It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Steven Spielberg is attached to direct a new original story centered on Frank Bullitt, the iconic character played by Steve McQueen in the 1968 thriller, Bullitt. Spielberg will also produce the pic along with Kristie Macosko Krieger, with Josh Singer on board to pen the script. Apparently, this is not a remake of the original film but a new idea centered on the character. In the original, Frank Bullitt is a no-nonsense San Francisco cop on the hunt for the mob kingpin that killed his witness. Considered one of McQueen’s more iconic roles, the film delivers one of the most famous car-chase scenes in cinema history.
Sharon Stone has optioned the rights to Lisa Barr’s upcoming novel, Woman on Fire, inking a deal to produce and star in a film adaptation. In the novel, a savvy, young journalist gets embroiled in a major international art scandal centered around a Nazi-looted masterpiece, and must contemplate whether finding the painting and exposing its dark history is worth her life. The thriller—laced with sex, art, and history— forces readers to question where the line should be drawn between the pursuit of justice and the hunt for revenge.
Robert Downey Jr. will be reuniting with Iron Man 3 filmmaker, Shane Black, on a new film for Amazon Studios based on the character Parker, created by author Donald E. Westlake (writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark). The character of Parker first appeared in the 1962 novel, The Hunter, where he’s introduced as a professional thief who’s left for dead by a past associate and spends the rest of the novel trying to track down his former accomplice. The Parker novels have been adapted before, notably in 1967’s Point Blank starring Lee Marvin, 1999’s Payback starring Mel Gibson, and 2013's Parker with Jason Statham playing the title character.
Rob Kirkland, Nick Cassavetes, Dajana Gudić, Paul Johansson, and Lou Ferrigno Jr. have signed on to star in the feature thriller, Dyad, written by Will Hirschfeld and directed by Patrick Flaherty (Rule of Thirds). Dyad follows Sofia (Gudić), a journalist eager to make her mark but consumed by conspiracy theories and her struggles with dissociative identity disorder. As she connects a couple of seemingly isolated high-profile deaths, she is pulled into the orbit of Zane (Cassavetes), the mercurial leader of a global cabal that counts media moguls (Johansson), politicians (Kirkland), and Hollywood elites amongst its members. Once Sofia discovers how deep the ties of this shadow government run, she sets her sights on the impossible task of taking them down.
Frank Grillo has signed on to star opposite Harvey Keitel in Justin Price’s action-thriller, Hard Matter, for Wonderfilm Media, which is currently in production in Biloxi, Mississippi. The film is set in a new America divided by quadrants, in which a power-hungry corporation has taken over the conventional prison system and replaced it with a system of deadly vigilante watches. In this version of America, criminals are the new law enforcers that carry out all forms of capital punishment in order to regain their place in society.
Bollywood star Elnaaz Norouzi has been added to the cast of Kandahar, the action movie starring Gerard Butler that has been shooting in Saudi Arabia. Ric Roman Waugh is directing the film, which stars Butler as Tom Harris, an undercover CIA operative, stuck deep in hostile territory in Afghanistan. He must fight his way out, alongside his Afghan translator, to an extraction point in Kandahar, all while avoiding the elite special forces tasked with hunting them down.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
Dave E. Kelly has scored a straight-to-series order at ABC for Avalon, a drama based on Michael Connelly’s short story. Avalon, which is ABC’s first straight-to-series order for its 2022-23 programming slate, takes place in the city of Avalon on Catalina Island, where L.A. Sheriff’s Department Detective Nicole "Nic" Searcy heads up a small office. Catalina has a local population that serves more than 1 million tourists a year, and each day when the ferries arrive, hundreds of potential new stories enter the island. Detective Searcy is pulled into a career-defining mystery that will challenge everything she knows about herself and the island.
Deadline reported that Quentin Tarantino is in early talks to direct one or two episodes of Justified: City Primeval, the FX limited series that has Timothy Olyphant reprising his role as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. Tarantino and Olyphant worked together on the director’s most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The filmmaker is quite a fan of author Elmore Leonard, who created the Givens character, adapting the Leonard novel, Rum Punch. into Jackie Brown, as well as optioning several Leonard titles during his career.
In a competitive situation, John Wells Productions landed the rights to Danya Kukafka’s recently published suspense thriller, Notes on an Execution. The novel tells the story of a serial killer in his last hours on death row through the eyes of the women in his life. Per the description, Notes on an Execution "presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice, our cultural obsession with crime stories, and challenges audiences to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men."
The Blacklist has been handed an early renewal with NBC picking up the crime drama for Season 10 while Season 9 is still on the air. Star/executive producer James Spader is set to return for the 10th season, which will be the second following the departure of both its female lead Megan Boone, who exited at the end of Season 8, and its creator, Jon Bokenkamp. Also back for Season 10 as executive producer/showrunner is John Eisendrath, who has been on the series from the start, co-showrunning with Bokenkamp for the first eight seasons and serving as sole showrunner since the start of Season 9.
