Quote of the Week

 

Ngaio Marsh Magnificence

 

The finalists were revealed for the 2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards. Now in their sixteenth season, the Awards celebrate excellence in mystery, thriller, crime, and suspense writing from New Zealand authors. Finalists will be celebrated and this year’s winners announced at a special event, "The Ngaio Marsh Awards and The Murderous Mystery," to be held in association with the WORD Christchurch Confrence at Tūranga on Thursday, September 25.

BEST NOVEL

• Return To Blood by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
• A Divine Fury by DV Bishop (Macmillan)
• Woman, Missing by Sherryl Clark (HarperCollins)
• Home Truths by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
• 17 Years Later by JP Pomare (Hachette)
• The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin)
• Prey by Vanda Symon (Orenda Books)

BEST FIRST NOVEL

• Dark Sky by Marie Connolly (Quentin Wilson Publishing)
• Lie Down With Dogs by Syd Knight (Rusty Hills)
• A Fly Under The Radar by William McCartney 
• The Defiance Of Frances Dickinson by Wendy Parkins (Affirm Press)
• The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin)
• Kiss Of Death by Stephen Tester (Heritage Press)

BEST NONFICTION

• The Trials Of Nurse Kerr by Scott Bainbridge (Bateman Books)
• The Survivors by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)
• The Crewe Murders by Kirsty Johnstone & James Hollings (Massey Uni Press)
• The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour & Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin)
• Gangster’s Paradise by Jared Savage (HarperCollins)
• Far North by David White & Angus Gillies (Upstart Press)

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: One Night's Mystery

May Agnes Fleming (1840-1880) was one of the first Canadians to pursue a highly successful career as a writer of popular fiction, reportedly earning $10,000 a year, a princely sum at the time. Her work became so popular that many of her novels were re-issued under different titles, often due to piracy. Her first book was published in her adopted state of New York in 1963, titled Erminie; or The gypsy's Vow: A Tale of Love and Vengeance. Using several pen names, including Cousin May Carleton and M.A. Earlie, she published several serial tales in the New York Mercury, the New York Weekly, the Boston Pilot and the London Journal (and set several of her books in England).

She wrote somewhere around 40 novels and would have written more if she hadn't died prematurely from Bright's Disease at the age of 39. Despite her literary success, she struggled in her personal life, separating from her alcoholic husband and ultimately excluding him from her will and the upbringing of their four children. This misfortune didn't break her but rather may have inspired the many strong female characters in her novels, both good and evil.

One Night's Mystery follows the lives and loves of three young women: Cyrilla Hendrick, the daughter of handsome, penniless, scoundrel; her best friend, Sydney Owenson, a naive heiress; and Dolly De Courcy, a spirited actress. Both Cyrilla and Sydney are engaged, although things aren't as they seem in either case. Sydney's gold-digging fiance is besotted with Dolly, while Cyrilla's is arranged through her aunt, whom Cyrilla calls "the crossest, spitefulest old woman on earth." The one night's mystery of the title refers to the disappearance of Sydney's fiance the day before her wedding, but did he run off with Dolly or was he murdered?

One Night's Mystery was first serialized in New York Weekly and the London Journal before being published in book form by G.W. Carleton in 1876, toward the end of Fleming's life. It is a prime example of the type of work Fleming wrote, romantic suspense with a few Gothic elements thrown in. Her writing style is direct, her characters simple but reasonably well fleshed out, and the complicated relationships between the characters thorny and entertaining, if a tad melodramatic.

Despite the melodrama, Fleming does insert moments of poetic descriptions that are especially effective with settings, such as this one about the grim street that houses the dull and respectable Demoiselles Chateauroy school for young ladies (where Cyrilla and Sydney met):

There were no shops, there were no people; the houses looked at you as you passed with a sad, settled, melancholy mildew upon them; the doors rarely opened, the blinds and curtains were never drawn; prim little gardens, with prim little gravel-paths, shut in these sad little houses from the street; now and then a pale, pensive face might gleam at you from some upper window, spectre-like, and vanish.

Mystery Melange

 

The Washington Center for the Book announced the finalists for the 59th annual Washington State Book Awards on Tuesday. The awards honor outstanding books published by Washington authors in 2024. This year, there were 42 finalists in seven categories, with the winners in each to be announced Sept. 16. The Best Fiction category includes the crime novel, Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco, which was also named a Best Crime Novel of 2024 by The New York Times Book Review.

Despite all the craziness in D.C. right now, the 2025 Library of Congress National Book Festival is full steam ahead for on Saturday, September 6, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Among the mystery and thriller events are a discussion about "Justice on Trial" with Ron Currie (The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne) and Scott Turow (Presumed Guilty); and Liz Moore (The God of the Woods) and Chris Whitaker (All the Colors of the Dark) in conversation about their blockbuster novels, which both are both set in the 1970s and feature missing people. There will also be book signings by these authors and many more.

Thirty-five years, ago, Jim Sanborn created a coded message within Kryptos, a sculpture stationed in a courtyard at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The piece, a meditation on secrets in a house of secrets, has fascinated and bedeviled professional and amateur cryptologists since its dedication, and over the years, the first three panels were cracked by code breakers within the C.I.A., a California computer scientist, and the National Security Agency. The fourth panel has remained unsolved—until now. In an auction on November 20, Sanborn will provide the answer to the remaining code to the highest bidder. Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related to the coding, Mr. Sanborn will also provide a 12-by-18-inch copper plate that has three lines of alphabetic characters cut through with a jigsaw, which he calls “my proof-of-concept piece." His ideal winning bidder is someone who will hold on to that secret.

Sad news to report: After 42 years, the always humorous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, has announced its retirement. It's the brainchild of Professor Scott Rice, who had to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist and chose Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the novel, Paul Clifford. That novel began with the famous "purple prose" opener that has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle, Snoopy, "It was a dark and stormy night." You can still read the contest archives online, which includes the winning entries for the Crime & Detective category through the years, as well as this entry, which won the Grand Panjandrum's Special Award last year: "Mrs. Higgins’ body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose."

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Give and Take" by Angela McClintock.

In the Q&A roundup, Lisa Towles was interviewed by the Writers Fun Zone about her technothrillers, with the latest, Switch (the third installment in the E&A Investigations Thriller Series), out next month; and Writers Who Kill's E. B. Davis spoke with with Alyssa Maxwell about Murder At Arleigh, the thirteenth book in the Gilded Newport Mystery series.

Media Murder for Monday

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

In a highly competitive situation, New Regency has landed Fixation, an erotic thriller spec from Wednesday screenwriters Erika Vazquez and Siena Butterfield. The project will be produced alongside Emmy winner Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories production company. While not much is known about the film’s plot, it has been reported it centers on a couple’s therapist who is drawn into a dangerous triangle of lust, lies, and manipulation.

Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade), Ty Simpkins (The Whale), Julie Ann Emery (Better Call Saul), and Mel Rodriguez (The Last Man on Earth) have joined the cast of Busted, an indie revenge thriller from director Maria Bissell (How to Deter a Robber), who penned the script with cinematographer Stephen Tringali. Currently in production, the film follows naive college freshman Wendy (Fisher), who gets trapped in a vicious blackmail scheme by her own roommate, forced into a seedy strip club to pay off the debt. But when she uncovers the sick truth behind the setup, the tables turn — hard. Joining forces with the club’s outrageous misfit crew, Wendy launches a daring reverse con to take her tormentor down. Others in the cast include Michael Rose, Kathleen Wilhoite, Maria Zhang, and Ava Allan.

TELEVISION/STREAMING

Glenn Close will star in the Channel 4 and Sony Pictures Television drama, Maud, playing Maud Oldcastle, an old killer with a tortured past. Determined to break from a lifetime spent caring for her sister, Maud sets out to claim a long-overdue second act, but a suspicious detective and an unrelenting world built for youth may soon discover just how far she’ll go to protect her freedom. Written by Nina Raine and Moses Raine (Donkey Heart) and produced by Wolf Hall maker Playground, the show is based on the short story collections, An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good and An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, by best-selling Swedish author Helene Tursten.

Oscar winner Nicolas Cage is in talks to headline the upcoming fifth season of HBO‘s Emmy-winning crime anthology series, True Detective, which marks the return of Season 4’s Issa Lopez as writer-showrunner. The new installment will be set in New York, in Jamaica Bay, per HBO’s Head of Drama Series and Film Francesca Orsi. Cage is in talks for the lead role of Henry Logan, a New York detective on the case at the center of the new season. The actor has been circling the part for a while, but it's unclear whether the deal will close. Another Oscar winner, Jodie Foster, also took a long time to make her deal for True Detective's Season 4, Night Country.

George Kay, the creator of Apple’s Hijack, is back with War, a new legal thriller starring Dominic West (The Crown) and Sienna Miller (Anatomy of a Scandal). West plays tech titan Morgan Henderson, and Miller stars as his estranged wife, international film star Carla Duval. The drama is set in the elite world of London law and kicks off with a "scandalous divorce case that sends shockwaves through boardrooms, bedrooms, and courtrooms alike." HBO and Sky have handed the show a two-season order, setting it up as an anthology series with a new case each season. Season one also stars Phoebe Fox, James McArdle, Nina Sosanya, Pip Torrens, and Archie Renaux.

Star Trek: The Next Generation star Marina Sirtis and Dynasty star Stephanie Beacham are returning to the small screen this fall in The Sunshine Murders, a new cozy crime drama premiering Thursday, September 4, on UPtv with a two-episode debut beginning at 8pm ET/PT. The series is about an unlikely crime fighting duo made up of two very different sisters: Shirley Rangi (played by Emily Corcoran), a farmer from New Zealand who travels to Athens in search of her father, and her half-sister and detective, Helen Moustakas (Dora Chrysikou). Shirley soon helps Helen solve crimes with her "bush" wisdom and wit while they try to find their missing father. Beacham will play Lady Gloria Whitten-Soames, and Sirtis is stepping into the role of Helen's mother, Alexa Moustakas.

Laura Donnelly (The Nevers) is set to star in the ITV serial killer drama, The Dark, playing Scottish Detective Monica Kennedy, the protagonist in the crime series. When the body of a young man is found eerily staged in the idyllic Scottish wilderness, she fears this is the beginning of a terrifying campaign that will strike at the heart of a rural community. The series is based on GR Halliday’s novel, From the Shadows, and there are hopes for more seasons with two more books already penned in the trilogy: Dark Waters and Under the Marsh.

PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

Science Friday welcomed chemist-turned-author Kathryn Harkup to discuss her new book, V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death, and the science of poisons: why they’re so popular in whodunnits, and how to get away with murder (in fiction writing, of course).

On the latest episode of Spybrary, host Shane Whaley interviewed author Alex Gerlis about his latest novel, The Second Traitor, book 2 in a spy series which is set against the backdrop of World War II and the early Cold War. Gerlis also chatted with Crime Time FM host, Paul Burke, about the book; Operation Sea Lion; Hitler as military commander; German spies in England; and Alan Furst.

Debbi Mack's latest guest on the Crime Cafe podcast is thriller novelist, Howard Kaplan, author of the Jerusalem Spy Series, the latest of which is The Syrian Sunset.

The Cops and Writers podcast featured a playback of a Sisters in Crime panel, "Behind the Badge," with moderator Patrick J. O'Donnell, retired NYPD Detective Marique Bartoldus (Twenty and Out), retired Chicago PD Detective Lieutenant Richard Rybicki (Dead Line), and retired Milwaukee Fire Department Captain Greg Renz (Beyond the Flames).

On Read or Dead, Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed historical crime and horror novels.

The latest episode of Mystery Rat's Maze featured the mystery short story, "A Funny Name" by Gregory Meece, read by actor MW Hoffman.

Author R&R with Heather Dixon

After spending over a decade in the marketing and advertising industry as a copywriter, Heather Dixon began a freelance career writing for businesses, as well as writing content for top parenting sites such as Red Tricycle and Pregnant Chicken. Her writing has appeared in a number of established sites, including Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, Motherly, SavvyMom and others. She has appeared on CBC radio and in print in the Globe and Mail. She lives just outside of Toronto, Ontario with her husband, her three young daughters and her Bouvier, Zoey.

Her debut crime novel, Burlington, asks, "What happens to the mean girls when they grow up?" In Burlington, they become a clique of alpha moms at the gates of their children's posh elementary school that Mae Roberts only stumbles into when they decide to accept the new mom in their fancy suburban neighborhood. And everything seems peachy keen until Mae begins slipping more deeper into a world of odd dinner parties, secrets, and rumors of suicide attempts. It's only when one of the Riverpark moms disappears, and then another, that Mae must decide what's more important—fitting in or uncovering the truth. A fresh take on belonging, obsession, and schoolyard politics, Burlington is a suspenseful debut novel that explores the exclusive world of wealthy mothers and demonstrates how privilege can come at a devastating price.

Heather Dixon stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching the novel:

 

My debut novel could probably be best categorized as book club fiction with elements of suspense. It’s called Burlington and it’s about a mother who moves to a new neighborhood in search of a better life. Only, once there, she gets caught up in the drama and the lives of the rich and beautiful school moms. I’ve been told it definitely gives off Big Little Lies vibes, which is great because I love Liane Moriarty.

When it comes to research, my main way to prepare for writing a novel is to read books that I think might be in the same genre or cover similar themes. I know some writers can’t read similar books when drafting, but I find it inspiring. In this case, I read both thriller books and domestic suspense novels to help me get a feel for the plotting and pacing. I wanted to make sure I was writing a page-turning novel, so I went right to the source and read all I could.

