assassins' guild." Along with Keanu Reeves, the returning cast includes Bridget Moynahan as Helen Wick, John's deceased wife; Ian McShane as the Continental Hotel owner Winston; and John Leguizamo as car chop-shop mogul Aurelio.

The new trailer for the the Sin City thriller, Sleepless, shows Jamie Foxx trapped between corrupt cops and the mob underground.

TELEVISION

Robin Hood is the latest literary figure to get the small-screen treatment, with CBS ordering the pilot A Burglar's Guide to the City. The project follows a team of modern-day Robin Hoods led by a brilliant architect with a troubled past who use their unique skills to steal from rich criminals and give to those that have been wronged by a corrupt system. Paul Grellong (Scorpion) will write the project, which is based on the book by Geoff Manaugh, with Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek: Discovery) and Justin Lin (The Fast and the Furious) serving as executive producers.

In other thief-related TV plot news, NBC has put in development In Defense of Tom Parish, a drama that centers on the titular successful Manhattan defense attorney who was once a high-end art thief. After a stretch in a federal prison where he learned the law, he reinvented himself and quickly rose to the top of his new profession. But he has to deal with a mistrustful family and an overzealous FBI agent who doesn’t believe Tom’s truly changed and … steal the occasional priceless work of art.

ABC has put in development the timely project Protect & Serve, a drama from the team behind Secrets & Lies. Written by Barbie Kligman and her husband, actor Billy Malone (Murder in the First), Protect & Serve is set in the aftermath of a riot in an American city triggered by the shooting of an unarmed man by cops. The police department is dismantled and a newly appointed police chief is tasked with rebuilding from scratch. 

A&E is also ripping from the headlines for its new docuseries called Live PD. The project offer viewers an unfettered and unfiltered live access inside the six of the country’s busiest police forces and the communities they patrol. The first season, which will run for eight, two-hour episodes, will show the work of both urban and rural police forces around the country on a typical Friday night via a combination of dash cams, handheld and fixed rig cameras.

In the first broadcast development season since the Pentagon allowed women to serve in front-line U.S. military combat units, ABC is tackling the subject with an untitled ensemble drama. It will center on an elite co-ed special forces team that will be forced to find a way to navigate both the treacherous waters of their external missions and the equally dangerous undercurrents of tensions — romantic and otherwise — within the unit.

NBC has given a put pilot commitment to Flight Risk, a woman-on-the-run thriller drama with comedic elements from Shameless executive producers Krista Vernoff and John Wells. Flight Risk centers on an attorney whose take no mercy approach towards the criminals she prosecutes has earned her the nickname The Shark. But when she loses her temper in a divorce mediation, comically threatens to have her soon-to-be-ex-husband killed, and he turns up dead the next day, she has to go on the run and turn to a criminal she's been prosecuting to help clear her name. 

John Noble is returning for the fourth season of the Fox paranormal procedural Sleepy Hollow. Noble will reprise his role as the deceitful Henry Parrish, the son of Tom Mison's Ichabod Crane.

USA Network has set a new premiere date for its thriller drama series Shooter starring Ryan Phillippe. The series, based on Stephen Hunter’s novel Point of Impact and the 2007 Mark Wahlberg film Shooter, is now slated for debut on November 15, two months after its original premiere date was delayed due to sniper attacks on police officers. The cast of the series also includes Omar Epps, Shantel Vansanten, Eddie McClintock  and Cynthia Addai-Robinson.

The CBS hit series The Mentalist is getting an adaptation for Russia and Ukraine. The 16-part series will be directed by Alexei Muradov and star Yehezkel Lazarov and Anastasiya Mikulchina and is tentatively scheduled to launch in late 2017. Shooting is to take place in Russia and Ukraine's port city of
Odessa, making the project a rare Russian/Ukrainian collaboration since the relations between the two countries have soured over Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in East Ukraine.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

UKTV has commissioned and launched a new six episode crime podcast, A Stab in the Dark, hosted by noted novelist Mark Billingham, whose novels Rush Of Blood and In The Dark are currently being adapted by Matt Charman and Danny Brocklehurst for BBC One.

Suspense Radio's Beyond the Cover podcast featured Matthew Dunn talking about his latest work, The Spy House, the fifth electrifying thriller featuring Will Cochrane.

