Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Emmy Award-winning director Jason Bateman (Ozark) is in early talks to direct Ryan Reynolds in Clue, the live-action feature adaptation of the Hasbro board game for Fox/Disney. Bateman also plans to star in the film. Bateman will develop the Clue script with Reynolds, who’s producing through his Maximum Effort banner, along with Allspark Pictures, the film division of Hasbro. Clue is a comedy and murder mystery inspired by the popular board game, but it’s not connected to the 1985 Clue film starring Tim Curry.

Warner Bros is rebooting its 1991 neo-noir gangster film, New Jack City, which Snowfall actor and filmmaker Malcolm M. Mays is writing. The original movie, directed by Mario Van Peebles, boasted a star cast that included Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, Chris Rock, Flavor Flav, Allen Payne, Judd Nelson, and Peebles. The plot revolves an arrogant New York City drug lord during the 1980s crack epidemic and a detective who goes undercover in the gang.

Will Smith will take on the role of New York City crime boss Nicky Barnes in his next Netflix film, The Council. Peter Landesman will executive produce and wrote the screenplay that tells the never-before-told story of a crime syndicate consisting of seven African-American men who ruled Harlem in the 1970s and early ’80s. It wasn't an ordinary crime syndicate – the men dreamed of a self-sufficient and self-policing African American city-state, funded by revolutionizing the drug game.

David Strathairn, who earned an Oscar nomination for Good Night, and Good Luck, has joined the cast of Nightmare Alley, the noir thriller being written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Bradley Cooper is headlining the Fox Searchlight production, an adaptation of the 1946 noir novel by William Lindsay (first adapted in the 1947 film noir starring Tyrone Power). Toni Collette, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett also star in the cast. The story is set in a world of carnival hustlers and con men, telling the story of a "mentalist" (Cooper) who teams up with a female psychiatrist (Blanchett) to trick people into giving them money.

Actor Emilio Insolera has joined the cast of 355, the Simon Kinberg-directed global spy thriller starring Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, Bingbing Fan, Sebastian Stan, and Edgar Ramirez. Based on an idea by Chastain, the plot centers around female spies from agencies around the world who must use all their considerable talents and training to stop an event from occurring that could thrust our teetering world into total chaos.

A new teaser released for Netflix's upcoming El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie gives us our first look at Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, reprising his role) in the moments after he left Walter (Bryan Cranston) and drove to freedom in the Breaking Bad TV series finale. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will premiere on Netflix and in select theaters Oct. 11.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Showtime has given an eight-episode series order to Ripley, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s bestselling series of novels, starring Sherlock alum Andrew Scott. The Night Of director, Steven Zaillian, will write and helm the series that centers on Tom Ripley, a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York. The character was first introduced in Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955 and later appeared in four more of her novels. He was most famously portrayed on-screen by Matt Damon in the 1999 film by Anthony Minghella.

Rebus is set to return to TV screens after over a decade away. The detective drama starred Ken Stott in the role of DI John Rebus for three seasons when John Hannah quit the role after the first series. Rebus creator, Scottish author Ian Rankin, has confirmed its long-awaited comeback and that new episodes are on the way with Gregory Burke penning the scripts. It's said the new episode could have a Nordic Noir-style, while Rankin (who has penned 22 books featuring Rebus) will have a much bigger say in how the series is run. No broadcast date has been set yet, and there is no word on whether the show would return to ITV.

In a competitive situation with multiple networks bidding, CBS has landed Queens, a police drama from The InBetween creator/executive producer Moira Kirland, executive producer Matt Gross, and studio Universal TV. Written by Kirland, Queens centers on a veteran homicide detective in Queens who takes on the most challenging case of her life — mentoring her new partner, a rookie cop whose Millennial outlook on the world clashes with the veteran’s Gen-X mentality — as these women work to solve the borough’s toughest crimes while also attempting to right a wrong from their past.

Fox has given a script commitment with penalty to DEA, a drama from writer Craig Gore (S.W.A.T.). Written by Gore, DEA is an "operation of the week" show as Jack Riley and his DEA Task Force hunt down a drug kingpin, dismantling dangerous drug organizations in major cities across the U.S. Episodes will be "a combination of smart investigation, intense action, as we explore what drives our main characters (cops and criminals) on both sides of the law."

Freeform has ordered a new thriller pilot from executive producers Jessica Biel, Bert V. Royal, and Michelle Purple, titled Last Summer. It's described as an "unconventional thriller that takes place over three summers – ’93, ’94, ’95 – in a small Texas town when a beautiful popular teen, Kate, is abducted and, seemingly unrelated, a girl, Jeanette, goes from being a sweet, awkward outlier to the most popular girl in town." Each episode is told from the POV of one of the two main girls (Jeanette and Kate), which will have the viewers loyalties constantly shifting as more information is revealed.

CBS has put in development the crime programs Wet House and The Terminal. Cop drama Wet House hails from the Rizzoli & Isles duo of star Sasha Alexander and writer-producer Russell Grant and centers on a female detective who lands at a station for castoff cops with personal demons after she has a fight with a colleague. She soon discovers her new colleagues are not only exceptional police officers who serve and protect their community but also a family of flawed human beings who nevertheless take care of their own. The Terminal is based on a short story by bestselling author Lee Child and centers on an unflappable ex-Marine, the first female to earn the Medal of Honor. When she lands the job of head of security for JFK International Airport, she discovers that protecting what is widely considered the biggest soft target in the world will be the most challenging mission of her life.

Walker, Texas Ranger is getting a reboot, with Supernatural star Jared Padalecki set to headline and executive produce. The "reimagining" of CBS’ long-running 1990s action/crime series starring Chuck Norris is being shopped by CBS TV Studios, with the CW as a leading contender for the new show. The project will see Walker getting a female partner and "will explore morality, family, and rediscovering our lost common ground." At the center of the series is Cordell Walker (Padalecki), a man finding his way back to his family while investigating crime in the state’s most elite unit.

Awesome Media & Entertainment has optioned best-selling author Caroline Mitchell’s detective novel, Truth and Lies, in the hope of creating a female Luther. The story follows the young London detective, DI Amy Winter, the daughter of a husband and wife who were imprisoned for a string of heinous killings. As she investigates the disappearance of a teenage girl, she's forced to reconnect with her incarcerated mother, Lillian, in order to prevent another murder.

Amy Brenneman is set as a lead opposite Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow in FX’s drama pilot, The Old Man, which is based on the eponymous novel written by Thomas Perry. The story centers on Dan Chase (Bridges), who absconded from the CIA decades ago and has been living off the grid since. When an assassin arrives gunning for Chase, the old operative learns that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past. Brenneman will play Zoe, a woman recovering from a bruising divorce, who rents a room to Chase not knowing he’s on the run - and then must draw on reserves she never knew she had in order to survive the day.

Julianne Nicholson (Monos), Jean Smart (Life Itself), Angourie Rice (Black Mirror), Evan Peters (I Am Woman), Cailee Spaeny (On the Basis of Sex), and David Denman (The Replacements) have been cast opposite Kate Winslet in HBO’s limited series, Mare of Easttown. Written and executive produced by Brad Inglesby, who also serves as showrunner, Mare Of Easttown stars Winslet as a small-town Pennsylvania detective whose life crumbles around her as she investigates a local murder.

Sherlock’s Rupert Graves is joining the third season of the Sky drama, Riviera. Graves will play Gabriel Hirsch, the carefree, charismatic and worldly ally of Julia Stiles’ Georgina Ryland. A year has passed since the second season finale, with Georgina having abandoned the cursed Riviera, leaving all its devastation and damage behind to start a new life. Now a rising star in international art restitution, she has reinvented herself as Georgina Ryland as she travels the world – from Venice to Argentina – on the hunt for stolen art works.