Then, after getting through the first draft, I usually go online to find all the little details I might not know about the setting. For Burlington, I searched things like what kind of trees grow in Vermont, what their local newspaper is called, what the homes look like. I also love using Google Earth to get in close and get real pictures of specific things. My book is contemporary fiction, so it was fairly simple for me to find answers to my questions, because I didn’t need to know what trees grew in Vermont 30 or 40 years ago, for example.

The other thing I’ve found extremely helpful is to reach out to professionals and ask questions. For another book I was writing, I needed to know if a spouse could legally take all of their joint savings out of a certain account without needing approval from the other spouse. I asked to speak to a financial advisor who was more than willing to answer all my questions. In fact, I think he kind of wanted to be a character in the book! For Burlington, I knew of someone who used to live in Vermont, so I reached out to her to ask specific questions about the area. I sometimes worried about bothering people, but I’ve found that most people don’t mind answering questions at all, especially when it’s for a book.

For a while, I tried to stick with the “write what you know” advice, but I find that quite limiting. With a combination of both internet research, real images to look at, and help from experts or people living in the area, I’ve found you can paint a real and detailed picture, which is so important. Even if you don’t end up going into detail on the page about what kind of tree someone is walking past, I think it’s important for yourself to have the entire picture before you can start crafting the world around your characters.

 

You can learn more about Heather and her writing via her website and also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Burlington is now available via all major booksellers.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Murder Among Friends

 

Elizabeth Ferrars (1907-1995), born Morna Doris MacTaggart, was a British crime writer and founding member of the Crime Writers Association who received a special Silver Dagger for lifetime achievement in 1980. Her Golden Age books totaled over seventy in all, written over a period of six decades, from 1932-1995. Her first crime novel, Give a Corpse a Bad Name, led to a successful career as a mystery author in both the U.K. and in the U.S., where her publishers issued her books under the name "E.X. Ferrars."

It's been argued that her popularity hasn't survived well into the late 20th and early 21st centuries due to the lack of a solid series character. Her first attempt was with freelance journalist Toby Dyke (a Lord Peter Wimsey type) and his companion, George, a former criminal whose surname is never revealed. She wrote five Toby Dyke novels over a two-year period, which may be why she suddenly ended the series, adding that she did so because she "got to hate him so much." In the 1970s and 1980s she created a series featuring a semi-estranged married couple, Virginia and Felix Freer, and another with retired botanist, Andrew Basnett. She also penned short stories centering on an elderly detective called Jonas P. Jonas. 

Her writing was in the "cozy mystery" vein, and as the Mysterious Bookshop noted, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine described her as the "writer who may be the closest of all to Agatha Christie in style, plotting and general milieu," while the Washington Post described her as "a consummate professional in clever plotting, characterization and atmosphere." 

Murder Among Friends, from 1946 (published in the U.S. as Cheat the Hangman), is one of her fifty standalone novels, and was included by H.R.F. Keating on his 100 best crime fiction books list. The story begins with a party thrown by Cecily Lightwood for her literary and artistic friends, including guest of honor, playwright Aubrey Ritter, who lives in the flat above Cecily's. The group is determined to have a fun evening despite the ever-present danger of air raid wardens looking for blackout infringements in war-time London.

But where is the guest of honor? After he's found murdered upstairs and one of the party-goers arrested and later sentenced to murder, another guest, mousy Alice Church, finds herself so obsessed with the crime and doubting the verdict, that she sets about playing detective. With the help of Alice's scientist-husband Oliver, she puzzles her way through to discover the real murderer, thanks to her quiet, persistent insight and her husband's eye for detail.

By today's crime fiction (and even cozy) standards, Murder Among Friends seems to be a fairly genteel psychological study of complicated, intertwined relationships, which might be considered quaint in its depiction of sexual attractions. Yet, as Keating tells it, in 1946, Ferrars's regular publishers refused to publish the book because "detective stories couldn't be this steamy."

Although she's said to have based many characters and situations on people she knew and things she'd experienced in real life, it's not known to what degree that plays a role here. But with the long character portraits Alice extracts from her questioning of the key players, it wouldn't take much of a leap to guess that Ferrars's emphasis on the emotional makeup of her characters was drawn from a keen eye of observation; or, as a character in her book The Small World of Murder puts it, "Murder's generally an intimate sort of thing. It happens in a small world, a little shut-in world of violent feelings."

Mystery Melange

The inaugural Spymasters Book Prize 2025 revealed the titles that made the shortlist. The six finalists include: The Peacock and the Sparrow by IS Berry; Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd; Spy Hunter by HB Lyle; Honour Among Spies by Merle Nygate; Midnight in Vienna by Jane Thynne; and Shadow of Poison by Peter Tonkin. The award is open to any spy novel published in hardback or paperback in 2024, including both historical and modern spy thrillers. The winner, who will receive a cash prize of £500, will be announced at a ceremony on September 3.

Friends of the Milton Public Library is hosting the panel, "Make Mine Murder: A Killer Panel of New England Crime Writers Reveal the Secrets Behind the Page," September 11 in Milton, Massachusetts. Lucy Burdette, Elise Hart Kipness, Sarah Stewart Taylor, and moderator Hallie Ephron will offer behind the scenes details of bestselling whodunits, edge-of-your-seat thrillers, and literary mysteries and how they craft suspense and plot twists, and bring their unforgettable characters to life.

Sisters in Crime's Desert Sleuths chapter is holding a Write NOW! virtual conference, September 19-20. Special guests include Rhys Bowen, Allison Brennan, Christina Estes, Robyn Gigl, Deborah J Ledford, Wendy H. Jones, Edith Maxwell, Catriona McPherson, Karen Odden, Raquel V. Reyes, D.M. Rowell, Alex Segura, and Lois Winston. In addition to panels, there will be one-on-one 10-minute pitch sessions with an acquiring agent and an opportunity for an editor manuscript review. You can register in advance through the organization's website.

The University of South Carolina's Fall Literary Festival will include a talk on September 10 by C. M. "Chad" Kushins, author of Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, who made use of the Library's Elmore Leonard Archives for the work. The archives contain drafts, manuscripts, and typescripts of Leonard’s novels, short stories, and screen adaptations and the research and notes related to the writing and publication of these works (including unpublished works). Also included in the collection are personal and professional correspondence, legal  documents, and biographical items related to Leonard’s writing career, including typewriters, director’s chairs and awards. During the festival, there will be an exhibit of many of these materials, titled "The bad guys are the fun guys: Celebrating 100 years of Elmore Leonard."
 

Newberry College will host the Newberry Crime Writing Workshop (NCWW), an intensive four-week writers' workshop for developing crime and mystery authors to take place July 6-31, 2026. Attendees will participate in daily sessions where they will develop and share their work with one another, led by the 2026 instructors, Joe R. Lansdale, Cheryl Head, Michael Bracken, and Dr. Warren Moore. Part class, part writers' colony, NCWW is adapting the model of other successful workshops (such as the famed Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop). Fifteen applicants will be selected based on samples of work and statements of purpose, and writers of any level of publishing experience are welcome to apply. The workshop's $4,000 tuition will cover instruction and room and board for the four-week term, and some financial aid may be available. For more information and to apply, check out the NCWW website.

