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.