Amazon has given a formal Season 3 pickup to its thriller Absentia, starring and executive produced by Stana Katic. Geoff Bell (Kingsman: The Secret Service) and Josette Simon (Wonder Woman) have also joined the cast. The series centers on FBI agent Emily Byrne (Katic), with the new season opening three months after the dramatic events of Season 2 that sees Emily nearing the end of her suspension from the Bureau and working hard to be the best possible mother to her son. Everything is upended when one of Nick Durand’s (Patrick Heusinger) criminal cases hits too close to home and threatens the lives of the family Emily is desperately trying to hold together.

BET has canceled the legal drama, In Contempt, after one season. The series which debuted back in April 2018, starred Erica Ash as Gwen Sullivan, an outspoken and passionate public defender in a New York legal aid office.

Fox has added four more characters to its upcoming 9-1-1 spinoff starring Rob Lowe. Natacha Karam, Brian Michael Smith, Julian Works, and newcomer Rafael Silva are joining 9-1-1: Lone Star as series regulars. Karam will play Marjan Marwani, a devout Muslim firefighter, who is also described as an adrenaline junkie. Smith will portray transgender male firefighter Paul Strickland, who "has a gift for observation worthy of Sherlock Holmes." Works will portray rookie firefighter Mateo Chavez, while Silva plays Austin police officer Carlos Reyes.

Timothy Busfield (The West Wing) is set as a series regular opposite Nicholas Pinnock in ABC’s midseason legal drama series, For Life. Written by Hank Steinberg, For Life is a fictional serialized legal and family drama, inspired by the life of Isaac Wright Jr, about Aaron Wallace (Pinnock), a prisoner who becomes a lawyer and litigates cases for other inmates while fighting to overturn his own life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Busfield will play Roswell, a legal mentor and trusted friend of Wallace.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Public radio station WLRN in Miami spoke with Alex Segura about his books featuring Cuban-American private investigator, Pete Fernandez.

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up featuring the mystery short story "The Mystery of the Jade Cats" by Sharon K Garner and read by actor Ariel Linn. The story is told by a black cat - just in time to kick off the Halloween season.

Criminal Mischief: Episode #28, with host Dr. D.P. Lyle, focused on "The MacGuffin" in crime fiction.

Wrong Place, Write Crime host Frank Zafiro debuted a new season by welcoming guest, Trey R. Barker, to discuss pounding his heart out as a rock and roll drummer, working in a jail, being a book conference social butterfly, owning a bookstore, and being a cop who writes.

The Writer's Detective Bureau, hosted by veteran Police Detective, Adam Richardson, tackled the topics of "Bad Cops, Romantic Complications, and Interview Rapport."

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club interviewed Faye Snowden, the author of three published mysteries with Kensington, whose new novel, A Killing Fire, features homicide detective, Raven Burns.

Meet the Thriller Author chatted with Jim Heskett, who writes award-winning mystery-thrillers (and as J.E. Heskett, post-apocalyptic thrillers), seasoned with a dash of snark.

Writer Types, hosted by Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden, wlecomed three outstanding authors, including Laura Benedict (The Stranger Inside), J Todd Scott (This Side Of Night), and Catherine Ryan Howard (Rewind). 

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean Horner and Rincey Abraham gave "readalikes" for some of the best selling mystery writers like James Patterson, Louise Penny and more.

The Book People podcast snagged Lara Prescott, whose debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, was inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Doctor Zhivago.

Author R&R with Janet Roger

Janet Roger trained in archaeology, history, and English Lit, with a special interest in the early Cold War. Her debut crime novel, Shamus Dust: Hard Winter, Cold War, Cool Murder, is being compared to the Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler in five-star reviews and centers on a private investigator seeking to solve a series of holiday murders:

Two candles flaring at a Christmas crib. A nurse who steps inside a church to light them. A gunshot emptied in a man's head in the creaking stillness before dawn, that the nurse says she didn't hear. It's 1947 in the snowbound, war-scarred city of London, where Pandora's Box just got opened in the ruins, City Police has a vice killing on its hands, and a spooked councilor hires a shamus to help spare his blushes. Like the Buddha says, everything is connected...so it all can be explained. But that's a little cryptic when you happen to be the shamus, and you're standing over a corpse.

Janet Roger stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and researching her book.

 

How did Shamus Dust come to be? Well, that’s going back a while. Let me explain. It’s a novel written and then set aside in a drawer - well in a computer file, it wasn’t quite that long ago - then looked at again years later when I had some time to reflect on it. That initial draft dates way back to when I first lived and worked in and around the City of London, the capital’s financial Square Mile - or for our American gumshoe, London’s Wall Street. Now that I think of it, I doubt the idea for Shamus Dust could possibly have sparked outside that time and place. For three reasons.

In the first place, just then I’d been re-reading two very different crime writers that I thought most impressive. Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon had both left indelible portraits of the cities where they set their stories. Neither was a native son, any more than I was native to London, yet both seemed to have a direct line to the essence of the places their characters moved through. In fact, they did such a job on the moods and atmospheres of Los Angeles and Paris, that they still colour our images of those cities today. When it comes down to researching, they show you that nothing - but nothing - beats breathing the air of the streets you plan to write about. It so happened that, at the time, I was breathing the air of London’s Square Mile. 

The second reason needs some recent history explaining. The City really is, more or less, the single square mile contained inside the arc of its ancient Roman walls. Its southern edge runs along the Thames shore. If you knew where to look, even in my days there, it bore some last scars of the wartime blitz. But reel back to the early Cold War, and a third of that square mile was still flattened rubble. It was archaeologists’ dreamland. For a few short years, digging in those blitz sites gave them unimagined access to a two-thousand years old Roman city right beneath their feet, and they wasted no time. Before reconstruction got seriously under way they’d already made monumental discoveries: a Roman temple, a Roman fortress on the line of the wall, even the foundations of an arena - a Roman coliseum, no less.

And there’s the puzzle. The discovery of the temple and the fortress made instant splash headlines. Yet London’s very own Roman coliseum - yes, there really is one - got overlooked. Seriously. And then entirely forgotten about until a rainy day almost forty years later, when the drawings were noticed in the archaeological record. That chance rediscovery intrigued me when I heard about it. Not only that, I was right there where it had been found. And where better to be able to follow the story back? I had the marvellous Museum of London. The Guildhall Library close by (with Cecil Brown’s astonishing birds-eye drawing of bomb damage in the Square Mile, made from a wartime barrage balloon). And of course, I had the bookshops. Which brings me to my third reason.

The London Encyclopedia? It’s a compendium history of the capital, street by street and too heavy to lug around, but a bible that sent me walking everywhere. (And left me with a habit of walking any city I’m in). Muirhead’s Short Guide to London 1947? It was a sort of visitor’s Baedeker, post zone by post zone, invaluable for checking that streets had survived the bombing and buildings still stood. There were many, many others, but you get the picture. We’re talking pre-internet search. There was no substitute for trawling the bookstores, and the irreplaceable second-hand bazaars. Then, far more than now, London was a book hound’s Aladdin’s cave.

So how did that coliseum puzzle work out? Happily, in the end. After its rediscovery in 1988, the amphitheatre was excavated for more than a decade, then opened to the public in a spectacular new gallery below ground (don’t miss it if you haven’t seen it). As for how evidence of a Roman arena - it’s the size of a football field - simply went unnoticed for so long, it still gets explained as a regrettable oversight, one of those things.

