In Reference to Murder

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 complicted 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

 

Book sculpture by Jodi Harvey-Brown

I'm very happy to point you over to this week's story at Beat to a Pulp, which is from the pen of Patti Abbott and titled "The Big Lug." Patti is a terrific story writer and also hosts the weekly Friday's Forgotten books feature that I'm happy to be a part of.

Shindig will host video chats with fifty authors live from Book Expo America, Thursday, May 30th through Saturday, June 1st. Featured authors will include Mary Higgins Clark, Andrew Gross, C.J. Lyons and many more. (Hat tip to Galley Cat)

This, via Austin S. Camacho: If you're an author who registered for the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity conference, they have moved the deadline to June 15 to submit a short story to be included in the collector's anthology that every attendee will receive in a goody bag when you arrive. Don't miss your chance to have everyone read your story alongside the likes of NY Times bestseller John Gilstrap. If haven't registered yet, it's not too late for you to be included in that special volume - but you have to be registered before you can submit your story. Visit the conference website for more details.

Jeff Pierce, over at The Rap Sheet blog and via his column for Kirkus, lists eight crime, mystery, and thriller works due for release between now and September 1 that he thinks would be particularly worth investing your time to read. He also has a long list of other crime fiction books being published this summer that should keep you busy at the beach.

Speaking of Jeff and The Rap Sheet, somehow I missed the blog's recent seventh anniversary celebration. If you aren't familiar with The Rap Sheet (and you should be), hop on over and check out one of the most consistently entertaining and informative crime fiction blogs out there.

Omnimystery News has its monthly list of new hardcover mysteries being published. June's roster ranges from the eighth Cotton Malone novel by Steve Berry to the tenth Lincoln Rhyme book by Jeffery Deaver to the ninth Walt Longmire installment from Craig Johnson. Other authors like Alafair Burke, Meg Gardiner, and Carl Hiaasen introduce new standalone novels this month.

Kobo announced a rise in e-reader sales of 145% in the first quarter of 2013. Its user base grew to 14.5m, with 15% of its new user base coming from the US. The top-selling e-books (in the UK) included Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Karin Slaughter's The Unremarkable Heart and James Patterson's Bloody Valentine.

The Q&A roundup this week includes Crime journalist Steve Lillebuen talking with GalleyCat about digital tools for crime writers; Declan Burke grills Chris Allen about his Alex Morgan series; and Mark Pryor joins the Mystery People.

Book Riot lists the best 15 movies starring bookstores.

Which Shakespeare character are you? Try this interactive PBS feature to find your inner Hamlet or Rosalind.

From the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, "10 Craziest Disguises Used To Commit a Crime."

 

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Dennis Lehane has signed on to write the screenplay for 20th Century Fox's adaptation of John D. MacDonald's 1964 mystery novel The Deep Blue Good-by. The film will reteam Lehane and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who also starred in the film version of Lehane's novel Shutter Island and is developing Lehane's short story "Running Out of Dog."

Deadline calls it a shocker, and that's an apt description of the news that Tom Cruise has exited as the star of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the remake of the classic TV series that Guy Ritchie is directing for Warner Bros. The official reason is that Cruise had a schedule conflict with the filming of Mission Impossible:5.

Paddy Considine (Tyrannosaur, The World’s End) and Swedish actor Fares Fares (Zero Dark Thirty) have been added to the cast of director Daniel Espinosa's adaptation of the Soviet-era novel Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Gary Oldman were already on board.

Magnolia pictures picked up Erik Skjoldbaerg's thriller Pioneer at the recent Cannes film festival. The film stars Aksel Hennie (who also played the lead in the film Headhunters based on Jo Nesbo's novel) as a professional diver working for the oil companies in the 1980s who gets involved in a perilous deep-sea journey.

Universal is developing a remake of Timecop, the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme time travel action movie set in the near future where time travel is regulated by a police force.

TV

As Omnimystery News reminds us, the new seasons of Longmire and The Glades premiere tonight back to back on the A&E network, beginning at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

The new King & Maxwell series based on David Baldacci's novels is set to premiere June 10 on TNT. The show was developed by Shane Brennan (NCIS: Los Angeles) with a cast that includes Jon Tenney (The Closer) and Rebecca Romijn (X-Men) as private investigators Sean King and Michelle Maxwell.

FX Networks announced that the premiere of The Bridge will be Wednesday, July 10th. The show is based on the Scandinavian crime drama (but moved to the US/Mexico border) and follows two detectives, one from the United States (Diane Kruger) and one from Mexico (Demián Bichir), who must work together to hunt down a serial killer operating on both sides of the border. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News, which also has a trailer.)

Logan Marshall-Green has been signed to star in the Cinemax pilot Quarry, based on the novel by Max Allan Collins. It follows a Marine sniper who returns home from Vietnam to find that he's been shunned by people he cares about and is recruited into a network of contract killers and corruption along the Mississippi River.

Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, the miniseries Carlos) has ben tapped to direct the film Hubris, which is inspired by a true story and based on an article by Hillel Levin. It follows a crew of thieves who rob a pawn shop and discover it is a front for the most brutal crime boss in Chicago history.

Detective Olivia Benson fans can breathe easier: actress Mariska Hargitay says she is returning to Law & Order: SVU for Season 15.