There have been some interesting call for papers on crime fiction topics recently for upcoming conferences: "(Re)generating the Genre: Unlikely Detectives and Reconstructed Crime Fiction," exploring how both contemporary and classic detective fiction (re)generates the genre by centering characters who have traditionally existed at the margins of cultural authority, with a deadline for abstracts of September 30th; "Virtual Crime and Detection," a special issue of Crime Fiction Studies themed around crime fiction and video games, with abstracts due November 15; the next International Crime Genre Research Network conference has a theme of "Crime Fiction: Retrospection, Futurity, Reinvention," or where crime fiction stands now and in the context of its long histories and potential futures, with abstracts due November 30; and the International Crime Fiction Association is seeking abstracts on the topic of "Captivating Criminality 13: Crime Fiction, Conflict, and Representation," due January 15, 2026.

Some sad news to report: Greg Iles, the Mississippi author of the "Natchez Burning" trilogy and other works, has died at the age of 65. He'd suffered from a decades-long battle with the blood cancer multiple myeloma, and on his website had posted a medical update shortly before the release of his last novel, Southern Man, Penn Cage Book 7. Iles wrote his first novel in 1993, a thriller about Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess, which became the first of seventeen New York Times bestsellers. Primarily set in the Deep South, his later novels have been made into films, translated into more than twenty languages, and published in more than thirty-five countries worldwide. Iles also performed with the musical group The Rock Bottom Remainders along with popular authors Stephen King, Amy Tan and others.


The Crime Fiction Lover website team are offering a chance to win a special signed 15th anniversary edition of Slow Horses by Mick Herron. They will detail the specifics of the competition and how to enter on their Facebook page this Saturday morning, August 23.

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Cold Dish" by Gary D. Rhodes.

In the Q&A roundup, multiple award-winning author Karin Slaughter spoke with Maine Public Radio about her new book, We Are All Guilty Here; crime author Brian Brady chatted with Lisa Haselton about his new crime fiction novel, Greed; and Sulari Gentill, whose Rowland Sinclair mysteries have won and/or been shortlisted for the Davitt Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, took the Page 69 test to her new novel, Five Found Dead.

Media Murder for Monday

 

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

NBCUniversal has acquired all rights, excluding publishing, to Robert Ludlum’s “Jason Bourne” and “Treadstone” book series, in perpetuity. The deal paves the way for new installments for Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin suffering from amnesia. A source with knowledge of the deal indicated it was a highly competitive bidding situation that drew seven offers from both streamers and studios before a massive nine-figure proposal was brought back to Universal. With this new agreement, longtime Universal collaborator and producer Frank Marshall will continue to shepherd forthcoming installments of the film series, as he has from the beginning of the “Bourne” franchise, along with Captivate’s Jeffrey Weiner and Ben Smith. Captivate has managed the rights for the Ludlum estate since 2001.

Searchlight Pictures has won a heated bidding battle for Incidents, a psychological thriller from William Gillies, according to Deadline. The film is about a woman who escapes from an attempted abduction with no clear motive, vowing thereafter to find her kidnapper and discover why she’s been targeted. No word yet on other creative attachments, but sources said there were eleven offers on the material. Gillies is best known for his debut feature, Hallow Road, another psychological thriller that premiered to strong reviews at the South by Southwest Conference 2025.

Millennium Media has chosen Noah Centineo to star in John Rambo, the prequel to the Rambo movie series. Sisu director Jalmari Helander is set to direct from a screenplay by writing duo Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani. The film’s plot is under wraps, but it will be the origin story of a young John Rambo during the Vietnam War. One of the most iconic action heroes in U.S. cinema, the character was created by David Morell in his novel First Blood. The original 1982 film saw Sylvester Stallone play the veteran Green Beret, who is forced by a cruel sheriff and his deputies to flee into the mountains and wage an escalating one-man war against his pursuers.

TELEVISION/STREAMING

Barry Eisler’s John Rain books are being adapted for Apple TV+ after the streamer and Tom Winchester’s Pure Fiction label scored the rights to the New York Times bestsellers. An earlier attempt to bring John Rain to TV, with Keanu Reeves toplining, faltered. But with a streamer in place this time around and an option that covers eighteen novels and four short stories, Apple TV+ is hoping it has a new franchise on its hands. Eisler’s bestselling thrillers follow ex-CIA operative John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American assassin, who specializes in making his kills look like natural causes. Aside from Rain, other key figures in the books include Delilah, a conflicted Mossad seductress who is both Rain’s lover and his deadliest adversary, and Dox, a wisecracking Texan sniper. Nine of the novels focus on Rain directly, while the wider "Killer Collective" universe includes a spinoff series of stories led by characters including sex-crimes detective Livia Lone, closeted black-ops soldier Daniel Larison, and deaf contractor Marvin Manus. These interconnected worlds collide when characters unite to take down a rogue unit that is targeting government whistleblowers.

Hulu has ordered Count My Lies, a limited series starring Lindsay Lohan and Shailene Woodley, from former This Is Us executive producers/co-showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger. The project, based on the recently published novel by Sophie Stava, follows compulsive liar Sloane Caraway (Woodley) as she fibs her way into a nanny position for the gorgeous and charismatic Violet (Lohan) and Jay Lockhart. It seems she’s finally landed her dream job, but little does Sloane know, she’s just entered a household brimming with secrets that are about to explode — with potentially catastrophic consequences for all.

Michelle Keegan (Fool Me Once) and Douglas Booth (Worried About the Boy) are set to star in the ITV cop drama, The Blame, based on the debut novel of the same name by Charlotte Langley. Keegan will play DI Emma Crane and Booth a character named DI Tom Radley in the six-part series, which centers of the discovery of the body of a teenage figure skater, sending shockwaves through the town of Wakestead. Also in the cast are Nathan Mensah, Nigel Boyle, Joe Armstrong, Matilda Freeman, Gavin Spokes, Josh Bolt, Ian Hart, and Ceallach Spellman.

Paramount+ has set Sunday, October 26 for the Season 4 premiere of Mayor of Kingstown, starring Jeremy Renner and Edie Falco. In season four, Mike’s control over Kingstown is threatened as new players compete to fill the power vacuum left in the Russians’ wake, compelling him to confront the resulting gang war and stop them from swallowing the town. Meanwhile, with those he loves in more danger than ever before, Mike must contend with a headstrong new Warden to protect his own while grappling with demons from his past. In addition to Renner and Falco, the series also stars Lennie James, Laura Benanti, Hugh Dillon, Taylor Handley, Tobi Bamtefa, Derek Webster, Hamish Allan-Headley, and Nishi Munshi.