Shamus Dust tells the story rather differently. It goes back to the early Cold War years, when rebuilding the City was up for grabs, fortunes were staked on a construction boom and those blitz sites were some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. In this telling, the interests include high-end racketeers as well as corrupt City grandees, who think delaying construction would be very bad karma. Cue a monumental discovery on a construction site that nobody will get to hear of. Cue the apparent vice killing that gets Shamus Dust under way. And cue the hardboiled gumshoe who gets hired for the cover-up.

And that’s pretty much how Shamus Dust came to be. Thank you for asking! And one last thing. In 1949, just after the film’s huge critical and box-office success, Graham Greene wrote that The Third Man had been meant to entertain, make an audience laugh, and frighten a little. Of the grim Viennese penicillin racket it revolves around, he says it was the reality - but that the reality was only background to a fairytale. I think that’s spot on. Wonderful storyteller as Greene is, he’s no slouch at research. But he also understands that it’s never more than a point of departure. What you need then is to conjure some magic. I’m really glad you didn’t ask me where that comes from.

 

Published by Troubador, Shamus Dust is available for purchase on Amazon UK and Amazon US. Learn more about the book and Janet Roger via the author's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.

Mystery Melange

 

Manda Scott has won the 2019 McIlvanney Prize, making her the second woman in its eight year history to win the award. Scott was honored for her thriller, A Treachery of Spies, in a ceremony at the recent Bloody Scotland crime festival. The McIlvanney Prize recognizes excellence in Scottish crime writing, includes a prize of £1000, and nationwide promotion in Waterstones. This year also saw the inaugural McIlvanney Debut Prize, which went to All the Hidden Truths by Claire Askew.

Noir Nation established the Golden Fedora Prize as a means to reward noir crime writing short forms, with the inaugural award in 2018 for poetry and this year's prize for short stories (the prize will alternate each form every other year). The 2019 Golden Fedora Prize winners are Erika Nichols-Frazer, BV Lawson, and Anne Swardson. Honorable Mentions include James Chesky, Jennifer Giacalone, A.M. Gregori, Mark Moran, Tyler Real, Gita Smith, and JMP Zute. (On a personal note: I am absolutely thrilled and humbled to have been honored with this award and grateful to the judges for their selection of my story "Alien Nation" for this accolade)

A Noir at the Bar event is headed to Hillsborough, North Carolina, tonight as an early spooky treat for the Halloween season. The event, which brings together independent crime authors to read from and sell their books, originated in St. Louis and was replicated in other cities across the country. Eryk Pruitt will host the Hillsborough event at the Yonder bar, with other contributors including James Maxey (Bitterwood), Suzanne Adair (Deadly Occupation), and Shawn Cosby (My Darkest Prayer).

The Library of Congress and Poisoned Pen Press are collaborating for the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, which "will feature a rich and diverse selection of books originally published between the 1860s and the 1960s," according to the Library. Titles will be drawn from the LOC's collection of hard-to-find and out-of-print books, with cover designs inspired by images from the library's collections. The series launches next spring with the publication of three books: That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green (1897), The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope by C.W. Grafton (1943) and Case Pending by Dell Shannon (1960). (HT to Shelf Awareness)

The latest issue of Mystery Scene magazine features a cover story about Ruth Ware's latest novel, a idiosyncratic updating of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw; Michael Mallory profiles fictional detective, Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, who was popular between the two world wars in books and on film; in a new annual feature, Oline Cogdill takes a look at terrific current books from six up-and-coming writers; plus many more articles, essays, news, and reviews.

October 1 is the deadline to submit to the Clues themed issue on "Genre-Bending: Crime's Hybrid Forms" that will be guest edited by Maurizio Ascari (the University of Bologna). Throughout its long history, crime writing has inspired and been inspired by other genres such as the gothic, sensation fiction, horror, romance, film noir, science fiction, and true crime. Papers and extracts should "explore the richness of these generic contact zones and the acts of cross-pollination they engendered, ultimately contributing to the overall development of this galaxy of literary forms."

Abu Dhabi's The National publication reported on one of literature's enduring heroes, Inspector Maigret. All of George Simenon's Maigret novels will be available in English via new translations soon to be completed, a process that has involved the work of as many as 11 translators. Between 1931 and 1972, Belgian author Simenon wrote more than 70 novels in his Inspector Maigret series, and Penguin Books has been commissioning the new translations, releasing one story a month over the last six years.

Auction house Christies' online blog featured a profile of Dashiell Hammett, with a side look at the author's collectible books from auctions past.

I've mentioned before how the late author, Stieg Larsson, became involved with the unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. A recent Guardian article also talked about how Larsson put several references to it in his novels, taking that one step further to ask "Do his secret files contain vital clues?"

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Paradise Costs" by Barry Ergang.

In the Q&A roundup, Crime Reads spoke with Craig Johnson, author of the popular Longmire series that was made into a TV series, about his latest novel, Land Of Wolves, which puts his Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire in a new place; Lesa Holstein chatted with Ann Cleves, author of the Vera Stanhope and Shetland Island mystery series that have been made into TV programs in the UK; and There's Been a Murder sat down with Val Penny, an American author living and writing in southwest Scotland.

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Sony Pictures Classics has made another acquisition out of the Toronto International Film Festival with Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy. The thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Charles Willeford, stars Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger, and Donald Sutherland and follows an art dealer hired to steal a painting from one of the biggest painters of all time. 

Universal has set August 14, 2020 as the release date for the Bob Odenkirk feature, Nobody, which is described as "John Wick meets Falling Down." Odenkirk plays Hutch Mansell, the guy you don’t notice, a suburban dad, overlooked husband, nothing neighbor. But when two thieves break into his home one night, the incident ignites Hutch’s unknown long-simmering rage, propelling him on a brutal path that will uncover dark secrets he fought to leave behind.

Parks and Recreation alum, Natalie Morales, has joined the cast of Warner Bros.’ The Little Things opposite Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Rami Malek. The pic follows Deke (Washington), a burned-out Kern County, CA. deputy sheriff who teams with Baxter (Malek), a crack LASD detective, to nab a serial killer. Deke’s nose for the “little things” proves eerily accurate, but his willingness to circumvent the rules embroils Baxter in a soul-shattering dilemma. Jared Leto is in talks to join in the role as the serial killer in the project from writer-director John Lee Hancock. Morales will play a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department detective working for Baxter.

NEON has released the first trailer for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning drama, Clemency, written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu, who made history as the first black female to snag the marquee award at the festival. The film stars Alfre Woodard as prison warden Bernadine Williams, who, over the years, has been drifting away from her husband while dutifully carrying out executions in a maximum security prison. When she strikes up a unique bond with death-row inmate Anthony Woods (Hodge), Bernadine is forced to confront the complex—and often contradictory relationship between good intentions, unrequited desires, and what it means to be sanctioned to kill.

The first trailer dropped for The Rhythm Section, the revenge thriller starring Blake Lively, Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

The Emmy Awards were handed out last night, and a few crime dramas notched some wins:  Best Actress in a Dramatic Series was won by Jodie Comer as Vilanelle in Killing Eve; Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie went to Jharrel Jerome for When They See Us; Outstanding Supporting Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Movie went to Patricia Arquette for The Act, based on the real life of Gypsy Rose Blanchard the murder of her mother. Jason Bateman won for Best Director of a Drama Series for Ozark, and Julia Garner won for her Supporting Actress role as Ruth Langmore in Ozark.

Kiefer Sutherland and Logan star Boyd Holbrook are joining streaming service Quibi’s adaptation of The Fugitive. The series puts a new twist on the 1993 film of the same name that starred Harrison Ford. Sutherland will star as a grizzled, well-respected Los Angeles cop leading an investigation into Mike Ferro (Holbrook), a blue-collar worker who is incorrectly, and very publicly, blamed for a bomb that destroys a subway train.

