In Reference to Murder

Mystery Melange

CrimeFest announced the winners for the 2020 CrimeFest Awards. The event, scheduled to take place in Bristol, UK from June 4 thru 7, was cancelled, but organizers announced award winners online at crimefest.com and via its social media pages on Tuesday July 7 (HT to Shots Magazine). Here are the winners (and you can see all the other finalists via this link):

• Debut Crime Novel Award: BLOOD & SUGAR, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
• Sounds of Crime Award: BLUE MOON, by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding
• eDunnit Award: TO THE LIONS, by Holly Watt
• H.R.F. Keating Award: THE HOODED GUNMAN, by John Curran
• Last Laugh Award: WORST CASE SCENARIO, by Helen FitzGerald
• Best Crime Novel for Children Award: MALAMANDER, by Thomas Taylor
• Best Crime Novel for Young Adults Award: BEAUTY SLEEP, by Kathryn Evans
   

Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site also noted that Walter Mosley's Down the River Unto the Sea has won the 2020 Falcon Award from The Maltese Falcon Society Japan for the best hardboiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year. Previous winners have included Don Winslow (a four-time winner), Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, and Robert Crais.

Killer Nashville is the latest event to announce it's cancelling for 2020 due to the pandemic due to the new travel bans and the recent upsurge of cases in Tennessee. They're going to postpone Killer Nashville 2020 and roll everyone's registrations forward to KN 2021 (August 19-22, 2021). Founder Clay Stafford added that "It was a hard choice, but the safety and well-being of our friends is our most important consideration. These are tough and uncharted times." This year's special guests were to be Lisa Black, J.T. Ellison, and Walter Mosley.

Although many mystery conferences are going online or being postponed until next year, Covid-19 has had its first permanent event casualty. Magna cum Murder announced on Facebook that because of deep budget cuts, the university has made the decision to close the E. B. & Bertha C. Ball Center where the annual festivities were held. This year's event was scheduled for October 23-25 in Indianapolis with Guest of Honor C.J. Box and International Guest of Honor Rt. Hon. David Trimble. The event has been frequently praised in the past by attendees and authors alike as more accessible and personable than many of the larger conferences.

The Guardian reported that crime fiction sales are booming during the pandemic. Readers have been "pouncing on stories of murder and revenge," with nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books bought in the last two weeks of June compared to the same point last year. The genre became the UK’s most popular over the period, leapfrogging both general and children’s fiction, as readers snapped up titles including Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher thriller, Blue Moon, Lisa Jewell’s dark The Family Upstairs, and Peter May’s prescient Lockdown.

Bloomberg had a breakdown analysis of "Who Did What in Every Agatha Christie Murder Mystery Novel," divided into graphs by the killer's age, gender, profession, relationship, motive, and method.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Spent Casings" by Terry Dawley.

Author R&R with Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of a memoir, Once We Were Sisters and fourteen works of fiction including the novels Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and Cracks, which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and made into a film starring Eva Green. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and O Magazine and included in the Best American Short Stories. She has twice won an O. Henry Prize, as well as an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.

Her latest novel is Open Secrets, in which the lies between a husband and wife are revealed, unraveling their family in a story that moves between the French Riviera, Switzerland, and Amagansett. When Michel, a Swiss banker, discovers his wife Alice's betrayal he turns for help to a Russian client who leads him into unknown territory, endangering not only his own life but that of Alice, and above all, his fourteen-year-old daughter, Pamela. Their charmed life—a beautiful house on the French Riviera, elegant vacations, and boarding school in Switzerland for Pamela—is not all that it seems. As the repercussions of Michel's illicit deals move closer in around them, Alice finds herself in Amagansett with her artist sister who is having a crisis of her own, while the danger circles around Pamela. Open Secrets is a suspenseful novel about relationships, family, love and the inescapable consequences of one's own actions.

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

On research and writing

All fiction attempts to portray life in a believable way whether it is science fiction, magic realism, or historical fiction. The reader needs to suspend disbelief to be interested by the story. This verisimilitude often comes with the authority of the voice. There are writers who manage to make us believe even the most extraordinary of events and others whose voice does not ring true. I have often had students who protest that something really happened but on the page render this event unbelievable. How, then, to make something believable?