Boyd Holbrook (Narcos) has been cast in the new Netflix series, Extraction, starring opposite Omar Sy. The show is set in the world of the action thriller movie franchise of the same name, to be helmed by showrunner, writer, and executive producer, Glen Mazzara. In the eight-episode action-packed thriller, a mercenary (Sy) embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hostages in Libya. Trapped between warring factions and ruthless killers, he must navigate life-or-death choices while confronting deep emotional wounds. Holbrook will play Extraction team leader David Ibarra in a series regular role.

A trailer was released for the all-new season of The Marlow Murder Club, returning August 24th at 9/8c on MASTERPIECE Mystery! on PBS, promising more murders, more suspects, and more friendship. The series stars Samantha Bond, who is joined by Jo Martin, Cara Horgan, and Natalie Dew.


PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

Karin Slaughter stopped by NPR's All Things Considered to talk about her 25th book, We are All Guilty Here,  a small town murder mystery with twists and turns until the end.

The latest episode of the Murder Junction featured a chat with crime writer Heidi Amsinck about her Copenhagen-set crime novel, Out of the Dark, and life in the UK for a Danish-born journalist.

The latest Wrong Place, Write Crime with host Frank Zafiro featured a slew of interviews from the floor at the conference for the Public Safety Writers Association, including some award winners.

Authors on the Air chatted with Katie Bishop, the author of The Girls of Summer, about how true crime and TikTok sparked her new thriller, High Season.

Pick Your Poison podcast host Dr. Jen Prosser discussed which antidote is getting more attention on social media than the poison it treats; what happens if the doctor panics while giving it; and why people are drinking fish tank antifungal cleaner.

Mystery Melange

The Australian Crime Writers Association announced finalists for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction Award: Down the Rabbit Hole by Shaeden Berry; A Town Called Treachery by Mitch Jennings; The Chilling by Riley James; All You Took From Me by Lisa Kenway; Everywhere We Look by Martine Kropkowski; and Those Opulent Days by Jacquie Pham. The shortlists were also released for Best True Crime and Best International Crime Fiction. Winners in all categories (Best True Crime, Best Debut, Best International, and Best Crime Fiction), will be announced in September.

The longlist for the 2025 Petrona Awards was released, honoring Scandinavian crime fiction in translation. The Petrona Award was established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries. The winner of the 2024 Award was Dead Men Dancing by Jógvan Isaksen translated from Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Norvik Press.

Australia's Bad Sydney Crime Writers Festival announced the 2025 Danger Awards Shortlist in the categories of Crime Fiction, Debut Crime Fiction and Crime Non-Fiction, for books honoring featuring Australia as a setting for stories about crime and justice. Plus, the People's Choice Award is back, with all titles across the three categories eligible. Fans can vote for their favorite before the poll closes on Monday, September 1. All the winners will be revealed at the conference on September 13th.

The shortlists were also announced for Australia's 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the richest literary prize in that country. Two crime authors made the lists: in the Fiction category, Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Fiona was also shortlisted for Sisters in Crime's Davitt Awards); and in the Young Adult category, My Family and Other Suspects by Kate Emery.

Registration are now open for ShortCon 2026, the premiere conference for writers of short crime fiction. Hosted by Michael Bracken, ShortCon 2026 will held at Elaine's Literary Salon in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 6, 2026 and feature: Gary Phillips leading “Blueprinting Criminal Behavior,” a three-hour writing workshop; Michele Slung presenting “Every Moment is a Story,” a behind-the-scenes look at putting together annual best-of collections; Art Taylor presenting “Linked, Intertwined, or Seamless: The Curious Case of the Novel in Stories”; and Stacy Woodson leading “Everything You Forgot to Ask,” an end-of-day panel featuring all the day’s presenters. This one-day conference includes two full meals (breakfast and dinner), a full day of presentations, the opportunity to interact with other short-story writers, and a Noir at the Bar Friday. Registration is limited to 50, and ShortCon 2025 was a sellout, so interested participants are encouraged to snag a spot early.

Lou Armagno tells us that members of The Charlie Chan Family Home head to Warren, Ohio to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Author Earl Derr Biggers’ literary and film creation, Detective Charlie Chan. Two public events are scheduled for Friday, August 15th: a three-person panel discussion on “A Century of Charlie Chan,” followed by a Q&A at the Warren-Trumbull Country Public Library; and the historic Robins Theatre will be the venue for one of the most intriguing of the 40-plus Chan films, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, starring Sidney Toler, Cesar Romero, Pauline Moore, and Victor Sen Yung.

Noir at The Bar – A Night of Crime Fiction heads to the National Centre for the Written Word, a the Market Place South Shields, United Kingdom on September 19th. Authors scheduled to read from their works include Matt Wesolowski, Iain Rowen, Eileen Wharton, Alys Cummings, FE Birch, Pam Plumb, Alan Parkinson, Sarah Wray, and Neil Broadfoot.

That same night on the other side of The Pond in Columbia, Maryland, there will be a Noir at the Bar at the Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity conference, with participating authors to include Chris Chambers, Rob Creekmore, Ef Deal, Carol Gyzander, Alice Loweecey, Debbie Mack, Jeff Markowitz, Tom Milani, Roberta Rogow, and Ann Stolinsky.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, has put out a call for articles for a themed issue on "Transportation and Mobility in Crime Fiction." Contributions should explore how crime narratives—from classic detective stories to contemporary thrillers, from global noir to genre-bending narratives—engage with both literal and metaphorical forms of movement, consider transportation as a backdrop, a plot device, and/or as a lens through which to examine broader cultural, social, and psychological dynamics. Submissions, which should include an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief bio are due March 1, 2026. Full manuscripts of 5-6,000 words based on the accepted proposal will be due September 1. 2026.

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Breaking News" by Peter Gregg Slater.

In the Q&A roundup, Shots Magazine chatted with Quentin Bates, a prolific author, translator, publisher (he recently founded a publishing company called Corylus Books) and even a fisherman; and Deborah Kalb spoke with Walter B. Levis, a former New York City crime reporter and author of the new novel, The Meaning of the Murder.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Lonelyheart 4122

Colin Watson (1920-1983) was a British author who started out in life as a journalist, first as a reporter for the Boston Guardian and later as an editorial writer, theater critic, and book reviewer. In 1958, while still working for newspapers, Watson published the first Flaxborough novel, Coffin, Scarcely Used, a book that Cecil Day-Lewis (who also wrote mysteries as Nicholas Blake) called "a great lark, full of preposterous situations and poker-faced wit."

Following the publication of the second book in the series, Watson retired to write full time and published a dozen mystery novels between 1958 and 1982. His mystery series came to known as The Flaxborough Chronicles, set as they were in Flaxborough, a fictional East Anglian city, population 15,000, loosely based on the Lincolnshire area of Boston where Watson worked as a journalist. The lead character in the series is Inspector Walter Purbright, assisted by his somewhat naive sidekick, Sergeant Sidney Love, and the Chief Constable, Harcourt Chubb. Watson's third book in the Chronicles, Hopjoy Was Here, won him a Silver Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association in 1962, and five years later he won a second Silver Dagger with Lonelyheart 4122.