The Leftovers alum Amy Brenneman has been cast in the Jeff Bridges/John Lithgow spy drama pilot at FX, The Old Man. Adapted from the Thomas Perry novel, the project stars Bridges as Dan Chase, a former CIA operative who absconded from the agency decades ago and has been living off the grid since. FX describes the series as “When an assassin arrives and tries to take Chase out, the old operative learns that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past.” Brenneman will star as Zoe, a woman picking up the pieces after a bruising divorce who rents a room to Chase not knowing he’s on the run.

Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary’s Revelations Entertainment have optioned Arthur T. Burton’s book, Black, Red & Deadly, for a TV series that they’ll develop about 19th century Arkansas slave-turned U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves. Reeves was a notable lawman whose legend has largely been ignored by history. Reeves captured more criminals than Pat Garrett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp, using flamboyant detective skills that were ahead of their time.

Ashlie Atkinson (BlacKkKlansman) is set as a series regular opposite Rami Malek and Christian Slater on the upcoming fourth and final season of USA Network’s Mr. Robot. The series stars Oscar winner Malek as Elliot Alderson, a cyber-security engineer who becomes involved in the underground hacker group, fsociety, after being recruited by its leader (Slater). Atkinson will play Janice, a chatty taxidermist with a peculiar sense of humor. The series also co-stars Portia Doubleday, Carly Chaikin, Martin Wallström, Grace Gummer, Michael Cristofer, and BD Wong.

Beta Film is partnering with Croatian production company Drugi Plan on the six-part drama series, Amnesia, about refugee and drug trafficking at the south eastern European border. The project will star Branka Katić (Captain America – The Winter Soldier), Tihana Lazović (The High Sun) and Aleksandar Cvjetković (Netflix’s The Paper). The drama is slated to shoot next March in the Plitvice Lakes National Park, the actual route used by many refugees who are fleeing Syria and other war-torn regions.

Justified star Timothy Olyphant is returning to FX with a key role in the upcoming fourth installment of the network’s anthology series, Fargo, headlined by Chris Rock. Season 4 is set in 1950 in Kansas City, Missouri amidst the uneasy truce between two crime syndicates.

The 9-1-1 spinoff, 9-1-1: Lone Star, has added Ronen Rubinstein (Dead of Summer) and Sierra McClain (Mindhunter, Empire) to the cast. The series follows Owen (Rob Lowe), a sophisticated New York firefighter who, along with his son (Rubinstein), relocates to the Texas capital and must try to balance saving those who are at their most vulnerable with solving the problems in his own life. McClain will play Grace Ryder, an Austin-based 9-1-1 call center operator and wife of firefighter Judd Ryder (Jim Parrack).

J.K. Rowling’s crime drama, Strike, will return to U.S. cable network Cinemax and has added several actors for its next season. Live By Night’s Robert Glenister and Peaky Blinders’ Natasha O’Keeffe have joined the series, which is based on Rowling’s best-selling Cormoran Strike crime novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Psych fans will have to wait a little longer for the second movie sequel. Originally slated to premiere in 2019, the film will not debut until at least spring 2020. That is because the movie is moving from USA Network, home of the original Psych series and Psych: The Movie, to Peacock, NBCU’s upcoming streaming service.

Escape, an established multicast network owned by E.W. Scripps’ Katz Networks, will rebrand itself as Court TV Mystery on September 30. According to the official announcement of the move, the rebrand will “continue the mission of Escape,” which targets women 25 to 54 with true-crime-focused programming.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

NPR's Morning Edition chatted with Attica Locke, author of Heaven, My Home, which continues the series featuring black Texas ranger, Darren Mathews, who returns from Locke's previous novel, Bluebird, Bluebird.

The latest Speaking of Mysteries podcasts featured Sherri Leigh James, talking about her mystery series with interior decorate, Cissy Huntington, and also author James R. Benn, discussing the 14th installment in his series of World War Two mysteries.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Bookclub spoke with S. A. Lelchuk about Save Me From Dangerous Men, the first in a new series featuring bookseller and private investigator Nikki Griffin, which has been optioned for film and television with foreign rights sold in multiple countries.

THEATRE

Laurence Fishburne and Sam Rockwell will return to Broadway in a revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, a play about three low-level crooks conjuring up a get-rich-quick scheme. The production will begin previews in March 2020 with an official opening on Tuesday, April 14. Fishburne will play the character Donny, while Rockwell will play Teach. The duo’s casting leaves the play’s third character, Bobby, as yet unfilled or unannounced.

The Cambridge Arts Theater and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, both in the UK, are the latest stops for the touring production of The Girl on The Train, based on the novel by Paula Hawkins, about a woman who discovers a woman she's been watching through the window on her train commute has disappeared. The show continues through September 28 for Cambridge and through October 5 for Plymouth.

The Limetree Theatre in Ireland is staging a production of Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced, September 30 through October 2. The classic story features Miss Marple who has to discover who committed a murder - at a party where it was announced in advance.

The Top 10 "Most-Produced Plays of the 2019-20 Season in the U.S." include a couple of crime dramas, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, based on the book by Mark Haddon, which tied for the top spot, and also Murder on the Orient Express adapted by Ken Ludwig from the book by Agatha Christie.

Banned Books Week

 

Today is the start of the annual Banned Books Week, launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship, which is why this year's theme is "Censorship Leaves Us in the Dark." The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country. In 2018, The ALA tracked 347 challenges to library, school and university materials and services in 2018, which included 483 different book titles.

Just as a reminder, more than 4,000 books were banned and burned in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. If you'd like to learn more about ways you can help stem the tide of censorship in the U.S., the American Library Association has some suggestions.

 

Mystery Melange

 

The winners of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, which celebrate the best of New Zealand crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing, have been announced:  Best Novel went to This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman; Best First Novel was won by Call Me Evie by JP Pomare; and Best Non-Fiction went to The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Jane Furlong by Kelly Dennett. Check out all the other finalists here.

The UK Kindle Storyteller Award shortlist was revealed and includes the crime novels, I Have Sinned by Caimh McDonnell; Tragedy at Piddleton Hotel by Emily Organ; and The Picture On The Fridge by Ian W Sainsbury. The UK Kindle Storyteller Award recognizes newly published work in the English language across any genre and was open to all authors who published their book through Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon.co.uk between May 1 and August 31 2019. The winner will be announced by at a ceremony in London in October, and awarded the cash prize, a marketing campaign to support the book on Amazon.co.uk, and the opportunity to have their book translated.

The York Literature Festival in the UK starts off its series of events tonight with international best-selling author Peter Robinson as he launches Many Rivers to Cross, the 26th instalment of the DCI Banks series. Other upcoming events will include Mischa Glenny, creator of the hit BBC series, McMafia, on October 7; and Poirot actor David Suchet on October 10 "behind the lens," showcasing his wonderfully evocative photographs with commentary.

The Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival is Tasmania’s newest biennial literary festival, and this year's theme is "Murder She Wrote," inspired by Agatha Christie, the Queen of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Murder She Wrote will begin on Halloween this year and run for four days from Thursday October 31 to Sunday November 3, followed by two days of a food and wine trail, the "Trail of Writers’ Tears." The four-day book spree includes Masterclasses, Workshops, incisive literary discussions and a Murder Mystery Party set in 1920s’ Cairo.

On Sunday, November 10, the 6th Annual Ladies of Intrigue returns to the Mesa Verde Country Club, at Costa Mesa, California. This year's headliners include J.A. Janice and Laurie King, with panelists to include Barbara DeMarco Barrett, Greta Boris, Steph Cha, Mary Anna Evans, Rachel Howzell Hall, Kaira Rouda, Laurie Stevens, Betty Webb, and others TBA. Register at ocsistersincrime.org or mysteryink.com.