When I was writing my first historical novel, The Children of Pithiviers, much of which takes place in Vichy France in the early 40's, I had some advice from my fellow countryman and Nobel prize winner: John Coetzee. He told me, "Don't stay too close to the facts." Certainly it is a more difficult task to blatantly alter historical facts. Research gives us the necessary confidence and the sort of precise detail that enables us to create a believable world, a world which rings true on the page. Even Don Quixote in his maddest moments renders his imaginary knights with marvelously real detail.

With my latest book, Open Secrets, I spoke to bankers, I read accounts of banks and banking systems in various parts of the world; I had also first hand dealings with Swiss banks through my sister whose money was stolen from a joint account in a Swiss bank with a numbered account by her husband, yet in the writing of the book, I found it necessary to take some distance from all of these "facts." I had to shut up the books and let the story come to me on the page through the characters who may have originated to some extent in my life but took on a life of their own. The story one is telling has its own truth  which we need to discover in the process of writing it, or so it seems to me.

 

You can learn more about Sheila Kohler and Open Secrets via her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. She also has a live online Q&A with Sheridan Hay via the Center for Fiction in New York coming up on July 14. Open Secrets is available this week via all major book retailers.

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

Solstice Studios is partnering with Fast and Furious producers on the action thriller, Shadow Run, from Magnum P.I. reboot scribe, Joe Gazzam. The project tells the story of a CIA agent who devoted five years of his life to capturing the Russian spy who killed his wife. His triumph turns into a nightmare when he’s told that, not only is America trading the spy away – but he’s been assigned to make the swap. Now he’s stuck with his mortal enemy on an off-the-books "shadow run" where nothing happens as planned and everyone is trying to kill them.

The S.H.U., a social thriller starring Edi Gathegi (Twilight Saga; X-Men: First Class), has been picked up for world sales by Los Angeles-based Premiere Entertainment Group. The story follows an affluent African American psychiatrist (Gathegi) into federal prison after he is found guilty of murdering his wife. A victim of systematic racism, he eventually finds himself in solitary confinement, slowly descending into madness and pushed to breaking point by an abusive female guard.

A trailer was released for The Tax Collector, which centers on Shia LaBeouf’s Creeper and Bobby Soto’s David, two "tax collectors" who work for a crime lord known as Wizard, collecting his cut of the profits from local gangs’ illicit dealings and operations. The Tax Collector drops on VOD and in select theaters on August 7.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Evil Doghouse Studios has secured the rights to Lars Lenth's popular Norwegian book series about eco-terrorist, Rino Gulliksen. Lenth’s book series, not yet released in the U.S., follows lawyer Leonard Vangen and the misanthropic muscle-for-hire Gulliksen as the two find themselves unlikely allies in the darkly comedic eco-thriller.

Éric Rochant, the creator of breakout French spy drama The Bureau, is headed for his U.S. television debut, an untitled global spy drama that centers on the lives of intelligence officers from the U.S., China, Russia, UK, and France. The series will follow these spies, who are involved in missions that make them meet, fight, or manipulate each other⁠—either as allies or enemies⁠—in the field and in cyberspace.

Fox is planning to produce all six of its pilot orders for this year’s development season and will continue to ramp up its off-cycle pilot orders. The pickups include the drama, The Cleaning Lady, starring Élodie Yung as an on-call cleaning lady for the mob, and Blood Relative, a forensic genealogy-themed crime drama starring Tyrone Marshall Brown, Tate Donovan, and Melissa Leo.

ABC announced plans to shoot five pilots once production can safely resume. One of those is Rebel, inspired by the life of Erin Brockovich. It stars Katey Segal as Annie "Rebel" Bello, a blue-collar legal advocate without a law degree—a funny, messy, brilliant and fearless woman who cares desperately about the causes she fights for and the people she loves.

ABC will not be moving forward with the Revenge spin-off it was developing for next year's 2020-2021 season. The new series would have followed the same blueprint the original established with Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), but this time following a young Latinx immigrant, who would be "guided by one of the original series' favorite characters" to exact revenge on the people who murdered her mother. There was much speculation that tech mogul Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann), Emily's main partner-in-crime in the original series, would have been been part of the new project and that the spin-off would be turned into an anthology series.