Emmy winner Michael Chiklis is set to headline the premiere episode of Fox’s straight-to-series crime anthology drama, Accused, with fellow Emmy winner, Michael Cuesta (Homeland) directing the premiere. Accused is based on the BBC’s BAFTA-winning crime anthology, with each episode opening in a courtroom on the accused, where viewers know nothing about their crime or how they ended up on trial. Told from the defendant’s point of view through flashbacks, Accused depicts how an ordinary person gets caught up in an extraordinary situation, ultimately revealing how one wrong turn leads to another, until it’s too late to turn back. Chiklis will play Dr. Scott Corbett, a successful brain surgeon who faces the limits of unconditional love when he discovers his teenage son may be planning a violent attack at school.
Ashley Reyes has been tapped as a lead opposite Jared Padalecki in the CW’s Walker. Reyes will first appear in the next episode, Nudge, slated to premiere March 3. She succeeds Lindsay Morgan who exited Walker earlier this season for personal reasons after playing Walker’s (Padalecki) partner, Micki Ramirez, since the pilot. Reyes will play a new character, Cassie, a "spirited, uncensored, strong Texas Ranger based in Dallas who served as a Texas state trooper for eight years before that." The CW’s reimagining of the popular CBS drama Walker, Texas Ranger centers on Cordell Walker (Padalecki), a widower and father of two with his own moral code who returns home to Austin after being undercover for two years.
Meanwhile, Matt Barr, who played 2020s Hoyt Rawlins on the CW’s Walker, will also play 1800s Hoyt Rawlins in the network’s spin-off pilot, Walker: Independence. Barr has been been tapped as the male lead in the project, executive produced by Walker's Jared Padalecki. Walker: Independence, a Walker origin story, is set in the late 1800s and follows Abby Walker, an affluent Bostonian whose husband is murdered before her eyes while on their journey out West. On her quest for revenge, Abby crosses paths with Hoyt Rawlins (Barr), a lovable rogue in search of purpose. Abby and Hoyt’s journey takes them to Independence, Texas, where they encounter diverse, eclectic residents running from their own troubled pasts and chasing their dreams. The CW also announced that Justin Johnson Cortez is set as a series regular.
Arrow's Juliana Harkavy has been cast as a lead in the ABC drama pilot, L.A. Law, a revival of the iconic Steven Bochco legal drama. She joins original cast members Blair Underwood and Corbin Bernsen, who are reprising their roles as Jonathan Rollins, and Arnie Becker, respectively, as well as fellow new series regulars Hari Nef, Toks Olagundoye, Ian Duff, and John Harlan Kim. In the pilot, the venerable law firm of McKenzie Brackman — now named Becker Rollins — reinvents itself as a litigation firm specializing in only the most high-profile, boundary-pushing and incendiary cases.
Anthony Boyle and Lovie Simone have joined the cast of AppleTV+’s upcoming limited series, Manhunt, which follows the hunt for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Boyle will star as Booth, while Simone will play Mary Simms, a former slave of the doctor who treated Booth’s injury and gave him safe harbor after his crime. The pair join series lead Tobias Menzies, playing Lincoln’s War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, who was nearly driven to madness by a desire to catch the president’s killer. The limited series is based on the book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
In honor of Black History Month, It Was a Dark And Stormy Book Club featured three books by black female mystery authors.
Read or Dead also joined in the annual February celebration, as hosts Katie and Nusrah talked about mystery and suspense reads by Black authors.
Hannah King chatted with CrimeTime FM's Paul Burke about her debut novel, She and I; her characters Keeley and Jude; class; being post troubles generation; judging others; and how much is up to the reader to complete the novel.
A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up featuring the mystery short story "Pisan Zapra," written by Josh Pachter and read by actor Amelia Ryan.
The Queer Writers of Crime podcast took a look at Joseph Hansen's landmark novel, Fadeout, which launched his twelve-book series featuring Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator and gay man. Crime and mystery fiction publisher Syndicate Books is republishing all twelve novels throughout 2022.
Spybrary Spy Book podcast chatted with Paul Vidich about his latest, The Matchmaker, a chilling Cold War spy story set in West Berlin where an American woman targeted by the Stasi must confront the truth behind her German husband's mysterious disappearance.
Wrong Place, Write Crime interviewed Bryan Collins about his books and his podcast.
My Favorite Detective Stories spoke with James Ziskin, author of the Anthony and Macavity Award-winning Ellie Stone Mysteries.
Listening to the Dead was joined by Pippa Gregory, one of only three criminal profilers working in the UK today, to discuss the infamous cases of Yvonne Killian and Rachel Nickell, two investigations where criminal profiling was tested and found wanting.