Just in time for Halloween: "18 Creepy True Crime Podcasts That’ll Keep You Up At Night."

THEATER

Mystery at the Theatre in Village of Schaumburg, Illinois, is presenting Binge, a show that lets you see all 10 episodes of a murder mystery in 100 minutes — including an intermission. It's the 10th Mystery at the Theatre play Rob Pileckis has written since 1997 for the Prairie Center Arts Foundation as a benefit for the Prairie Center for the Arts.

Mystery Melange

The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA) has awarded the 2016 T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award for Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. The other nominated novels included Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz and The Promise by Robert Crais. The Parker Award recognizes excellence in books that reflect Southern California culture or lifestyle from authors living within the SCIBA region. (HT to the Gumshoe.)

You can hang out with some of today's sharpest crime fiction authors at the Noir at the Bar in Vancouver tonight, featuring Terry Shames, Dietrich Kalteis, Will Viharo, Owen Laukkanen, Sam Wiebe, Merrilee Robson, Linda L. Richards, and Eileen Bell. Emcee ER Brown will also be on hand, with book sales courtesy of White Dwarf/Dead Write Books.

Philadelphia has chosen The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon as the featured selection for its "one book" program in 2017. Celebrating its 15th anniversary next year, One Book, One Philadelphia is a signature event of the Free Library of Philadelphia that promotes literacy, library usage, and citywide conversation by encouraging the entire greater Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing a single book. From January 25 to March 23, nearly 100 events and programs will center around Haddon's novel.

The Washington Post reviewed a new anthology of four "perfectly drawn" short stories by the late P.D. James, two of which feature James stalwart Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard.

The London-based Killer Women' Writers Collective is trying to steer the genre away from misogyny in books and sexism in book reviews. The group started a few years ago as a way for writers to combat the loneliness that comes from the isolation of fiction writing but has grown into something much bigger since: a 16-strong group of writers including The Girl on the Train's Paula Hawkins.

Author Amy Gentry took a closer look at domestic thrillers at the cinema that foreshadowed the current similar trend in fiction in an article titled "Breast-feeding Noir" for The Paris Review.

The Washington Post investigated "Blue lives: Pop culture’s minority cops," a look at how non-white officers have been portrayed on TV and film and how they "show us the camaraderie and job satisfaction black or female cops get from buying into institutions that previously barred them. But they don’t tend to inquire deeply into the limits of the citizenship that come with being a police officer or the compromises minority officers must make for that citizenship."

"The Gone Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the Train":  Five-Thirty-Eight did an analysis of fiction titles and concluded that we're not done yet with the recent "Girl" titled suspense novels, using statistics and insights from the industry such as a bookseller who noted five different galleys on the shelf with "girl" in the title pubbing this fall.

How chloroform evolved from a beloved sedative to a crime-fiction trope.

The spy who couldn’t spell: how the biggest heist in the history of US espionage was foiled.

Might want to start looking for a new line of work, 007.

It's a bit early for folks like me to be thinking about Christmas, but you might want to pick up tickets soon for the second annual Murder Under the Mistletoe, the Christmas party at Heffers' bookstore in London on December 8th. Although participating authors haven't been announced yet, last year's guests included Susan Grossey, Charlot King, Mike Ripley, Nicola Upson, Mandy Morton, Suzette Hill, Mark Ellis, Miranda Carter, Alison Bruce, Michelle Spring and Kate Rhodes.

As always, check out the latest weekly crime poem over at the 5-2.

In the Q&A roundup, John DeDakis chatted with Blog Critics about his Lark Chadwick mystery series; Otto Penzler, crime fiction editor and owner of the Mysterious Bookshop and Mysterious Press spoke with the the New York Times and said the last book that surprised him was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn; Big Issue North snagged Ann Cleeves for a Q&A about her series set in the Shetland region that was brought to life on BBC One’s Shetland; Eric Beetner discussed his new novel Rumrunners and using Midwestern settings, with Steph Post.

Mystery Melange

A new major exhibition about Edgar Allan Poe opened this week at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Titled "Enigmatic Edgar A. Poe in Baltimore & Beyond," the exhibit features highlights from the Susan Jaffe Tane Collection of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the finest private collections of Poe materials in the world. Items include Poe's first published book of poems, one of only 12 known copies and "the most celebrated rarity in American literature; the story that launched Poe's career as an author, "MS. Found in a Bottle," published when he won a contest in The Baltimore Saturday Visiter; "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" as they first appeared to readers in magazines, and much more.