CBS’s action crime drama, Magnum P.I., starring Jay Hernandez, is targeting a mid-August tentative production start date for its upcoming third season. While a spike in coronavirus infections throughout the continental U.S. is raising doubts about production restart plans in COVID-19 hot spots like California and Georgia, sites like Hawaii have emerged as appealing alternatives, especially since Hawaii has the lowest rate of infection and death of any U.S. state.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone had a special episode, talking about the Locked Up Festival being held online in support of the Trussell Trust in the UK.

Crime Cafe host, Debbi Mack, interviewed crime writer Saralyn Richard about her Detective Oliver Parrott mystery series.


Writer Types guest co-host, Cheryl Head, joined Eric Beetner to chat with Steve Hockensmith (Holmes on the Range) and Sara Sligar (Take Me Apart).

Speaking of Mysteries welcomed Cathi Stoler to talk about Bar None, the debut title in her "Murder on the Rocks" series.

Suspense Radio's Beyond the Cover was joined by bestselling author Scott Turow to talk about his latest legal thriller, The Last Trial.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club featured a "Cozy Episode," highlighting three cozy mysteries they've enjoyed reading lately.

The Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine podcast featured a reading of Angela Zeman's intriguing, meaningful, and inventive historical story "The First Tale of Roxanne"; and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's podcast had author David Dean reading his moving and suspenseful tale, "The Duelist."

Happy Independence Day

(Photo by Bill Couch)

FFB: Windy City

Hubert "Hugh" Holton (1947-2001) grew up in Woodlawn, outside of Chicago, the only son of a police officer. In high school, he started reading detective novels from the school library—Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Arthur Conan Doyle. He later said, "One of the things that I always noticed about the books was that police types were always portrayed as very stupid individuals. My father is now, as he was then, one of the smartest people I ever met. I was saying, 'How in the world are they doing this? Why are they making these officers look so stupid?'"

In July 1964, Holton himself joined the police department's cadet program, then spent a three-year tour of duty (including a seven-month stint in Vietnam) until returning to Chicago to sign up with the police academy in 1969. He was one of the first black officers to work in Wrigleyville, but after a district commander told him, "I don't need any colored tactical officers in my district," he transferred to Wentworth. Six months later, he'd moved up to plainclothes, and eventually was promoted up to commander of the Grand Crossing District.

But those early crime fiction novels continued to haunt him, and he enrolled in writing programs at Columbia College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1986, he attended a conference at Northwestern sponsored by the midwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and two years later took a course taught by mystery author Barbara D'Amato. Thanks to her encouragement, he subsequently published his first novel, Violent Crimes, featuring Larry Cole, a young black police officer at the start of his career, aided by an older and wiser Italian-American partner named Blackie Silvestri. Holton went on to write ten successful novels in the Cole series, but sadly, Holton died of cancer in 2001 at the age of 54.

The second installment in the thriller series featuring Chicago Police Commander Larry Cole is Windy City. While investigating the death of a fellow officer, Cole stumbles across a pattern of killings that leads him to discover that the alleged fun-loving, super rich couple Neil and Margo DeWitt have a gruesome hobby:  they murder women and children using methods from Chicago-area mystery novels. Cole enlists a group of mystery writers to help him figure out where the homicidal couple will strike next. But as the body count rises, the threat hits closer to home:  not only are the DeWitts responsible for killing Cole's best buddy, Margo DeWitt is setting her sights on Cole's young son as her ultimate target.

Kirkus Reviews noted, "It's the rare reader who'll put this one down as it hurtles—one chilling event after the next—to its over-the-top finale...a bravura performance."

Mystery Melange

The UK’s book trade magazine, The Bookseller, announced this year's winners of the British Book awards, also known as the Nibbies. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite won top honors in the Crime & Thriller category, with the other finalists including The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley; How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid; The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides; Imposter by LJ Ross; and Blue Moon by Lee Child. Braithwaite was the first Black author to win her category, joining fellow authors Candice Carty-Williams and Bernardine Evaristo who became become the first Black authors to win top British Book awards for book of the year and author of the year, respectively.

