In Reference to Murder

The Best Before the Fest?

Several mystery/crime fiction conferences include writers' workshops prior to the main event, often staffed with bestselling authors and an interesting array of panels and seminars. Thrillerfest, coming up next week in NYC, has such an event called CraftFest, a two-day affair held July 6-7. The first day starts off with simultaneous panels including Steve Berry talking about "Point of View, Psychic Distance and Passive Voice"; Dr. D.P. Lyle discussing "Forensics in Fiction"; and Gar Anthony Haywood who will tell you how to "Make the Case for Your P.I." You'll also have a chance to hear several other experienced writers as they help you navigate your way through writing and publishing in the suspense/thriller field.  And there's still time to register, if you're a procrastinator.

Over on the West Coast, the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, held July 21-24 in Corte Madera, CA, likewise has an impressive roster of authors and panels to inspire you. Dr. Lyle will be on hand there, too, talking about "The Psychology of Characters," to get the ball rolling as part of three pre-conference classes, along with David Corbett on "Integrating Arcs and Acts" and Hallie Ephron on "Back Story, and How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot With It."  Then the full conference kicks off in the afternoon on the 21st with Cara Black, Tony Broadbent, Kirk Russell and Moderator Jacqueline Winspear as they "Explore the Genre." And you're in luck here, too, as there's still time to register for this learning opportunity.

Mystery Melange

Morning Call columnist Bill White listed his Top 10 Literary Detectives, with both old and new favorites (some of whom aren't technically detectives per se).

The Irish Times reviewed the new anthology Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century , edited by Declan Burke. It's filled with essays, interviews, short stories, memoir and first-hand perspectives from some of today's top Irish crime writers.

Many of you many already know that Martin H. Greenberg passed away this past weekend. Greenberg was a tireless supporter of short stories in the crime fiction, scifi and horror genres, and quite frankly I'm not sure anyone knows how many works he was involved with, but he shared editor duties with Isaac Isamov on over 120 scifi anthologies alone. He received four genre lifetime achievement awards, including the Science Fiction Writers Association Solstice Award, the Bram Stoker award, the Milford Award in science fiction, and the Ellery Queen award in mystery. He will be sorely missed.

The last remaining home to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, is under threat to be torn down. Lee Barwood has an article in Kings River Life magazine where you can read more, and if you'd like to help, visist the Save Undershaw Preservation web site.

Mystery Writers of America has added a new MWA University program in San Francisco on October 15th. There will be classes for writers led by Jess Lourey, Julie Smith, Rex Burns, Laura DiSilverio and Reed Farrel Coleman. Cost is $50 for both members and non MWA members, and you'd better hurry, because attendance is limited to 80 people.

The Macavity Award nominations were announced by Janet Rudolph. They're nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International, with winners to be announced at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention in St. Louis in September. Congrats to all!

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

A couple of recent updates regarding the film Parker, based on the professional thief created by Donald Westlake in his novels:  FilmDistrict is acquiring the US distribution rights to the film, and Jennifer Lopez is in talks to play the female lead opposite Jason Statham. Taylor Hackford is already on board as director, with the screenplay adaptation by John J. McLaughlin.

A suspense/thriller film written by Eric Nazarian and Sergei Bodrov titled Blood Brothers is in development. Although the plot is unknown, the setting is to be Russia and Bodrov is set to direct, with Channing Tatum being eyed as the star.

Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert De Niro all star in the upcoming thriller The Killer Elite, which follows the true story of an ex-special ops agent who is forced to rescue his mentor. The film doesn't arrived until September, but you can catch a trailer preview on Bish's Beat.

Welcome to the Punch, about a detective (James McAvoy) who forms an unusual partnership with a criminal (Mark Strong) to uncover a conspiracy, has added British actress Andrea Riseborough as the female lead. The film starts shooting in July in London.

TV

Masterpiece Mystery will air three episodes in July of the series based on Michael Dibdin's books featuring Italian police detective Aurelio Zen, starring British actor Rufus Sewell.  Dibdin's widow, Seattle author Kathrine Beck, has said that "these have done a very good job of capturing the essence of the books."

Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox will reprise their roles as Inspector Robbie Lewis and his partner DS James Hathaway in more episodes of the Inspector Lewis TV series. They're based on novels by author Colin Dexter, who consults on the production.

Showtime is teaming up with writer/producer David Goyer to create a drama based on the graphic novel series 100 Bullets, which included 100 issues between 1999 and 2009 and was written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Eduardo Risso.  The noir series follows the attempts of the mysterious Agent Graves to destroy a secret group of families that control most of the world's wealth and power.

The short list of replacements for Chris Meloni on Law & Order: SVU has been whittled down to five: David Conrad (Ghost Whisperer), Kevin Alejandro (True Blood, Southland), Michael Raymond-James (Terriers), Danny Pino (Cold Case) and Rhys Coiro (Entourage). Meanwhile, Meloni has just been cast in the upcoming Superman movie reboot.

Criminal Minds fans can breathe easier, at least as far as Thomas Gibson's status is concerned. Although negotiations went down to the wire, the actor did come to an agreement to return as Special Agent Hotchner.

The CBS procedural Hawaii Five-0 will be a reunion of Lost stars when Terry O'Quinn returns in the Fall for a recurring role and joins fellow former Lost cast member Daniel Dae Kim. O'Quinn will portray a Navy Seal Lt. Commander who trained Alex O'Loughlin's McGarrett in Coronado and served with his father in Vietnam.

Jason Patric will star in the new FX drama pilot Powers, based on the graphic novel by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. It's a police procedural set in a world where superpowers are relatively common.

Law and Order: Criminal Intent may be coming to an end, but stars Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe aren't completely giving up hope it may come back in some form. But just in case, they added their farewells to the fans.

The new interactive graphic novel based on the TV series Burn Notice logged 100,000 page views its first day. Created in partnership with DC Comics and titled A New Day, the project bridges the storylines between the fourth and fifth seasons.

Stephen Root has been cast as a a shrewd businessman gangster in the FX drama pilot Outlaw Country, a crime thriller/family drama, set against the backdrop of Southern organized crime and Nashville royalty. It stars Luke Grimes as twenty-something Eli Larkin, who tries to leave a life of crime, John Hawkes as Eli's uncle, who is a big-time player in the Southern crime world, Haley Bennett as a country singer and Mary Steenburgen as her overprotective mother. 

PODCASTS

NPR's Diane Rehm Show featured Eva Gabrielsson, author of There Are Things I Want You to Know about Stieg Larsson and Me.

Suspense Radio added new interviews: on Saturday June 25th, Jon Land and Joseph Finder; and on Sunday June 26th, a split show with Chevy Stevens and Marcia Clark. All times are pacific time. 

THEATER

We had the murderous barber Sweeney Todd, so why not Bonnie and Clyde, the musical? Producers are bringing a version of Bonnie and Clyde, starring Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan, to Boardway previews on November 4, with a regular open on December 1 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway. It has a good pedigree:  the book is  by Ivan Menchell, who wrote The Cemetery Club; music is by Frank Wildhorn (Jekyll & Hyde); and lyrics are by Don Black (Sunset Boulevard).

Two Boys, a new opera by Nico Muhly and Craig Lewis, debuted at the English National Opera on June 24th. It's based on the true story of a teenager who stagged a younger boy outside a shopping mall in an English suburb, and a detective obsessed with the case who has to unravel fake identities and Internet intrigue to solve the motivations behind the tragedy. The opera will premiere at the Metropolitan in New York during the 2013-14 season.

Friday's Forgotten Books - Death of a Dutchman

Magdalen Nabb was born in Lancashire in 1947 but lived in Florence, Italy, from 1975 until her death in 2007. She wrote both children's fiction and crime fiction, the latter featuring her literary creation Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia. She modeled the Marshal on a real Florentine law officer who used to keep the author up to date on crimes in the city being investigated by the Carabinieri, the national Italian police force. Critic Susanna Yager of the Sunday Telegraph once noted that "The mystery for me is why Magdalen Nabb is not better known," certainly not as well as Michael Dibdin (Aurelia Zen) and Donna Leon (Commissario Guido Brunetti).