The 7th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, in association with Bath Spa University, will be titled "Captivating Criminality 7: Crime Fiction: Memory, History and Revaluation." Slated for July 2-4, 2020, organizers have put out a call for papers that examine changing notions of criminality, punishment, deviance, and policing. What they're seeking: "Abstracts dealing with crime fiction past and present, true crime narratives, television and film studies, and other forms of new media such as blogs, computer games, websites and podcasts are welcome, as are papers adopting a range of theoretical, sociological and historical approaches."

A 12-year-old mystery enthusiast and scholar-in-residence by the name of Joseph has curated the exhibition, "A Century of Mystery and Intrigue," at Florida State University Library's Special Collections and Archives. The exhibit includes trains and works such as Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy (1927) and will remain on view until December 20, 2019. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at The Bunburyist)

A copy of Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock, more than doubled its estimate when it sold for $93,750, including buyer’s premium, to claim top-lot honors in Heritage Auctions’ Rare Books Auction featuring the Otto Penzler Collection of Mystery Fiction Part II on September 5. The volume is a first edition so rare that only one other copy is known to have made it to the auction block, and that one had a restored jacket. The novel effectively secured Greene’s place in Twentieth Century literature, was adapted multiple times for television and film and appears on the Haycraft Queen Cornerstone list, which is billed as “the definitive library of mystery fiction.”

Writing for Crime Reads, Martin Edwards looked at the renaissance of Golden Age crime fiction, specifically how Agatha Christie and her cohorts came back into fashion and helped to revive the traditional mystery.

Crime Reads's Susan Elia MacNeal looked at "10 novels that explore the world of women spies in the World Wars."

It apears that a woman once described as "Kenya's Sherlock Holmes," private investigator Jane Wawira Mugo, is in a spot of trouble. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has placed her on the country's Most Wanted list for "a list of alleged crimes she has masterminded read out like a paragraph from a crime thriller novel."

Want to spend the night in a library? If you travel to Wales, you're in luck. The Gladstone Library, the only residential library in Great Britain, houses 150,000 written works, including 32,000 books that were part of the collection of four-term Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, for whom the library is named. Established in 1906, the library’s onsite 26-room B&B still draws guests from around the United Kingdom, Europe, and United States.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Post-Enlistment Trail" by David S. Pointer.

In the Q&A roundup, David Lagercrantz spoke with Parade Magazine about saying good-bye to Lisbeth Salander, as he moves on to other literary endeavors; Anthony O’Neill chatted about his new novel, The Devil Upstairs, an allegorical thriller set in modern-day Edinburgh; and the Writers Who Kill's E.B. Davis interviewed Marilyn Levinson, a/k/a Allison Brook, about her Haunted Library mystery series and also chatted with Ellen Byron about her Cajun Country series.

 

Author R&R with Mark Bergin

Author Mark Bergin’s career as an award-winning crime reporter then police officer spanned nearly 30 years and resulted in him being named Police Officer of the year twice, for drug and robbery investigation. His career also put him in close contact with a difficult and often overlooked issue in American culture: police suicide. Currently, more police officers are lost to suicide than to conflicts in the line of duty. Bergin brings awareness to this weighted issue in his debut work, Apprehension, and plans to donate a portion of his sales directly to the National Police Suicide Foundation and similar programs.

Apprehension tells of the four best and worst days in Alexandria Police Detective John Kelly’s life. Preparing for a pedophile trial to save a young boy, Kelly discovers that a terrible, secret act he committed after his niece was murdered is about to surface. It could mean the end of his career or his freedom. And his girlfriend, the molester’s defense attorney, has a secret, too, one that will destroy Kelly on the witness stand. Crushing challenges and violent horrors rain on Kelly, pushing him to the brink and beyond.

Bergin stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R and researching and wriring Apprehension:

 

I researched all my life for my first novel, APPREHENSION. Right up to my death. 

I started writing it more than thirty years ago, during a bad personal and professional patch. I was a police officer on a busy plainclothes drug unit in Alexandria, Virginia, working fifty to sixty hours a week, and another ten or twenty in court (lots of police work equals lots of trials.) I was also going through a divorce, in part because my wife didn't like cops and I had just become one. 

I think personal angst is good for artistic impulse, and I found myself compelled to write several pages of notes for a mystery novel about a cop under stress. Write what you know. I promptly put the notes away and had a successful divorce, followed by a very successful marriage, children, a slower but satisfying career, promotion to a command level and, finally, two heart attacks. I actually died in each, but came back, leading to retirement. 

Suddenly off the force with nothing to do, I pulled out the old notes and began linking together what was essentially a beginning, some disjointed middle bits, and an ending. From the time I was a teenager I had seen writing a book as the peak of creative success. I had been a newspaper reporter for four years before joining the police, but that form of writing seemed far from artistry.

I began thinking of this story in 1988, so its narrative, crisis, and denouement stayed stuck in that time frame. When I picked it up again years later, I had to remind myself about the nuts and bolts of police life back then: what cruisers we drove, what radio identifiers and procedures were in place, how Headquarters was laid out.  But I also wanted to write a timeless novel that cops, especially my former partners, could read and say, "This is how it is, how it was, how it feels to be a police officer." I wanted it to be a novel they could give to family and friends as an example of what some cops go through physically and mentally. 

The truth is that I got most of the details wrong at first. A beta reader and retired Alexandria captain pointed out that we drove Plymouth K-cars in 1988, not Dodge Monacos. A former deputy chief helped me remember the patrol command structure on the street back then. A friend and Veterans Administration social worker gave me articles and advice on stress and PTSD. Very little of it was deliberate research, more like intelligent conversations with smart people who kept me on the right path to accomplish two of my goals: to write a compelling story for the general public and to satisfy my knowledgeable and demanding police audience.

My heart attacks led me to a third goal. Right before surgery I met a nurse who told me my one-hundred percent blockage of the left anterior descending artery was known in the medical field as "The Widowmaker."  She put her hand on my shoulder and said, "You're not supposed to be here anymore. God's got something more for you to do." When I finally began writing, I decided to give the book a greater purpose than just storytelling. I switched up the themes of the book to fully emphasize stress and PTSD and decided I would dedicate half my profits to programs that combat law enforcement suicide. Every year, more cops kill themselves than are killed on the street. In my time with the Alexandria Police Department, one fellow officer was murdered, while three shot themselves to death, and two city deputies also were victims of suicide. Five to one. A higher ratio than the national average, symbolic of a problem much unknown outside the law enforcement profession and mostly unconfronted inside. 

In APPREHENSION, Detective John Kelly prepares for a trial of a pedophile to protect the offender's son and victim but learns his own terrible but hidden act of violence committed last year is about to be discovered. Kelly will lose his job and maybe go to prison, but he can't stop it from surfacing. Meanwhile, the defense attorney in the case is his secret girlfriend, with her own secrets; one she can joyously share with Kelly, the other she must destroy him with in court. Kelly's stress pushes him to a desperate end. 

I hope the book raises awareness of police suicide and some funds to combat it. I hope it can act as a conversation starter among police agencies to help knock down the walls of weakness, shame, and privacy that stop us from seeking help. I also hope folks enjoy the mystery, but that's no longer up to me.

You find out more about Mark Bergin and Apprehension on his website and follow him on Facebook. Apprehension is now available through all major book retailers.

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Paramount Pictures is rebooting Face/Off, the 1997 John Woo-directed action thriller that starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, and has hired Oren Uziel to write the script. In the original film, Travolta played FBI agent Sean Archer, obsessed with catching a homicidal sociopath named Castor Troy who's responsible for killing the fed’s son. The agent undergoes facial transplant surgery and takes the mug of his nemesis so he can be sent to prison to find out a bomb’s whereabouts and stop an attack. The plan goes awry when the bad guy wakes up and takes the face of the FBI agent.