Organizers of New Zealand’s annual Ngaio Marsh Awards for crime fiction announced their longlist of nominees for the 2020 best New Zealand crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing. You can check out all twelve titles on this list via this link. The finalists for both this Best Novel category and also Best First Novel will be announced later this year with the winners honored at this year’s WORD Christchurch Festival, held from October 29 to November 1.

On July 23, Mark Billingham will be in conversation with Ian Rankin in a special online event. Billingham will discuss the novel, Cry Baby, his 20th novel and the prequel to Sleepyhead, the first installment in the bestselling Tom Thorne series. You can register just for the event on its own or for a little extra, register for both a ticket and a signed copy of the book.

MurderCon organizer, Lee Lofland, announced that the event is going virtual, with two full days of live instruction featuring many of the same in-person event topics taught by the Sirchie’s expert instructors. Classes will include Fingerprints, Chemical Processing of Prints, Presumptive Blood/DNA, Blood Spatter, Footwear Evidence, Lifting Footwear, Homicide Investigations, Murder Case Studies, Toxicology, Forensic Geology, and Entomology, and much more. Full details, including how you can register to attend the 2020 Virtual MurderCon, will be available on the event's website by July 6. The registration period will be very brief and spots are limited on a first come, first served basis.

Austin Camacho, the director of Creatures, Crime & Creativity, made the very tough decision to cancel this year's conference. However, C3 2021 will be September 10th-12th at a new venue, the Doubletree Hilton Hotel in Columbia, Maryland, with key note speakers to include bestselling mystery author, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and top fantasy author, Sherrilyn Kenyon.

Norlisha Crawford, associate professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, who guest edited the Clues issue on Chester Himes, will be teaching an online course on African American detective fiction in August via the Rosenbach in Philadelphia. Authors covered will include Himes, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Walter Mosley, and Nichelle D. Tramble. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at the Bunburyist Blog.)

A line of face masks from Out of Print (the Penguin Random House company that creates book-centric apparel and accessory items) and the American Booksellers Association has been the biggest new-product launch in Out of Print's 10-year history. The seven Out of Print Literary Masks sold more than 13,000 in their first week. They are available at outofprint.com and will begin selling at bookstores nationwide next week for $12 each. A portion of each sale is being donated to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) to assist bookstores affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Guardian featured a panel of authors titled "Me and my detective." Lee Child, Attica Locke, Val McDermid, John Connolly, Ann Cleeves, Amer Anwar, Ian Rankin, Sara Paretsky, Abir Mukherjee, Lynda La Plante, Michael Connelly, Mark Billingham, and Jo Nesbø revealed how they came up with their most famous creations, what it’s like to live with them over decades, and if they’ll last the distance.

Mystery Fanfare's Janet Rudolph compiled a listing of mysteries taking place during summer filled with murder and mayhem, whether it's on the beach, at the lake, or in the city.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "I Died a Thousand Times: Death #999" by Richie Narvaez."

In the Q&A roundup, Indie Crime Scene interviewed Michael Pronko, author of Tokyo Traffic; Karin Slaughter chatted with Woman and Home and revealed the secrets behind her best-selling books and her writing success; The Picky Bookworm welcomed Scottish author and former Detective Sergeant with the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, Ian Patrick, about his crime novels; CrimeReads spoke with Ottessa Moshfegh about her novel of metaphysical suspense, Death in Her Hands; and John Grisham had a video chat with The Mystery People to discuss his latest novel, Camino Winds.

Author R&R with Jane Stanton Hitchcock (winner of the 2019 Hammett Award)

Bestselling author Jane Stanton Hitchcock was born and raised in New York City, where she led a seemingly privileged life. Early on, she learned the trappings of wealth and fame are not nearly all they are cracked up to be, themes she has since explored in her creative works dealing with murder and mayhem in high places. Before turning her hand to crime novels, she actually started her career in screenplays, one of which, Vanilla, was directed by Harold Pinter in London. (Fun factoid: Jane’s mother, actress Joan Alexander, originated the roles of Lois Lane on the radio serial The Adventures of Superman and Della Street on the radio serial Perry Mason).