Jeffery Ewener, a fan of Watson's work, wrote for the Mystery Magazine Web that in Watson's fictional world, "you find this...combination of superficial blandness deceptively concealing an uproar of animal spirits - like a hymn book hollowed-out to hold a hip flask. Watson gives us geriatric gentlemen patting bottoms, matronly housewives jumping into orgies, MI5 agents running up huge unpaid bar bills for reasons of National Security, austere solicitors blackmailing the local gentry."

As an example of what Ewener is referring to, take this excerpt from Lonelyheart 4122:

"Well, they didn't seem very pleased to see me, sir. Singleton wouldn't come out of the garden. He was going up and down with a lawn mower all the time. I had to ask each question as he went by one way, and try and catch the answer when he passed on the way back."

"Very trying for you, Sid."

"Not really. The answers were all very short. And him being so busy made it easier to get the writing samples. I just pinched three or four of the labels on his rose bushes. Of course," Love added, nodding at the file,  "I trimmed them down a bit and mounted them properly."

"So I noticed. Most neat. Now I understand why I couldn't make much sense out of "Peace Mrs. Pettifer Brevvitt's Pride Lancashire Ascending."

Lonelyheart 4122 introduces us to the character of Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who subsequently appeared in all Flaxborough novels save one. In this outing, Inspector Purbright's investigation into the disappearance of two respectable middle-aged women leads him to a matrimonial bureau where he meets another client, Miss Teatime, whom Purbright fears may also be in danger. But Miss Teatime doesn't want anything to do with his protection, and neither Miss Teatime nor her shady beau, a retired naval officer, are what they appear to be.

Four of The Flaxborough Chronicles were filmed for the BBC's  "Murder Most English" program, including Lonelyheart 4122.

Author R&R with Tim Chawaga

Tim Chawaga is a writer and playwright whose short fiction has been featured in Interzone and Escape Pod and whose work has been performed in New York and Philadelphia at many venues that have either closed or been converted into gyms. He has a BFA in Drama from the Tisch School of the Arts, is a 2019 graduate of Clarion West, and is the recipient of George R.R. Martin's Worldbuilder Scholarship. He works in tech and lives in a co-op in Brooklyn with his partner and dog.

In his debut novel, Salvagia, Triss Mackey is flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that lets her live quietly aboard the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient Cabana Boat. In exchange, she dives for recycling, recovered from the flooded area of formerly-coastal cities known as the yoreshore. If she happens to find some salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the past—well, that’s just between her and the highest bidder.

But when the federal government begins withdrawing from Florida entirely, Triss must buy the Ghost outright or lose her loophole. Meanwhile, the corporate mafias are poised to seize power, especially Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America luxury hotel. Triss needs a score big enough to keep her free from both the feds and corporations, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.

In pursuit of such a score, she stumbles upon the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz, and winds up with more than she bargained for, including a partnership with Ortiz’s hotshot space-racing son, Riley. If she can help Riley solve the mystery of his father’s death, it may lead them to a valuable piece of salvagia and with it, the hope of a sustainable, free way of Florida living.

Tim stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the novel:

SALVAGIA is a science fiction mystery inspired by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, about a freelance salvage diver living along the future flooded South Florida coast.

I would divide my research for it into two categories: structure and content.

STRUCTURE

SALVAGIA is a mystery novel, and it was mostly useful for me to try to adhere to some of the “rules” of a traditional mystery, or at least check in with them every now and again when I got stuck. So I read a lot, particularly the Travis McGee series, including his debut, The Deep Blue Goodbye. John D. MacDonald’s prose style is uniquely efficient. He can craft a whole character in a sentence, and his descriptions are beautifully specific while remaining unbelievably sparse.

I also consulted the somewhat famous but unsourceable 12-Chapter Murder Mystery structure just to get a general idea of what a satisfying mystery arc might look like.

At one point, my now-agent told me that things felt a little unfocused. The book was in first-person, but it’s science fiction, and that’s a particularly challenging combination; science fiction benefits from a lot of world-building description; how thing work and what their history is. First person limits the reader to what a single person in that world knows and experiences. But I thought that first-person was right for the mystery aspect of it, so the push and pull, of when to get in the world-building weeds (rarely) and when to stay on the plot tracks (usually) was something that I had to get a hold of. He recommended a few 1^st person POV mysteries with female protagonists, like Charlaine Harris’ Shakespeare’s Landlord. After internalizing John D. MacDonald’s style and structure it was really useful to begin to look at other authors and how they approached questions like information delivery, twists, descriptions, and character backgrounds.

And then, at some point in my next draft, I just entirely forgot about any sort of structure and tried to make sure that I was still engaged upon re-read.

CONTENT

The benefit of science fiction is that I can often make up whatever I want, but the downside is that once I do, I really have to own it, and be willing to devote words to describing it in greater detail than existing things drawn from our collective knowledge. I was very conscious of this because of the push and pull of sci-fi vs. first-person I described above.

And there were a few things that I really wanted to devote a lot of attention to that were outside of my own personal experience. The first was the particulars of scuba diving. I am not scuba-certified myself, and am actually somewhat terrified of deep water. But my protagonist, Triss, dives a lot in the book, in some particularly claustrophobic places. The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury was an incredibly useful resource. It specifically outlines the dangers and thrills of shipwreck and cave diving, while telling a gripping non-fiction tale about father-son diving team the Rouses. The author is a diver himself, and that level of knowledge made this book an indispensable resource.

Further character inspiration work came from reading Driver #8, the autobiography of Dale Earnhardt Jr. There’s a sport in the book called atmo-breaking, which is basically a drag race to space. One of the characters, Riley Ortiz, is an atmo-breaker and the son of a famous atmo-breaker, so I thought that someone like Dale Earnhardt Jr. would be a good inspiration for what a person like that might be concerned about.

Lastly, SALVAGIA is a novel set in a climate-changed world, specifically the area around Miami. Out of all the many resources I drew inspiration from, including the work of futurist Kim Stanley Robinson, the book Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza was most instrumental, because it outlined the threats to Miami specifically in the coming years—not just sea level rise but also the contamination of the aquifer, its history of unsustainable over-development, its urban planning policies and its politics.

 

You can learn more about Tim Chawaga and his writing by visiting his website, and follow him on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Goodreads. Salvagia is now available via all major booksellers.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Bait

Before there was Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell, even before Joseph Wambaugh, Dorothy Uhnak was patrolling the streets of New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s as a New York City Transit Authority policewoman, with 12 of her 14 years as a detective. She later hinted she left police work due to sex discrimination, officially resigning to finish her college degree at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Uhnak had also been interested in writing since she was a child, and was the one who typed up reports for the male police officers because she knew how to type quickly and accurately. She initially had problems getting her autobiographical memoir Police Woman published until editors began to recognize her from newspaper articles as the real-life 125-pound female officer who knocked down and arrested an armed mugger.