After the first book featuring Guarnaccia appeared in 1981, it impressed Georges Simenon so much that he wrote to congratulate Nabb. After the publication of the sequel, Death of a Dutchman, he said, "Your first novel was a coup de maitre, your second is a masterpiece." That second book (she wrote 14 Guarnaccia installments in all) opens as Marshal Guarnaccia finds a jeweler dying in an apparent suicide from slashed hands and a barbiturate overdose, uttering his last words, "It wasn't her." The only witnesses to the crime are a blind man and a notoriously untruthful 91-year-old woman.

Although the case seems to be a dead end, the Marshal refuses to let it go, fighting his way through bureaucratic red tape, hordes of tourists, the soggy July heat, the secret police known as Digos and the dead Dutchman's troubled past in order to reach the truth. The dead man is known as a "Dutchman" even though his father was Dutch and his mother Italian. This neither-here-nor-there sense of belonging echoes the life of the Marshal himself, a Sicilian stationed in Florence, living at the station barracks without his wife and sons, as they care for his invalid mother back home.

Marshal, lower down the police hierarchy than a Lieutenant or Magistrate, is nonetheless a dedicated, sensitive and caring officer, not particularly articulate but with a subtle humor who patiently helps the young and inexperienced officer in charge of the case. The city and culture that is Florence becomes another character, focusing on the importance of family, place and tradition. Or as the Washington Post added, "The richest scene here, however, is Florence itself, whose intricate politics and class structure Nabb parses with precision and wit."

A Fallen Blog Tour and Giveaway

As part of the launch of Karin Slaughter's companion audio CD to her latest novel Fallen, I'm giving away copies to 6 lucky winners of the unabridged boxed CD set (see details below). The audio book is narrated by actress  Shannon Cochran, who is on the faculty of Steppenwolf Classes West in Los Angeles and has had many guest appearances on Fringe, Numb3rs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, NYPD Blue and many other shows.

Fallen is the latest in the combining of Slaughter's two series, one with trauma doctor Sara Linton and the other with George Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent. In Fallen, Trent's partner Faith Mitchell arrives at her mother's house to find Faith's infant daughter hidden in a shed behind the house, the front door to the house open with a bloodstained knob, a man dead in the laundry room and there's a hostage situation in the bedroom. When the hostage situation turns deadly and Faith's mother goes missing, Faith turns to Trent, Linton and GBI boss Amanda Wagner to help Faith clear her name, find her mother and uncover the truth.

I've been asking authors this year to talk a bit more about how they approach researching their novels, and Karin graciously obliged:

Q) How do you research your novels? Since they feature cops and medical examiners, have you done ride-alongs and attended autopsies? Do you research at the library or online a lot to get the details just right. Or do you feel too much research and over-planning can be deadly to a manuscript? For Fallen in particular, did you need to do any research into gangs and gang activity?

A) I’ve never done a ride-along, but I’ve been on several training exercises with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.  I’ve seen a few autopsies.  I’ve gone to the shooting range and handled the various weapons the GBI agents have to be trained on.  Many of the agents have been very generous with their time, and I’ve had the great pleasure of talking to them about their jobs, how they look at the world, and their toughest cases.  That being said, at the end of the day, I’m a fiction author.  A lot of times I’ll take a grain of truth and turn it into something more exciting.  The fact is that cops spend a lot of time just sitting around reading, or waiting outside a house for the bad guy to come home, or staring at a computer screen trying to connect the dots.

For Fallen, I didn’t want to get into all the gang stuff, mostly because I’m terrified of gangs!  I talked to a gang specialist with the Atlanta police, but mostly, I just made stuff up.  The cool thing I did for Fallen was watching the GBI train for a school shooter scenario.  They took over an abandoned school, had role-players acting as teachers and screaming students, and sent each agent into the building to find that shooter.  They did this all day for a full day, and I got to watch each agent to see how they would respond to the drill.  It was exhilarating, and scary, and such a huge adrenaline rush that as soon as I got home, I was on my computer writing that opening scene where Faith pulls into her mother’s driveway, realizes something horrible has happened, and takes her shotgun into the house to find the bad guys.