Jane is also an avid poker player who regularly competes in the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker, and her sixth novel, Bluff (which just won the Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers), plays off that theme. One-time socialite Maud Warner polishes up the rags of her once glittering existence and bluffs her way into a signature New York restaurant on a sunny October day. When she walks out again, a man will have been shot. Maud has grown accustomed to being underestimated and invisible, and she uses her ability to fly under the radar as she pursues celebrity accountant Burt Sklar, the man she believes stole her mother's fortune and left her family in ruins. Her fervent passion for poker has taught Maud that she can turn weakness into strength to take advantage of people who think they are taking advantage of her, and now she has dealt the first card in her high-stakes plan for revenge. One unexpected twist after another follows as Maud plays the most important poker hand of her life. The stakes? To take down her enemies and get justice for their victims. Her success depends on her continuing ability to bluff—and on who will fold. Can she win?

Jane stops by In Reference to Murder for a Q&A:

1) BLUFF grew out of your own mastery of poker. In what ways did the game inspire this book – and how is the idea of bluffing a catalyst for suspense?

First of all, I would never say I had “mastered” poker.  If anything, the game is my master.  It’s taught me a lot about life and how to deal with adversity – namely, there’s no point in dwelling on bad luck or one’s mistakes.  Hard as it is, you sometimes have to say “Next Hand” and get on with it.  I also realized that at the poker table I was being underestimated just as I had been in life.  Players never expect an older woman to play anything but Old Lady Poker, just like the guy who swindled my mother out of millions of dollars never expected me to find out about his larceny and ultimately help put him in jail.  When I made this connection I found a way into the book:  Combine being underestimated in life and in poker and write a twisty tale of murder, revenge, and bluffing.  I hope the reader will be intrigued by the characters and swept up in the twists and turns of the story.  The book is one long poker hand with a Flop, a Turn, and the River.  As they play the hand with me, I want them to be thinking:   “How the hell does she get out of this?”  Only one way:  Bluff!

2) “Mad Maud” Warner is a complex character – and a timely one, given the fervor of feminism and the #MeToo movement. In what ways do you see her as an everywoman of sorts – and how did you balance likability with believability in developing her person? 

I say in the book: “Older women are invisible, and we don’t even have to disappear.”  Power derived from supposed weakness is a theme of the book. In the very first scene, Maud is able to escape because no one can fathom a woman like her – an older, well-dressed socialite – could have had the balls to commit such a shocking crime in a posh and crowded restaurant.  

The book is told in two voices:  Maud’s own, as she recounts what led her to commit murder; and the third person, which details the crime and its aftermath on all the people involved.  My hope is that the reader will be rooting for Maud as she explains what has led her to such violence and why she thinks she can possibly get away with it if she literally plays her cards right!  I guess she’s a #MeToo murderer!

3) You also satirize high society. How do you view humor as a tool for enlightenment – and what’s your rule for achieving a sense of fun (and funny) without crossing the line into farce or offensiveness? 

I like what Abba Eban said: “The upper crust is a bunch of crumbs held together by dough.”  I grew up in so-called “High Society” and, as I say in the book “money is a matter of luck; class is a matter of character.”  Maud knows she can trust some of her dicey poker playing pals much more than the “social” friends she’s known her entire life.  I also say:  “Money exaggerates who people are.  If you’re good you’ll be better, if you’re bad you’ll jump right down on the devil’s trampoline.”  A lot of people think having money makes them better than other people.  I like to aim my pen at such pretension and there’s no better way to do it than with humor.  I’d have to be Dostoevsky to write my own family’s story without humor.  As the book shows, money doesn’t save anyone from addiction, swindling, and death.  In fact, money often makes things worse.  But there’s nothing more exasperating than self-pity.  So telling my family’s story was a challenge.  It took me nineteen drafts!  But the poker theme eventually helped me harness the humor in all the darkness.

4) In addition to a novelist, you are also a playwright and screenwriter. In what ways do these disciplines inform one another – and what are the greatest challenges of the novel in comparison?