Police Woman ushered in Uhnak as the first woman officer to write a police-lady procedural (and was later used as the basis for a series by the same title starring Angie Dickinson), and the book's success led to the first in a trilogy featuring Detective Second Grade Christie Opara, titled The Bait, which won the Edgar Award as the best first mystery novel of 1968 (in a tie with E. Richard Johnson's Silver Street). It later became the basis for the Get Christie Love series, although Uhnak's protagonist was changed from a blond white female to an African-American female, the first time an African American woman was the sole star of a TV series.

The Bait was followed by the other two books in the trilogy featuring Christie Opara, The Witness (1969) and The Ledger (1970), but at the urging of her editors, Uhnak switched to writing a sweeping police novel Law and Order about three generations of a police department family, published in 1973. The latter was her breakout book and became a television move in 1976, with Uhnak helping write some of the dialogue. More fame followed after her 1977 novel The Investigation served as the basis for a 1987 television movie, Kojak: The Price of Justice.

Uhnak says she began notes and doing character sketches for The Bait while still in uniform, with the protagonist, Christie Opara, largely based on the author. She also took characters from her experiences such as the "great bunch of guys" in her squad and the antagonist, Murray Rugoff, who was patterned on a suspect she remembered arresting who had no hair. Her last assignment with the D.A.'s Special Investigations Squad may have been given her the most story fodder, where she "found out the dirty little secrets about the police department."

In The Bait, 26-year-old Christie Opara is on her way to an undercover drug bust when she makes an unexpected arrest of a hairless man who's exposing himself to schoolgirls on the subway. After a female dancer who has been receiving anonymous phone calls is murdered and Opara herself begins to receive similar phone calls, she realizes her suspect and the killer may be one and the same. Realizing there's only one way to prove it, she offers herself up as bait. Her boss, Supervising Assistant District Attorney Casey Reardon, who finds Opara getting under his skin in more ways than one, reluctantly agrees to her idea even knowing that part of Opara's determination to go through with the plan is based on her desire to exorcise demons left behind from the on-duty murder of her cop husband five years ago.

The Bait debuted to mixed reviews when it was published, but it's filled with realistic characterizations and interactions, as you'd expect from someone who walked the walk:

Christie looked from face to face, admiring them; this was all by-play, yet it was essential. An establishing of lines of communication, of reading and responding. No one really knew what story Marty was about to tell, yet each would help him filling in, building on it. It was more than time-passing, it was an interacting on a light and unimportant level: it was a rehearsal.

and

Johnnie Devereaux had a fantastic acquaintance with people in all areas of the city...He could blink his eye and tell in which section of the city, which small, hidden, unknown pocket, you could find a particular group of people, what the ethnic makeup was three blocks to the west or one block to the east. Where to eat authentic Cantonese food, not the American chop suey junk; where to get real Northern Italian cooking or a non-commercial, absolutely pure Kosher meal like someone's Grandma used to put in front of someone's Grandpa. People and their strange quirks of behavior and the fascinating customs and remnants of blood-culture were Johnnie's hobby and a knowledge he enjoyed sharing.

The Bait is an entertaining insider look at police work, especially through the eyes of a woman cop at a time when there weren't many women cops, without getting bogged down into overly technical slang or extraneous procedural details. (One bit of Uhnak/Bait trivia: In 1973, a pilot more faithful to the book, titled The Bait, was filmed. Despite an all-star cast that included Donna Mills, Michael Constantine, William Devane, Arlene Golonka, June Lockhart, it was never produced into a series.)

Sadly, Teresa Graves, star of Get Christie Love, died in a house fire in 2002 at the age of 53, and Uhnak herself died in 2006 of a deliberate drug overdose that may have been suicide, according to her daughter.

Mystery Melange

Stella Rimington has died at the age of 90. Rimington was the first female director of MI5 and the first head of the domestic spy agency to be publicly named (and also widely seen as the model for Dame Judi Dench's "M" in the James Bond films). After leaving MI5, Rimington principally became a writer, with her first book the memoir, Open Secret, which was controversial at the time. A series of crime novels followed, including ten with Liz Carlyle, an MI5 officer as the lead character, and two more with Manon Tyler, a CIA agent.

The full program was revealed for the 2025 Agatha Christie Festival taking place from September 13-21 across the English Riviera. The festival kicks off with the popular Fringe Festival, which offers a host of unique experiences that celebrate Christie’s legacy in the very places that inspired her work, including walking tours and mystery-solving events. From September 18th onward, the festival transitions into its Literary Festival slate, with such highlights as Lucy Foley and Sophie Hannah discussing their work continuing the stories of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot; authors Janice Hallett, Vaseem Khan, and broadcaster Steph McGovern exploring how modern writers are reinventing Golden Age detective fiction in "The Never-Ending Golden Age"; Tony Medawar discussing "Agatha Christie and the Occult"; and Icelandic crime fiction star Ragnar Jónasson discussing his new novel Death of a Crime Writer alongside Kelly Mullen, followed by an interactive murder mystery game.

BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival, running September 11–13 in Sydney, Australia, has launched its 2025 program. Among the headliners are Michael Robotham, Candice Fox, Jane Caro and Gary Jubelin. The program will feature writing workshops, including the festival’s first offering of manuscript feedback sessions, and industry pitching opportunities across both fiction and nonfiction genres. For the first time, this year’s festival will include young adult crime and mystery writing in the program with authors Amy Doak (Eleanor Jones is not a Murderer) and Troy Hunter (Gus and The Missing Boy), who will both run workshops for high school students.

Noir at the Bar heads to British Columbia on August 28 at Victoria's Caffe Fantastico. The event is hosted by Magnus Skallagrimsson, with authors scheduled to read from their works to include Jean Paetkau, Ardell Holden, Shane Joaquin Jimenez, Jim Bottomley, Christine Cossack, John Farrow, and Judee Fong.

Val McDermid is using the same elements and techniques from her mystery novels to revisit one of history’s most enduring whodunnits:  the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe. In her new play, And Midnight Never Come, McDermid explores the controversial circumstances around the death of the brilliant and subversive Elizabethan playwright who was stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern at the age of 29. Officially, Marlowe was killed over a row about a bill. But unofficially, espionage, heresy, and a state-sanctioned cover-up have all been put forth as potential motives.

Virgin Voyages is presenting its first true-crime podcast-themed cruise in partnership with iHeartMedia. Departing Oct. 10 from Miami on the Valiant Lady, the one-time five-night itinerary sails to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic and Virgin’s Beach Club at Bimini in the Bahamas. The cruise focuses on popular titles including Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know, Betrayal, and Buried Bones. During the special voyage, guests can experience live podcast recordings of their favorite shows, attend "how to podcast" workshops, find meet-and-greets with top hosts, participate in giveaways, and enjoy themed cocktails and bites.

