Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

For his first film in a decade, Director John Polson has chosen fellow Australian Peter Temple's award-winning crime novel Truth. The novel became the first work of genre fiction to win the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010. The story follows Melbourne Police Inspector Stephen Villani as he balances investigations into a murdered woman in a penthouse apartment and three men butchered in a sadistic rampage, while dealing with a tattoo-faced drug dealer corrupting his rebellious daughter and his own crumbling marriage.

Director Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Bone Collector) is taking on a film adaptation of Firing Point, a yet-to-be-published sequel to the 2003 submarine thriller Final Bearing by George Wallace and Don Keith. The novel is about an untested submarine captain who must work with a Navy SEAL team to rescue the Russian president and avoid igniting World War III. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Steve Rose, writing for The Guardian, takes a look at crime television and film based in Melbourne, Australia, including the new thriller Animal Kingdom by writer and director, David Michôd. It's based on a true case of two policemen lured to investigate an abandoned car, then shot dead in cold blood in retaliation for a previous shooting.

Robert Downey Jr is rumored to be in talks to star in the film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's mystery novel, Inherent Vice, an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon mystery novel. Downey would play Larry "Doc" Sportello, a private eye based in Los Angeles in the late 1960s who is tracking down the killer of a woman's wealthy lover.

TV

It's "old home" week for actor Jamie Bamber and producer Ronald D. Moore, both of Battlestar Galactica fame, with Bamber set to star in a new Moore pilot for NBC, titled 17th Precinct. He joins already-cast Stockard Channing in the ensemble cop drama set in a fictional town where magic and supernatural elements rule over science.

Fresh on the heels of the announcement from NBC about a new police procedural for the fall schedule blending fairytale fiction with reality comes news that the lead role has already been cast. David Giuntoli (of the Real World...seriously!) will star in Grimm as a detective who "begins to see humans as 'beast/animals', and discovers he has a legacy, to protect 'humans' from these beasts."

Maria Bello (ER, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) will take on the role made famous by Helen Mirren in the new Prime Suspect reboot, with English actor Toby Stephens playing her live-in boyfriend.

Four of the six NYPD rookie cop characters in the upcoming Robert De Niro-produced pilot Rookies have been cast:  this week Judy Marte, Tom Reed and Stark Sands joined already-announced Leelee Sobieski in starring roles.

Ashley Judd may be nearing a deal for her first regular TV series role, in ABC's action series Missing (one of several working titles). Judd would play Becca Winstone, a devoted single mom and ex-CIA agent who travels to Europe to track down her 18-year-old son after he disappears in Italy where he'd been working on architecture fellowship.

PODCASTS/RADIO

For NPR, Alan Cheuse reviews two crime novels set in two very different parts of the world, The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Japan), a story of murder, mathematics and rivalry, and Damage by John Lescroart (San Francisco), a tale of violence and revenge.