 Movies are really a directors’ medium so a writer is blessed if he/she has a good director.  Enough said.  Playwriting taught me about creating scenes and developing characters through dialogue.  In the theatre time on the stage grows more expensive with each minute.  You have to engage the audience.  Therefore, you always have to ask yourself:  What’s at stake?  Why should people care about these characters, this situation?  You have a captive audience sitting there waiting for things to develop in a finite amount of time.  The novel has no such constraints.  But I confess, I love a good, twisty plot. I like every scene to further the story.  But I also think it’s important for the reader not to be one jump ahead of me.  It’s when surprise meets inevitability that I feel I’ve done my job.  I want my readers to say:  Wow I didn’t see that coming, but now it all makes sense!  

I try and give the reader a sense of place without overloading the description.  Action is character and I really like writing dialogue, putting myself into all the characters – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  It’s fun to create a good villain and more fun to see the villain get his/her comeuppance.  But in my books, there is usually an anti-heroine who is, herself, operating in an amoral sphere.  In Bluff, I want my audience to be complicit in Maud’s revenge and root for her to get it – otherwise the book doesn’t work.   

5) What does winning the Hammett Prize mean to you?

It’s an incredible honor.  I never expected to win it!  Being nominated was enough, particularly among such a talented group of writers, not to mention the distinguished nominees and winners of past years.  Frankly, just to be favorably mentioned in the same sentence with Dashiell Hammett is a mystery writer’s dream. 

 

You can learn more about Jane Stanton Hitchcock and the Hammett Award-winning book via Jane's website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bluff is available via all major bookstores.

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

David Leitch (Deadpool 2; Hobbs & Shaw) has signed on to direct the thriller, Bullet Train, with another action-thriller veteran, Antoine Fuqua (director of the Equalizer movies starring Denzel Washington), on board as producer. Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese manga, centers on a group of assassins with conflicting motives on a train in Tokyo. The film is a contained thriller, which means it can be shot on a contained set and thus fall in line easier under health restrictions than a more sprawling action movie with actual locations.

Vertical Entertainment has picked up North American rights to the mystery-thriller, Viscous, starring Mena Suvari (American Beauty). The film, from debut writer-director Braden R. Duemmler, follows a socially awkward teenager who is blindsided when her mother introduces her new fiancée. At first, his charm, intelligence, and beauty seem too good to be true, and after a series of strange occurrences the teenage daughter realizes that this new member of their family is not exactly who he seems.

Gerard Butler is set to star in the action film, Kandahar, with Ric Roman Waugh directing. (Butler and Waugh also teamed up last year on the hit action pic Angel Has Fallen). Waugh will direct from a screenplay he wrote with former military intelligence officer Mitchell LaFortune. In the film, Butler will play Tom Harris, an undercover CIA operative working in the Middle East. An intelligence leak dangerously exposes his classified mission and reveals his covert identity. Stuck in the heart of hostile territory, Harris and his translator must fight their way out of the desert to an extraction point in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while eluding the elite special forces hunting them.

The Mickey Rourke, Sean Stone, and Eric Roberts crime drama, Night Walk, has secured North American distribution. Directed and produced by Moroccan-born filmmaker Aziz Tazi, Night Walk follows Frank (played by Oliver Stone’s son, Sean Stone), a Western traveler visiting the Middle East, where his girlfriend Sarah lives. After a tragic incident leading to Sarah’s death, Frank is wrongfully imprisoned by corrupt police, and under the guidance of the prison’s top shot-caller (Mickey Rourke) and the protection of his Muslim cellmate, he unravels political corruption at the top seats of government in his quest for justice.

Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk) has been cast opposite Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike) in the thriller, Hunters In The Dark, with veteran theater director, Simon Evans, making his feature filmmaking debut. The project tells the story of 28-year-old English school teacher, Robert Grieve (Pettyfer), who unexpectedly wins a bag full of cash. Adrift in Cambodia and eager for a way out of his life of quiet desperation, he decides to take a journey deeper into the wilder aspects of the country, coming up against a scheming American, a crooked police officer, and a darker side of Cambodia.