Karin, by the way, has spearheaded the SaveThe Libaries.com initiaitve and will receive the Silver Bullet Award at ThrillerFest in July for outstanding achievement in the pursuit of literacy and the love of reading. 

To win one of these 6 boxed sets, courtesy of AudioGO, just send along an e-mail with your name and mailing address and the subject line "Fallen CD Giveaway" to [email protected] by midnight EDT on Friday, July 8th, or if you're on Facebook, send me a direct message. All names will be entered into a random drawing and the 6 winners announced on the blog by Sunday, July 10th. If you have questions, feel free to post them in the comments section.

As part of Karin's audiobook blog tour, check out the other blogs in the stops along the way:

6/21/2011: Jen's Book Thoughts
6/23/2011: Book Addict Reviews
6/28/2011: Dew on the Kudzu
6/30/2011: Beth Fish Reads
7/1/2011:  Teresa's Reading Corner
7/5/2011:  You've GOTTA Read This!
7/6/2011:  Girls in the Stacks

Mysterious Melange

Elizabeth Foxwell posted a Call for Papers for an upcoming themed issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection on paranormal mysteries. You've got awhile: the submission deadline is December 29, 2011.

The crime fiction blog All Due Respect is folding, unless Alec Cizak can find another editor willing to take over. In its brief life, the blog featured stories by 12 different authors, and we'll certainly be sorry to see it go. But fear not for Alec and pulp fiction: he's still shepherding Pulp Modern, which is looking for stories between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

Over at the Women of Mystery blog, Terrie Moran notes that Sleuthfest 2012 will be held in Orlando, so it's a great chance to attend a mystery conference and take the family to Disney World. Sleuthfest special guests will include Charlaine Harris, Jeffery Deaver and Chris Grabenstein.

The Ripster, a/k/a Mike Ripley of Shots E-zine and the Getting Away With Murder column, announced the a Ostara Publishing imprint's Top Notch Thrillers reissues for July. They include two British thrillers from the early 1980s, which Ripley adds are fine examples of "flight and pursuit" novels in the John Buchan tradition.

The Drowning Machine handed out its Watery Grave Invitational short story challenge winners, six in all:  Chris La Tray, Eric Beetner, Chad Eagleton, Ian Ayris, Patricia Abbott and Nigel Bird.

Steve Weddle and Do Some Damage got several entries in the Beach House Noir contest, in which writers were challenged to create a short story by giving the summer vacation the crime fiction treatment. You can read entries via the links posted on the blog.

The first issue of Shelf Awareness: Enlightenment for Readers debuted this past Friday. It's a free twice-weekly e-mail newsletter with "a dozen or so book reviews, some content from the daily version of Shelf Awareness that will boost your reading IQ, new consumer-focused content like "Book Candy" and more readerly goodies." Each week, the editors will also share the 25 best books available to you right now, chosen by industry insiders, and all you have to do is sign up on the SA web site.

If you are writer and/or read crime fiction and haven't visited D.P. Lyle's writers forensics blog, you should. As a physician, author and consultant, he has lots of helpful insights into the medical side of crime. Kings River Life magazine has a Q&A with Lyle and is also giving away copy of his new book Royal Pains: First Do No Harm, a tie-in with the TV series.

David Cranmer has a review of a couple of books by Robert J. Randisi, as well as a giveaway of copies of two of Randisi's Rat Pack mystery series, I'm a Fool to Kill You and Fly Me to the Morgue. 

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Warner Bros and Universal Pictures have optioned rights to Harlan Coben's thriller Tell No One, with Ben Affleck as director and Chris Terrio adapting the script. The novel is finally getting its day on the big screen in the U.S. after Sony picked up and then dropped the project in 2002—although the new project is basically a remake of the 2006 French film adaptation of Coben's book, which was directed by Guillaume Canet. Also, Deadline reports that the French Gaumont Film Company, which controls the rights to Coben's Bolitar mysteries, is also developing Coben's novel Long Lost.