Lionsgate is in final talks to acquire the action spec script, Shadow Force. Kerry Washington and Sterling K. Brown will star in and produce the Leon Chills-scripted action drama that is described as "a two-hander action picture reminiscent of films like Mr. and Mrs. Smith."

Rosanna Arquette (Pulp Fiction) has signed on to star in the indie drama, Chicago 1919, with Julie Dash (The Rosa Parks Story) set to direct. The project follows two young African American brothers and their involvement in the Chicago race riot of 1919, an extremely violent racial conflict provoked by ethnic White Americans against Black Americans that began on the south side of Chicago. During the riot, thirty-eight people died, and it was the worst of the nearly twenty-five riots in the United States during the "Red Summer" of 1919.

Con O’Neill (Chernobyl) and Sarah Jane Potts (Kinky Boots) will lead the cast in the UK revenge-thriller, Don’t Leave Me. The project follows a suicidal man, now working as a church handyman and soup kitchen worker, as he tracks the killers of his wife and daughter.

Teresa Ruiz (Narcos: Mexico) has been added to the cast of The Minuteman, an action thriller starring Liam Neeson. Ruiz also joins actors Katheryn Winnick and Juan Pablo Raba in the story of a rancher (Neeson) on the Arizona border who becomes the unlikely defender of a young Mexican boy desperately fleeing the cartel assassins (led by Raba) who’ve pursued him into the U.S.

According to the LA Times, two venerable institutions are throwing their energies behind a search for lost Sherlock Holmes films. The UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Baker Street Irregulars are on a mission to recover and restore missing Holmes films from the silent era and beyond. Finding the bygone works will involve the Library of Congress, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and historians, collectors, and national film archives in Britain, Germany, France and other countries. Previous such efforts have located a missing 1916 Holmes production starring American actor William Gillette, which turned up in 2014 in Paris.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Netflix is adapting Harlan Coben’s mystery thriller, The Woods, as a Polish original. It's the latest international adaptation of a Coben book for Netflix, with the digital platform also remaking El Inocente in Spain with Oriol Paulo, and The Stranger and Safe in the UK. Set in two time spans, 1994 and 2019, The Woods tells the story of a Warsaw prosecutor, Pawel Kopinski, who is still grieving the loss of his sister from twenty five years ago – the night she walked into the woods at a summer camp and was never seen again. But now, the discovery of a young homicide victim – a boy who vanished along with Pawel’s sister – reveals evidence that links him to her disappearance. 

Production company, Bad Wolf, is developing a gritty drugs, sex, and nightclubs drama set in the aftermath of World War One. Soho 1918 follows the birth of the nightclub scene in Soho and tells the true story of a conservative, god-fearing 42-year old single mother, Kate Meyrick, who builds a nightclub empire and criminal family enterprise. She eventually becomes the most dangerous woman in London as well as a competitor to Brilliant Chang, the baron of Soho’s gritty underworld.

Six-time Emmy winner John Lithgow is set as a lead along with Jeff Bridges in FX’s drama pilot, The Old Man. FX has also tapped Jon Watts, who directed and co-wrote blockbusters Spider-Man: Homecoming and its sequel Spider-Man: Far From Home, to direct and executive produce. The project is based on the eponymous novel written by Thomas Perry and centers on Dan Chase (Bridges), who absconded from the CIA decades ago and has been living off the grid since. When an assassin arrives and tries to take Chase out, the old operative learns that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past. Lithgow will play Harold Harper, who is called back to service by the FBI after suffering a terrible personal loss. He has a complicated past with rogue fugitive Chase (Bridges), which makes him uniquely suited for hunting him down.

Swedish actor Adam Pålsson has been tapped by Netflix to star as Henning Mankell’s renowned detective protagonist, Kurt Wallander, in a six-episode English-language series due out next year. A prequel series of sorts, the "young Wallender" tells the story of detective Kurt Wallander’s first case when he is in his 20s working as a uniformed police officer. The cast also includes Richard Dillane as Police Commissioner Hemberg, Leanne Best as Frida Rask, and Ellise Chappell as Mona Wallander. The streaming network is hoping for the same success that has made a hit of Shaun Evans’ Inspector Morse prequel, Endeavour.

Ken Watanabe has signed on to executive produce and also star opposite Ansel Elgort in Tokyo Vice, a drama series for HBO Max, WarnerMedia’s upcoming streaming platform. Based on the book by Jake Adelstein with a script by Tony-winning playwright J.T. Rogers, the project is based on Adelstein’s non-fiction first-hand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police vice squad where an American journalist embeds himself to reveal corruption.

Game of Thrones star Richard Dormer is set to lead the cast in BBC America’s The Watch, based on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Dormer stars as Sam Vimes, Captain of The Watch, disempowered by a broken society that’s reduced his department’s jurisdiction to almost nothing. The eight-part series, set in the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork where crime has been legalized, follows a group of misfit cops who rise up from decades of helplessness to save their corrupt city from catastrophe.

Victoria’s Jenna Coleman, Dunkirk’s Billy Howle and Nocturnal Animals’ Ellie Bamber will topline the BBC/Netflix drama, The Serpent. The trio join Tahar Rahim, who plays Charles Sobhraj, one of the most elusive criminals of the 20th century. Sobhraj was the chief suspect in the unsolved murders of up to 20 young Western travelers across India, Thailand, and Nepal’s "Hippie Trail" in 1975 and 1976. A psychopath, con man, thief, and master of disguise, he slipped repeatedly from the grasp of authorities worldwide and had arrest warrants on three different continents.

Chernobyl’s Emily Watson will star in the psychological thriller, Too Close, for British broadcaster ITV. Written by actress and author, Clara Salaman, the three-part drama is based on the novel of the same title under the pseudonym Natalie Daniels. Watson plays a forensic psychiatrist assigned to work with a woman accused of a heinous crime but who claims she can’t remember a thing.

Mitch Silpa, perhaps best known for his comedic work in Bridesmaids, is taking on a dramatic role in CBS’s new legal drama series, All Rise. The series follows the lives of judges, prosecutors, and public defenders as they work with bailiffs, clerks, and cops to get justice for the people of Los Angeles amidst a flawed legal system. Silpa will play DDA Clayton Baker, a shrewd Deputy District Attorney who is willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead.

Amanda Peet (The Romanoffs) and Christian Slater (Mr. Robot) are set to headline the second season of USA Network's anthology series, Dirty John. Like the first installment, which aired on Bravo and starred Connie Britton and Eric Bana, the second will be based on a true crime story featuring an epic tale of love gone wrong. Season 2, titled Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, focuses on convicted murderer Betty Broderick (Peet) and her ex-husband (Slater) that spans the 1960s to the ’80s and chronicles the breakdown of their marriage that Oprah deemed one of "America’s messiest divorces" even before it ended in double homicide.

Liv Tyler is set to star opposite Rob Lowe in Fox’s spinoff series 9-1-1: Lone Star. Set in Austin, it follows Owen (Lowe), a sophisticated New York firefighter who, along with his son, relocates to the Texas capital and must try to balance saving those who are at their most vulnerable with solving the problems in his own life. Tyler will play Chief Paramedic Michelle Blake, the only one who can match wits with Owen in the station, where she often will put him in his place.