Saban Films has bought North American and UK rights to Jared Cohn’s Reactor starring Bruce Willis as the leader of a gang of mercenaries holding a nuclear power plant hostage. Casting is underway for the lead role, a former soldier who takes down Willis and his crew. Cohn wrote the script with Cam Cannon and Stephen Cyrus Sepher.

The estate of Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is suing Netflix, Legendary Films, and author Nancy Springer over copyright and trademark issues associated with the upcoming film, Enola Homes. The suit claims that, despite most of the original pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes tales having been judged to be in the public domain, the author’s last 10 stories about the character — published between 1923 and 1927 — are not. The movie stars Millie Bobby Brown as the much-younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, who proves to be a highly capable detective in her own right. Henry Cavill, Helena Bonham Carter, Sam Claflin, Fiona Shaw, and Adeel Akhtar also star in the film that is set to stream on Netflix.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Langdon, the NBC series based on Dan Brown’s novel, The Lost Symbol, has added to its cast. Sumalee Montano (Star Trek: Picard), Arrow alum Rick Gonzalez, and Beau Knapp (The Good Lord Bird) are set as series regulars opposite Ashley Zukerman. Written by Dan Dworkin and Jay Beattie, Langdon follows the early adventures of famed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Zukerman), who must solve a series of deadly puzzles to save his kidnapped mentor and thwart a chilling global conspiracy. The project, which hails from Imagine Television, CBS TV Studios and Universal Television, is among five 2020 pilots which NBC has committed to filming later this year, once production can safely begin amid coronavirus restrictions.

ViacomCBS International Studios and Miramax will co-produce The Turkish Detective, a crime series set in modern-day Istanbul based on the 21 inspector Cetin Ikmen novels by Barbara Nadel. Each episode "follows Ikmen and his partner Mehmet Suleyman as they solve a series of crimes, with the stories heavily rooted in the rich culture and history of Istanbul."

AMC will air the British drama, Gangs of London, in the U.S. after HBO’s Cinemax exited the project, which has been renewed for a second season. The ten-part show was a big hit for Sky in the UK, becoming its biggest premiere streaming series this year and the biggest original drama launch on Sky Atlantic in the past five years.

Turner networks TNT and TBS have put four projects in development including The Fall and Liar's Club. The Fall is a paranoid thriller about a woman whose dark secrets start to unravel her seemingly perfect life and is inspired by the Albert Camus tale of the same name. Liar's Club is described as "part comedy, part pulp thriller" or "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel meets Breaking Bad." it follows a woman leading two very different lives, one adorned in the trappings of Connecticut country clubs, and the other drenched in the murkiness of the underground gambling circuit in NYC.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up featuring the mystery short story "Vengeance in Cadmium Blue" by Margaret Mendel as read by actor Ariel Linn.

Writer Types host, Eric Beetner, talked with authors Michael Elias (You Can Go Home Now); Jennifer Chow (Mimi Lee Gets A Clue); and Richard Prosch (the Dan Spalding series).

Michael Elias was also the guest on Speaking of Mysteries to discuss You Can Go Home Now, a psychological thriller where a woman cop is on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own.

Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Marc Cameron, author of the New York Times bestselling Jericho Quinn Thriller series.

Writer's Detective Bureau host, veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, discussed the role SWAT plays in an investigation after they’ve busted the suspect; what a witness or visitor to an FBI Office might see; and what the cocaine production process looks like.

Casey Cep, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was the guest on It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club, chatting about her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, an instant New York Times bestseller.

THEATRE

Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, is being adapted for the theatre for the first time, and is set to premiere on April 3, 2021 at the Churchill theatre in Bromley, London, under the direction of Luke Sheppard. The stageplay, which involves the murder of the Louvre’s curator and the race to solve a series of baffling codes left beside his body, is being written by the same team who adapted The Girl on the Train for the stage, Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel.

FFB: Troublemaker

American author Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) was born in South Dakota, the son of a shoe shop owner who lost the business during the Depression, prompting moves to Minneapolis and eventually a citrus grove in California belonging to the author's married sister. Hansen was to spend the rest of his life in California, making a living as a writer and teacher.