Omnimystery noted that author Robert Harris's financial thriller, The Fear Index, has been optioned for film by Fox, even though the book won't be published until September in the UK and January 2012 in the U.S. The title refers to the index that measures volatility of the S&P 500, and the plot surrounds a physicist once employed on the Large Hadron Collider, who now uses a secret system of computer algorithms to trade on the world's financial markets.

I think many of us are scratching our heads at the potential casting of the rather diminutive Tom Cruise as 6'5" 250-pound Jack Reacher, the star literary creation of Lee Child. But Cruise is considering taking on the lead role in One Shot, which is being adapted by screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie. Child himself says of the potential casting: "Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way."

TV

It's been a trend lately to see movies and TV adapted from graphic novels, and now Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are going to make a live-action series for Starz out of the 2001 anime series Noir. The tale follows two female assassins who team up to fight against a secret society. Steven Lightfoot (Criminal Justice) wrote the adaptation.

Laura Prepon and Naomi Judd are set to star in the Lifetime TV movie based on author Iris Johansen's 1999 thriller The Killing Game, about Eve Duncan, a woman who is contacted by a man claiming to be the killer of Eve's 7-year-old daughter 10 years before. Eve, a forensic sculptor, works to close the case even as the alleged killer taunts her and threatens to kill again. 

AMC's The Killing was renewed for a second season with a 13-episode order, following solid ratings for the debut series (see Michael Ausiello's post-mortem with writer/producer Veena Sud on Season One here). In another Q&A with the Calgary Herald, Sud added: "The aspiration in developing this show...was that we allow ourselves to walk in the footsteps of these characters, versus a pre-destined ending and forcing our characters to get there. There's an organic nature to the storytelling."

Three different Canadian mystery writers, William Deverell, Giles Blunt and Robert Rotenberg, had their works optioned for TV by Bell Media. Deverell's series, set in the Gulf Islands and featuring attorney Arthur Beaucham, won the Hammett award for crime writing in 1997; Giles Blunt's Detective John Cardinal series won Britain's Silver Dagger Award for Fiction in 2001; and Robert Rotenberg's debut novel Old City Hall, about a popular radio host who is arrested for murdering his wife is also in the development pipeline.

Lifetime's new procedural drama series, The Protector, starring Ally Walker (Sons of Anarchy, Profiler) as a single mother and detective in the LAPD homicide division, got off to a slow ratings start, but hopefully new casting will help; veteran actress Patty Duke is joining the crew in a recurring role as mother to Walker's character Gloria Sheppard.

If you're headed to Comic-Con in San Diego in July, here's a schedule of who to see when, including cast members from Psych, Covert Affairs, Bones, The Finder and Castle.

PODCASTS

South African crime writers Deon Meyer (Thirteen Hours) and Mike Nicol (Black Heart) discuss the way news events inform their writing, on a podcast for BBC Radio 4. 

Father's Day Presence

Janet Rudolph has posted some crime-fiction related to Father's Day on her blog, Mystery Fanfare.

The Seattle Public Library posted some of its favorite literary fathers and sons.

Galley Cat noted some lists of literary Father's Day gifts.

Author Kevin Renner talked to 50 women to learn more about his daughters and published his efforts in his new book In Search of Fatherhood: A Mother Lode of Wisdom from the World of Daughterhood.

NPR featured The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared, a debut book written by the daughter of a divorced father who read to his daughter every single night for nine years—spanning 3,218 days—until she went away to college.

And if your father needs a real celebratory break, make him a Father's Day Whiskey cocktail.

Friday's Forgotten Books - Under the Snow

Before the recent Scandinavian crime fiction invasion, before even Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, there was Kerstin Lillemor Ekman (born August 1933), whose debut crime novel, Thirty-Meter Murder (30 meter mord), was published in 1959. Her first few mystery novels grew out of her background as a documentary filmmaker, and she wrote seven crime fiction books in all before turning her hand to more general psychological and social themes (and one book that's a history of Sweden told from the POV of a troll). She did later return to the genre, with the detective novel Blackwater (Händelser vid vatten) in 1993, which won the Swedish Crime Academy's award for best crime novel.