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Another N-Word" by Tony Dawson.

In the Q&A roundup, J.T. Ellison, author of the Taylor Jackson and Dr. Samantha Owens series and more, applied the Page 69 Test to Last Seen, her most recent thriller; Vicki Delany, Canadian author of several cozy mystery series including the Lighthouse Library series and Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, also took the Page 69 Test to Tea with Jam & Dread, her newest Tea by the Sea mystery; Shots Magazine interviewed Caroline Fraser, author of Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, and also Travis Kennedy, author of the thriller, The Whyte Python World Tour; and Writers Who Kill spoke with Ellen Byron about her Golden Motel Mysteries.

Media Murder for Monday

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

Lee Isaac Chung (Twisters) is in talks to direct an Ocean’s Eleven prequel for Warner Brothers Pictures, based on a script by Carrie Solomon (A Family Affair). Plot details haven't been revealed, but the new film is known to be set in Europe in the 1960s. The 2001 film followed Danny Ocean, a gangster, who rounds up a gang of associates to stage a sophisticated and elaborate casino heist which involves robbing three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously during a popular boxing event.

Britton Webb has joined the thriller Don’t Forget Me Tomorrow, replacing Jesse Kove, who was previously announced for the project. The story, based on author A.L. Jackson’s novel of the same name, follows Dakota Cooper (Charlotte Kirk), a single mother trying to rebuild her life in a small town when a mysterious figure from her past returns, forcing her to confront old secrets, rekindled love, and new danger. Webb plays Ryder Nash, the enigmatic ex-con whose return threatens to unravel and ultimately redefine Dakota’s carefully rebuilt life.

Max Martini (Pacific Rim) and Brianna Hildebrand (Deadpool) are starring in the thriller Bethesda, the directorial debut from Andrew and Isaac Lewis (aka The Lewis Brothers), from a screenplay by Matt Black. Bethesda is described as "a neo-Western thriller set in desolate West Texas in the early ’90s that centers on a dying ex-Texas Ranger with a violent past and the young woman he rescues from a life of drugs and forced prostitution." After killing the brother of a border-town crime lord, the two broken strangers go into hiding from the pseudo-philosophical assassin hired to kill them. While on the run, "they find redemption within each other in this dark and violent land where the line between good and evil is blurred, where the only rule is that of survival."

NOIR CITY returns to Chicago's Music Box Theatre, September 5-11. Screenings from Friday, September 5, through Sunday, September 7, will be hosted by Film Noir Foundation president and founder Eddie Muller, while screenings Monday, September 8, through Thursday, September 11, will be presented by FNF board member Alan K. Rode. The series kicks off with The Grifters (1990), based on a book by Jim Thompson with a screenplay by Donald Westlake, which stars John Cusack as a young grifter blithely scamming his way through sunny Southern California, until he gets trapped in a battle of wills and wiles waged by the women in his life: mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) and girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening).

TELEVISION/STREAMING

Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting) is set to play legendary literary detective Sherlock Holmes in Season 2 of the CBS series, Watson. Carlyle will appear in a recurring guest role, working opposite series lead Morris Chestnut, who plays Dr. John Watson. The investigative medical drama is a modern version of one of history’s greatest detectives as he turns his attention from solving crimes to solving medical mysteries. With his eyes fixed on the future, Watson faces an unexpected twist when Sherlock Holmes, who was presumed dead, resurfaces, forcing him to confront a buried secret from his past — one that lies hidden within his own body.

Slow Horses writer and executive producer, Will Smith, will be leaving the drama after Season 5, which will premiere this fall on Apple TV+. Smith has guided the faithful screen adaptation of Mick Herron’s series of spy novels from the beginning and has won an Emmy for writing. Smith is handing over the reins for Season 6 to Gaby Chiappe, and Ben Vanstone for Season 7. Slow Horses follows a group of reprobate MI5 rejects that have been sidelined at Slough House, a forgotten outpost far from MI5’s Regent’s Park HQ. Led by Gary Oldman’s sardonic Jackson Lamb, the "slow horses" of Slough House prove weirdly effective, often confounding MI5’s Second Desk Diana Taverner (Kristen Scott-Thomas) and, as of Season 4, its First Desk Claude Whelan (James Tallis). Series regulars include Jonathan Pryce, Saskia Reeves, Jack Lowden, Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Tom Brooke, and Ruth Bradley.

The new adaptation of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley bestselling novels from BBC One issued an official release date and trailer for the upcoming reboot. The crime drama follows police detective Tommy Lynley, an outsider in the force, mostly because of his aristocratic upbringing, and his ill-matched partner, Barbara Havers, a maverick sergeant with a working-class background with whom he seemingly has nothing in common. Nevertheless, the incompatible duo become a formidable team, bonded by their desire to see justice done. The series will premiere on Thursday, September 4, on BritBox in the U.S. and Canada.

Netflix’s Untamed has been renewed for Season 2, shifting what was planned as a limited series into an ongoing show as Eric Bana’s National Parks Service investigator heads to a new park after solving a mystery in Yosemite. Season 2 will pick up after Bana’s character has already been working at different parks, so the location for Season 2 won’t be the exact next destination after Yosemite.

NBC announced its fall premiere dates, which includes one small surprise: the three-hour Law & Order Thursday lineup will be back on NBC's fall schedule as of September 25. Law & Order: Organized Crime, which moved from NBC to Peacock ahead of its fifth season a year ago, will return to the broadcast network. Its fifth season, which recently wrapped its run on the NBCUniversal streamer, will get a second viewing on NBC, airing in its old Thursday 10PM slot behind Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. Peacock has not made a renewal call on Organized Crime yet, with the show’s performance likely to inform NBCUniversal’s decision whether to pick up Season 6 of the drama for Peacock — or NBC.

Fox has unveiled its premiere dates for the 2025-26 season, which includes the season 2 premiere of the Canadian series, Murder in a Small Town, set to air Tuesday nights at 8pm ET.


PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

Dan Fesperman chatted with Paul Burke on Crime Time FM about his new spy novel, Pariah; Eastern Europe; fiction as the second draft of history; facades of democracy; comedy and Hollywood; and The Baltimore Banner.

The latest Murder Junction featured thriller writer Nick Harkaway about his latest novel, Karla's Choice, and following in his father John Le Carré's footsteps by bringing George Smiley back to readers.

Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Ty Hutchinson, known for his high-concept, fast-paced novels, to talk about his latest book, DarkBright.

Authors on the Air spoke with Polly Stewart about The Felons' Ball, her new Southern thriller with secrets, suspense, and small-town danger after a moonshine empire, a forbidden romance, and a murder on a houseboat collide.

On the Pick Your Poison podcast, Dr. Jen Prosser investigated which dictator's autopsy was published on the front page of the newspaper, why he hated doctors, and what that had to do with his death; as well as what leeches were used for in 1950.