Emmy and Golden Globe nominee, Hope Davis, is set as a series regular opposite Michael Stuhlbarg in Your Honor, Showtime’s limited-run project starring Bryan Cranston and based on the popular Israeli drama, Kvodo. Lilli Kay (Chambers) has also come aboard the project and will recur in multiple episodes. The 10-episode legal thriller hails from Peter Moffat (Criminal Justice) and The Good Wife's Robert and Michelle King and features Davis as Gina, who might be even more dangerous than her husband, the feared crime boss Tommy (Stuhlbarg). Kay plays their daughter, Fia, whose relationship with her new boyfriend might threaten her family.

Emmy winner Uzo Aduba has signed on for a lead role, and Corey Hendrix and newcomer Matthew Elam have also been cast as regulars, opposite Chris Rock on the upcoming fourth season of FX’s Fargo. Set in Kansas City in 1950, the city serves as the crossroads and collision point of two migrations, Italian emigrants versus African Americans fleeing the south to escape Jim Crow, both fighting for a piece of the American dream as two controlling crime syndicates.

Dermot Mulroney, Anthony Welsh, Severine Howell-Meri, Cherelle Skeete, and newcomer Gianna Kiehl have all joined the season 2 cast of Amazon’s Hanna. They join Esmé Creed-Miles, who returns for the second season in the title role, along with Mireille Enos, who reprises her role as CIA operative Marissa Wiegler. Written by David Farr (The Night Manager), Hanna is equal parts high-concept thriller and coming-of-age drama, which follows the journey of an extraordinary teenage girl determined to escape from the grasp of the shadowy Utrax organization and its ruthless agenda.

Starz has set the premiere date for the European crime drama, Dublin Murders, for Sunday, November 10, and unveiled the first trailer. Based on the novel by Tana French, the psychological drama follows Rob Reilly (Killian Scott), a smart-suited detective whose English accent marks him as an outsider when he's tasked with investigating the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of Dublin. He's aided by his partner, Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene), who has his back when's pulled into another case of missing children and forced to confront his own darkness.

Apple TV is cranking up its new service and programming, and you can find a handy guide of current and upcoming shows here, which include Defending Jacob, based on William Landay’s best-selling legal thriller; an untitled series starring Brie Larson as a CIA agent in a new drama that’s said to be based on the real-life experiences of CIA undercover operative Amaryllis Fox; and another untitled series, this one a mystery, that follows a girl who moves to a small town where she gets involved in uncovering a cold case the community has tried to bury.

If you want a chronological listing of new and returning shows to be on the lookout for, the New York Times has you covered (free subscription required).

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

On the latest edition of Kansas Public Radio's Conversations, T. Jefferson Parker talks about his latest novel, The Last Good Guy, the third to feature private investigator Roland Ford.

This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast featured Tony Knighton, a lieutenant with the Philadelphia Fire Department, whose new crime novel is titled Three Hours Past Midnight.

Read or Dead's Rincey Abraham was joined by guest co-host Liberty Hardy to talk about the trailer for the Tana French TV adaptation; Emily St. John Mandel's new mystery book; and World War I mysteries.

The latest Criminal Mischief podcast, hosted by Dr. D.P. Lyle, focused on how investigators narrow their suspect list and completely exonerate some suspects by using the population distribution information for the four ABO blood types.

A new episode of Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up with the first chapter of Spirit Wind by Marilyn Meredith, read by actor Julia Reimer.

The Mystery People podcast honored the 20th anniversary of Stark House Press with a discussion on hard boiled crime fiction, featuring a great collection of historians, editors, and authors including Jeff Vorzimmer, Rick Ollerman, Tim Bryant, Josh Stallings, and Joe R. Lansdale.

Adam Hall received the Spybrary treatment on episode 85, with guest host Jeff Quest starting off a two-parter on Hall's Quiller spy books.

This week, the Writer's Detective Bureau, hosted by veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, discussed "Career-Long Fitness, Amateur Sleuths, and the Future of Policing."

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club focused on the factual side of mysteries with an interview of Rich Cohen and his latest historical true crime, The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation.

The Crime Time podcast reviewed books by Gilly MacMillan & C.J. Tudor and took at look at Stephen King’s 80’s masterpiece, Christine.

THEATRE

Buffalo Theatre Center near Chicago is presenting Holmes and Watson through October 13. Three years following the mysterious "death" of Sherlock Holmes at Richenbach, there have been many who’ve claimed to be Holmes, all de-bunked as imposters by the faithful partner of the sleuth, Watson. But now three separate men insist that they are the infamous detective, having survived that encounter at the Falls. Full of twists and turns, this is "a riveting and clever adventure" from award-winning playwright Jeffrey Hatcher.

Chicago's Lifeline Theatre is staging a production of Whose Body, based on the book by Dorothy L. Sayers, with a run through October 27. When a dead body turns up in a bathtub wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez glasses, amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey assigns himself to the case. However, when the mystery becomes labyrinthine, he enlists the help of close friend Inspector Parker to follow his only lead, a teaching hospital near the scene of the crime. Could it be a harmless prank by a medical student or something more sinister?

Coming soon to the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK, is the Agatha Christie play, A Murder is Announced. Starting September 23 with a run through the 28th, the story follows residents of Chipping Cleghorn who are astonished to read an advert in the local newspaper that a murder will take place this coming Friday at Little Paddocks, the home of Letitia Blacklock. Unable to resist, the group gather at the house at the appointed time, when the lights go out and a gun is fired. Enter Miss Marple, who must unravel a complex series of relationships and events to solve the mystery of the killer.

Agatha Christie’s mystery play, The Mousetrap, the longest continuously running play in the world, is coming to the Memorial Opera House in Valparaiso. The play, about a group of strangers stranded in a boarding house during a snowstorm who must figure out which one of them is a murderer, will have performance dates of Sept. 27-29, Oct. 4-6, and Oct. 11-13.

Mystery Melange

 

The Australian Crime Writers Association announced this year's winners of the Ned Kelly Awards:  2019 Best Fiction, The Lost Man by Jane Harper; 2019 Best True Crime, Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee; and 2019 Best First Fiction, The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan. For all of this year's shortlisted winners, head on over to the ACWA website.

This year's recipients of the 2019 Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction are Megan Abbott (for Distinguished Body of Work) and Sarah St. Vincent (Debut Novel). The awards, which will be presented October 10 at the Louisiana Humanities Center in New Orleans, were established for women writers to honor the memory of Diana Pinckley (1952-2012), a longtime crime fiction columnist for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, and her passion for mysteries. (HT to Mystery Fanfare.)

The four finalists were revealed for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year:  Breakers by Doug Johnstone; A Treachery of Spies by Manda Scott; Conviction by Denise Mina; and The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry. The winner will be presented at the opening reception of Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival at the Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling on September 20. (HT to Shots Magazine)

In conjunction with the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity (C3) Con in Columbia, Maryland, ten authors will read from their work at the latest Noir at the Bar event this Friday, September 13, which is free and open to the public. Hosted by E.A. Aymar, the event will include readings from Debbi Mack, Adam Meyer, Alan Orloff, Ellen Butler, Austin S. Camacho, David Mack, S.A. Cosby, Matty Dalrymple, and Weldon Burge - all of whom are competing for an engraved trophy, with attendees choosing the winner.

Gallery 88 in Mount Ephraim, New Jersey, is hosting an exhibit by Chris Cote, titled "Neo Noir Philadelphia," and there will be an opening reception this Friday from 6-9 pm. Chris Cote is an art director and graphic designer by day and street photographer by night, who is known for his cover art and production design for Philadelphia area comic book publisher Zenescope Entertainment, as well as his street photography project inspired by the neo-noir genre.

Speaking of things noir-ish and pulp-ish, Pulp Adventurecon is coming up on November 2 in Bordentown, New Jersey. Pulp Adventurecon (a one-day show held annually in two locations: Fort Lauderdale in February and Bordentown in November), hosts collectors and vendors of rare pulp magazines, vintage paperbacks, golden age comic books, movie memorabilia, and related paper collectibles.