Hansen fell in love with a worker at Lockheed's Los Angeles aircraft plant, Jane Bancroft, and married her in 1943. He was gay, she was a lesbian, and they both had affairs, but as the author later remarked, "something was right about it, however bizarre it may seem to the rest of the world." They remained happily together until Jane's death 51 years later, and had a daughter who later underwent gender reassignment.

Hansen penned over 40 books and other works, many with homosexual themes, not widely accepted during the pre-Stonewall 1960s, prompting him to use a pen name with small West Coast publishers. His breakthrough, and the first of his works to use his own name, came with the detective novel Fadeout in 1970. In the St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, Hansen said that  "Homosexuals have commonly been treated shabbily in detective fiction—vilified, pitied, at best patronized...I wanted to write a good, compelling whodunit, but I also wanted to right some wrongs. Almost all the folksay about homosexuals is false. So I had some fun turning clichés and stereotypes on their heads in that book. It was easy."

Fadeout and 11 subsequent books in the series featured Dave Brandstetter, an openly gay insurance investigator/private eye who still had the tough, no-nonsense qualities of the classic hardboiled protagonist. The novels are also known for their colorful descriptive portrayal of Los Angeles during the late 60's and 70's. Hansen was a fan of Ross Macdonald, "but it bothered me that his detective never had any personal life, and he never changed. My joke was to take the true hard-boiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well."

Troublemaker, the third book in the series from 1975, finds Brandstetter investigating the murder of Rick Wendell, the owner of a local gay bar and all-around nice guy. Wendell's body had been discovered by his mother, who found a young man, stark naked, wiping off a revolver with Rick lying dead at his feet. It seems like an open-and-shut case, but Brandstetter digs deeper, both in his job as investigator for Medallion Life Insurance and because he doesn't like easy solutions. What happened to the large sum of money Wendell had just withdrawn from the bar's bank account? And why are the only fingerprints on the gun those of the victim's mother--the beneficiciary of her son's insurance policy?

Hansen wrote compelling dialogue and multi-layered characters, as in this description of the victim's mother:

 

"She wore jeans, high-top work shoes, an old pullover with a jagged reindeer pattern. Somebody's ski sweater once, somebody even bigger than she was. Her son? She was sixty, but there was nothing frail about her. The hands gripping the grainy rake handle were a man's hands. Her cropped hair was white. She wore no makeup. Her skin was ruddy, her eyes bright blue. Hearty might have described her. Except for her mouth. It sulked. Something had offended her and failed to apologize. Not lately—long ago. A lifetime probably."

 

The New Yorker said of the Brandstetter series, "Unusual in two respects. One is that the insurance investigator, though ruggedly masculine, is thoroughly and contentedly homosexual, the other is that Hansen is an excellent craftsmen, a compelling writer." And as a nod to Hansen's writing as solid private-eye fiction, not just gay private-eye fiction, the Los Angeles Times called the author, "The most exciting and effective writer of the classic private-eye novel working today." In 1992, Mr. Hansen received a life achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Famous Shamus

This news just in, a little late for Mystery Melange earlier this morning, but the Private Eye Writers of America announced the Shamus Award winners today:

Best PI Hardcover

WINNER:  Lost Tomorrows by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)

Also nominated:

The Tower of Songs by Casey Barrett (Kensington)
The Shallows by Matt Goldman (Forge)
Below the Line by Michael Gould (Dutton)
The Cold Way Home by Julia Keller (Minotaur)

Best Original Private Eye Paperback

WINNER:  Behind the Wall of Sleep by James DF Hannah 

Also nominated:

The Skin Game by JD Allen (Midnight Ink)
Paid in Spades by Richard Helms (Clay Stafford Books)
Ration of Lies by M. Ruth Myers (author)
The Bird Boys by Lisa Sandlin (Cinco Puntos Press)

Best Private Eye Short Story

WINNER:  "Sac-A-Lait Man" by O'Neil De Noux (Sept/Oct EQMM)

Also nominated:

"The Smoking Bandit of Lakeside Terrace" by Chad Baker (May/June EQMM)
"The Dunes of Saulkrasti" by William Burton McCormick (Sept/Oct EQMM)
"The Fourteenth Floor" by Adam Meyer (Crime Travel)
"Weathering the Storm" by Michael Pool (The Eyes of Texas)