The biennial NoirCon is coming up very soon in Philadelphia, October 26-30 in fact, but it's not too late to register. This year's convention features David L. Goodis Award winner, Aurélien Masson (editorial director, Série Noire, Éditions Gallimard); the winners of The Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Excellence, Charles Ardai (author and publisher, Hard Case Crime) and Stona Fitch (author and publisher, Concord Free Press); and the recipient of The Anne Friedberg Award for Contributions to Noir and Its Preservation, Barry Gifford (author, screenwriter, and publisher, Black Lizard). There are also a plethora of fun panels, The Hammett Award luncheon, and a Noir at the Bar at the Pen & Pencil Club with 16 authors on hand, all corralled by crime fiction blogger, critic and reviewer Peter Rozovsky. Check out the full schedule here.
 
ITW online Thriller School is open for registration. In this seven-week program, beginning March 13th, 2017, the craft of thriller writing will be front and center with topics covering Storytelling, Voice, Character, Plot, Point of View, Dialogue and Setting, Mood, and Atmosphere. Instructors David Corbett, F. Paul Wilson, Lee Child, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Meg Gardiner, James Scott Bell, and Peter James will teach an aspect of craft through podcasts, an online Q&A, and written materials.

The Guardian profiled the new line of crime comics from Hard Case Crime and Titan Comics. The stellar lineup starts off today with the release of Triggerman, the tale of a convict in Prohibition-era Chicago on a mission to save the girl he left behind, from Walter Hill, director of 1979 cult classic gang movie The Warriors. That will be followed a week later by Peepland, written by crime authors Gary Phillips and Christa Faust (herself a former peep show employee) about the seedy goings-on at 1980s Times Square peep show booths.

Likewise, author James Robinson (Scarlet Witch, Starman) is stepping into the world of James Bond in an all-new graphic novel miniseries authorized by Ian Fleming Publications. The project centers around the famous spy's CIA ally and friend Felix Leiter, who first appeared alongside James Bond in Ian Fleming's very first novel, Casino Royale. In the new series, Leiter, now operating as an independent investigator, finds himself in Japan, tracking down a beautiful Russian spy from his past. But when the mission takes a turn for the worse, he will discover that there are more deadly schemes taking shape in Tokyo ... and beyond.

In Val McDermid's essay on PD James for The Guardian, she notes that James "faced the darkness head on" and subverted the coziness of golden-age crime fiction. James once wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject of Golden Age crime, Talking About Detective Fiction, and the same love for the work of her predecessors is evident in a new collection of James' short stories.

As the Hollywood Reporter noted, Hollywood Is getting back in the Agatha Christie business. While the work of the "Queen of Crime" has been made into dozens of film, TV and stage adaptations, there hasn't been a major theatrical feature in the past 30 years since the "lackluster" 1985 film Ordeal by Innocence, starring Donald Sutherland and Christopher Plummer. But that's all changing, thanks to the efforts of the Christie estate to introduce her stories to a new generation.

The Daily Mail looked at how Ian Fleming smuggled WWII Enigma secrets into James Bond’s adventures after the author became so interested in Bletchley Park, he left clues in the books in a "wild contravention" of the Official Secrets Act.

Writing for LitHub, Melissa Ginsburg takes a look at "10 Books Featuring Subversive Women," a reading list for defying society's expectations.

Jon Land, author of Strong Cold Dead, compiled a list of "The 12 Best Book to Film Adaptations," many of which are crime dramas.

In celebration of director Curtis Hanson's work, Gareme Ross lists "The ten greatest neo-noir films," with dark themes, crime and thrills, and morally ambiguous characters at their core.

This week, the featured crime poem over at the 5-2 is "Conscience," by Charles Rammelkamp.

In the Q&A roundup, Daniella Bernett stopped by Omnimystery News to talk about her Emmeline Kirby/Gregory Longdon mystery series; Val McDermid spoke with The Independent about how to be a best-selling crime writer, her writing process, and her latest book, Out of Bounds; and the New York Times snagged Tana French for a "By the Book" Q&A.