Kirkus Reviews's mystery correspondent, Radha Vatsal, took at look at how Sisters in Crime is helping to diversify crime fiction by supporting and promoting under-represented voices.

In a plot straight out of a crime novel, Richard Danney, the son of author Frederic Dannay (who, along with his cousin penned the Ellery Queen mystery series), discovered his late mystery-novelist father’s signed books had been stolen, after seeing them go up for auction at Soetheby’s. Richard Danney claims 33 of his dad’s signed books were stolen by his step-mom Rose, passed to her son Terry Koppel and eventually given to Sotheby’s for auctioning, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed last week. After Frederic died in 1982, his third wife, Rose, allegedly fought his will but ultimately gave her right to Frederic’s literary works and agreed to turn over property from their house including "all Literary papers," the court documents claim. Sotheby’s is safeguarding the books and agreed to suspend any sales until the dispute was worked out.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "The Hunt" by Larry Chavis.

In the Q&A roundup, Hallie Ephron interviewed Lee McIntyre, an author best known for his nonfiction books, about his first work of crime fiction, The Sin Eater; Hank Phillippi Ryan and Paddy Hirsch sat down for a conversation on journalism and writing fiction; Alexander McCall Smith chatted with Event about his writing routine and the "value of civilisation"; and the Mystery People interviewed Reed Farrel Coleman about The Bitterest Pill, his latest continuation of Robert B. Parker’s character, Paradise Massachusetts Police Chief Jesse Stone.

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Paramount Pictures has acquired Brilliance, and will turn the Marcus Sakey novel adaptation into a vehicle for Will Smith to star and Akiva Goldsman to write. The story is set in a future where non-neurotypical people ("Brilliants") are demonized by society who fear they will threaten the status quo of the "normal" population with their unique gifts. Smith will play the book series hero, Nick Cooper, a federal agent who works for the Department of Analysis and Response and whose job it is to track down and terminate criminal abnorms who use their gifts for ill. 

New Line Cinema has won an auction for Shut In, a spec script by first-time scribe Melanie Toast. The story is an edgy thriller centered on a single mother who is held captive by her violent ex, leaving her two young children at risk - and she must do everything to protect them and survive.

Saban Films has taken U.S. rights to the Aaron Eckhart action thriller, Line of Duty, from director Steven C. Miller. The pic follows Eckhart as a disgraced cop who finds himself in a race against time to find a kidnap victim whose abductor he accidentally killed. The film will be receiving a November theatrical release.

Vikings star, Katheryn Winnick, and Narcos star, Juan Pablo Raba, have joined the cast of The Minuteman, the action thriller starring Liam Neeson that begins production next week in New Mexico and Ohio. The project follows a rancher (Neeson) on the Arizona border who becomes the unlikely defender of a young Mexican boy desperately fleeing the cartel assassins (led by Raba) who’ve pursued him into the U.S.

Marvel veteran Hayley Atwell as been cast alongside Tom Cruise in the new Mission: Impossible movie, the seventh in the franchise and the first of two being directed back-to-back by Christopher McQuarrie. However, there is no word yet on the role that Atwell will play.

An upcoming Matt Damon thriller has been given a 2020 awards season release date with a limited release on November 6, 2020, before going wide on November 13. The untitled film follows Damon as Bill, an "oil-rig roughneck," who leaves his familiar Oklahoman environs to be with his daughter, who has been studying in France but was recently imprisoned for a murder she claims she didn't commit. In addition to Damon, the film also stars Abigail Breslin and Camille Cottin.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Fox has put in development The Perfect Couple, a one-hour mystery drama based on Elin Hilderbrand’s bestselling novel. The story centers around wedding season on Nantucket, where one lavish wedding ends in disaster before it can even begin when a body is discovered hours before the ceremony. As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash digs into the backgrounds of the bride, the groom, the groom’s famous mystery novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, Kapenash discovers every wedding is a minefield – and no couple is perfect.

Monk creator and executive producer, Andy Breckman, has re-teamed with the series’ director, Randy Zisk, for another hour-long procedural that CBS has put in development. Titled Einstein (and based on the German series), the action follows the brilliant but directionless great-grandson of Albert Einstein, who spends his days as a comfortably tenured professor. That is, until his bad boy antics land him in trouble with the law, and he's pressed into service helping a local police detective solve her most puzzling cases.

Black Ops producer World Media Rights is developing a true crime series with the real-life inspiration for Amazon’s Bosch after securing access to two Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Cold Case Unit veterans. The ten-part documentary series, Catching the Cold Killers, will follow officers Rick Jackson and Adam Bercovici as they re-open cold cases from LA’s law enforcement community. Jackson, who is a founding member of the LAPD cold case unit, was the inspiration for Michael Connelly’s fictional character, Harry Bosch, which was adapted into the eponymous Amazon cop drama.

Hulu has opted not to proceed with an ambitious two-series drama project based on two of John Grisham’s novels, 1995's The Rainmaker and 2015's Rogue Lawyer. Deadline reported that there is interest from other potential buyers in the project, which had been envisioned as the first chapter in a larger franchise, tentatively titled The Grisham Universe.

Oscar-winning actor Christoph Waltz is set to co-star opposite Liam Hemsworth in the untitled action thriller from Scorpion creator Nick Santora, producer Gordon Gray, Silver Reel Pictures, and CBS Television Studios. In the series, desperate to take care of his pregnant wife before a terminal illness can take his life, Dodge Maynard (Hemsworth) accepts an offer to participate in a deadly game where he soon discovers that he’s not the hunter…but the prey. The action-thriller explores the limits of how far someone would go to fight for their life and their family

Glynn Turman (Mr. Mercedes) is set for a recurring role opposite Chris Rock on the upcoming fourth season of FX’s Fargo, which will be set in Kansas City in 1950. The city will serve as the crossroads and collision point of two migrations, Italians coming from Italy and African Americans fleeing the south to escape Jim Crow, both fighting for a piece of the American dream as two controlling crime syndicates. Rock plays the head of one family, while Turman will recur as Doctor Senator.

Amazon has set the return date for John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan. The series, based on the CIA officer from Tom Clancy’s books, will premiere its second season on Nov. 1. Amazon also released the full-length trailer for the upcoming season,

The first trailer for Netflix's new procedural drama, Criminal, is out, with David Tennant and Hayley Atwell starring as uncooperative suspects in the "innovative" police procedural anthology series. Set entirely in the confines of a police interview suite, the show features 12 distinct stories that take place in four countries: the UK, France, Germany, and Spain.

Facebook Watch has dropped the first trailer for Limetown, its adaptation of the hit podcast starring and exec produced by Jessica Biel. Limetown follows Lia Haddock, played by Biel, a journalist for American Public Radio, as she unravels the mystery behind the disappearance of over 300 people at a neuroscience research community in Tennessee.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Crime author Walter Mosley spoke with WBUR in Boston about his new reference work, Elements of Fiction.

Speaking of Mysteries welcomed author Sherri Leigh James to discuss her series featuring interior decorator Cissy Huntington, the protagonist in Blood Red and Iced Blue.

The Writer's Detective Bureau, a podcast hosted by veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, discussed "Exigent Circumstances, Becoming a PI, and Confidential Informants."

It Was a Dark and Stormy Bookclub chatted with Ann Aguirre, an American author of speculative fiction, about her new crime novel, The Third Mrs. Durst.

THEATER

The Vertigo Theatre Mystery Series in Calgary, Canada, will present Strangers on a Train, September 15 - October 13, 2019. The thriller play, by Craig Warner that's based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, was made famous by the classic Alfred Hitchcock film.