Eckman's novel Under the Snow (De tre små mästarna) from 1961 is set in the harsh, distant landscape of the Arctic Circle's Lapland in the town of Rakisjokk during the extended darkness of winter. Or as one character notes, "You might say this is where the world comes to an end." A drunken evening ends in the death of a local artist and teacher named Matti Olsson, but when Constable Torsson sets out to investigate (a 25-mile trek on skis across a frozen lake), he is met with a conspiracy of silence, mismatched stories and only a single clue: a bloodstained mahjong tile. His efforts aren't helped by the fact that the locals are part of the ethnic Sami group who speak Finnish and don't think very highly of Swedes. Torsson has no choice to close the case. That is, until David Malm, an eccentric redheaded painter and friend of Matti's, arrives in town to investigate the truth on his own and runs into beautiful teacher Anna Ryd who is caught with a bag containing a bloody noose with a human hair clinging to it.

Eckman maintains the dark atmosphere of the unrelenting subzero cold and sunless days (followed by nights where the sun never sets) where nearly everyone has secrets, but still manages to inject bits of humor and her trademark irony: the super-fit younger colleague decked out in the 1960 version of chic Gore-Tex gear who turns an ankle in the first few yards during his first attempt on skis; a language professor who happily scribbles down the ferryman's epithets; a elkhound that barks nonstop. One unusual technique: Ekman wrote Under the Snow almost completely in the third person except for Chapter 12, where Matti's killer explains how the murder was committed. Of her writing influences, Eckman has said "I live in  a small village and I have been living in two other small villages far up north in Sweden. Very close to the forest, the mountains, the waters. They have had a great impact on me, melting into my language."

Under the Snow remained unavailable in English from the time of its publication until the translation by Joan Tate in 1996, 35 years later. Entertainment Weekly called Eckman "Striking...a sort of Graham Greene meets Dean Koontz," and the Library Journal added that "Ekman's brilliant evocation of a place and culture above the Arctic Circle is as compelling and mysterious as the crime itself." Ekman was elected member of the Swedish Academy in 1978, but left in 1989 when the academy didn't take a strong stand after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. She also turned her hand back to the screen with a Swedish TV movie based on one of her books and appearances as herself in documentaries.

Mom, I'm Bored!

Schools are beginning to let out for the summer, which means that in a couple of weeks you'll start hearing the "I'm bored" refrain. Although I suspect most children weren't like me and counting down the days until summer vacation just so they could spend the time reading, when your young'uns start looking for something to do, here are some reading suggestions.

The Canadian Children's Book Centre Awards just announced their shortlists, including the John Spray Mystery Award:

• Borderline by Allan Stratton ((HarperTrophyCanada) - ages 13 and up
• Dead Bird Through the Cat Door by Jan Markley (Gumboot Books)– ages 9-12
• The Mystery of the Cyber Bully by Mary Chan (Thistledown Press) – ages 9-12
• A Spy in the House by Y.S. (Lee Candlewick Press) - ages 13 and up
• Victim Rights by Norah McClintock (Red Dear Press) – ages 13 and up

Booklist also posted its top YA crime fiction:

• Bullet Point by Peter Abrahams (HarperTeen) - grades 9–12
• The Case of the Gypsy Good-bye by Nancy Springer (Philomel) - grades 6-9
• Griff Carver, Hallway Patrolby Jim Krieg (Penguin/Razorbill) - grades 4-7
• The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Hidden Gallery by Maryrose Wood (HarperCollins/Balzer and Bray) - grades 4-6
• The Liar Society by Laura Roecker and Lisa Roecker (Sourcebooks) - grades 7-10
• The Memory Bank by Carolyn Coman (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine) - grades 4-6
• Nickel Plated by Aric Davis (AmazonEncore) - grades 8-11
• Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick (Roaring Brook) - grades 7-10
• Treasure of Dead Man's Lane and Other Case Files by Simon Cheshire (Roaring Brook) - grades 4-7
• You Killed Wesley Payne by Sean Beaudoin (Little, Brown) - grades 9-12

And if you find them a bit reluctant, remind these members of the Smartphone Generation that they can even download books to their phones and e-readers.