CMT has picked up an additional 11 episodes of the reality series Dog And Beth: On The Hunt, starring bounty hunters "Dog" and Beth Chapman.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Albert Gate Mystery

Louis Tracy (1863-1928) was born in Liverpool to an upper middle class family and educated at the French Seminary at Douai. Although he led a relative life of leisure, he also joined the 1st Volunteer Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment and earned a full certificate for a captaincy by the age of 18, an unusual feat for the time. He turned his hand to journalism in 1884, writing for several newspapers and even worked his way up to part-ownership of the The Evening News before selling his share. He is said to have used some of the proceeds to run 23 soup kitchens during the depression-style winter of 1894, using some of those glimpses of poverty first-hand in his later novels.

His first published work of fiction was a patriotic, somewhat propagandistic war-themed title, The Final War, which appeared as a serial from 1895 to August 1896 in Pearson's Weekly. After a visit to America for research, Tracy was due to write another serial for Pearson's, but fell ill. The publication drafted M. P. Shiel to help finish the work, which began a decades-long occasional, and sometimes prickly, collaboration between the two men. Tracy went on to publish prolifically, with some 80 or more books and numerous short stories, essays and articles, under his own name and the pseudonyms Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser.

Tracy's fiction often featured American characters, a ploy to make it easier to sell his books on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to some head-scratching plotting such as setting The House of Peril in New York, even though it included a number of Tracy's familiar English detectives. In the revised English edition of 1924, (retitled The Park Lane Mystery), he reset the story in London. Tracy's strange love-hate relationship with his own country also led to pronouncements such as his comment to the Sunday Times that "American readers are better educated than the English," leading the reporter to sniff, "at least he writes novels about this country without the usual blunders of foreign writers."

The Albert Gate Mystery from 1904, is actually set in London and features one of Tracy's regular protagonists, amateur detective Barrister Reginald Brett. The plot hinges around priceless imperial diamonds sent by the Sultan of Turkey to London, to be cut in the heavily-guarded Albert Gate mansion by experts under the protection of the British government. However, four Turkish officials are found dead in the house, and the diamonds disappear. The leading culprit is Jack Talbot, a young secretary at the Foreign Office who was overseeing the endeavor and also disappeared without a trace the evening of the murders.

Brett reads about the events in the morning newspaper, detailing the high-ranking Turkish gentry, servants, guards, and fourteen expert Dutch diamond-cutters who have been detained at Scotland Yard, and how "the greatest living authority on toxicology" was among several medical personnel consulted. Brett's interest is piqued, but he doesn't get pulled into the mystery until the arrival of Lord Fairholme. It seems Fairholme's fiancee, Edith Talbot, refuses to marry him until her brother—who also happens to be the suspect Jack Talbot—is found and proved innocent.

Brett's investigation has him chasing diamond thieves through England, France and Sicily with the somewhat-antagonistic help of Scotland Yard detective Winter, as well as royal messenger Captain Gaultier, Lord Fairholme and Edith. Along the way, the sleuth (who is described as brash, fearless, handsome, brilliant, a human dynamo and both "the smartest criminal lawyer in London" and "the cleverest analytical detective of the age") dons disguises and wades through political intrigue, treason among thieves, and a spirited horse-carriage chase scene, before the denouement.

The character of Brett was compared to Sherlock Holmes during Tracy's day, although one reviewer said that "Mr. Reginal Brett is perhaps a trifle too Sherlockian in his rapid conclusions, although unlike the incomparable Holmes, he does not always permit his admiring audience to follow step by step in his course of reasoning." Brett has also been called a precuror of Lord Peter Wimsey, but as entertaining as he is at times, the writing and character aren't quite in the same league as Holmes and Wimsey.

There are some laugh-out-loud dated bits, too, such as "Brett expected to see a young, pretty and clever girl, vain enough to believe she had brains" (although the woman in question, Edith, turns out to be a fierce heroine in her own right). There are also some homages to other detective icons in the book, such as the small bust of Edgar Allan Poe in Brett's home and how he has adopted the French method of "reconstituting" the incidents, no doubt a nod to Vidocq, the founder and first director of the crime-detection Sûreté Nationale as well as the head of the first known private detective agency.

Mystery Melange

Book sculpture lamp by Michael Bom

The International Thriller Writers has added a special FBI pre-conference workshop titled, "Today's FBI: Crime Essentials For Writers." Participants will hear from FBI experts in cyber crime, international terrorism, criminal investigations, and more. The event is scheduled for July 8th and capacity is limited, so contact ThrillerFest Executive Director at [email protected] if you're interested.

Finalists for the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Awards in the Mystery/Suspense category were announced and include Ripped – A Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller, by Shelly Dickson Carr (New Book Partners); Run To Ground, by D.P. Lyle (Oceanview Publishing); and The Unkindness of Strangers, by Peter S. Fischer (The Grove Point Press). The annual award recognizes excellence in independent publishing.

Pop Culture Nerd is sponsoring the third annual Stalker Awards, in honor of May being Mystery Month and June being International Crime Month. The awards are handed out to crime novels you're obsessed with and the authors who write them. Categories range from Novel You Shoved Most Often in People's Faces to Most Scene-Stealing Supporting Character. Anyone can vote, via the website form.

The annual Crimefest Convention held at Bristol in the UK is coming up next week, from May 30 through June 2. Dozens of bestselling authors will attend including Toastmaster Robert Goddard, Lindsey Davis, Jeffery Deaver, Sophie Hannah, David Hewson, Peter James, Simon Kernick, Denise Mina and Dana Stabenow. Although the event is sold out, you can still take advantage of Non-Attending Registration, which will snag you the delegate goodie bag and conference program sent via mail.

This week's featured story at Beat to a Pulp is "Bid Time Return" by Nik Morton.

The Q&A roundup this week includes Ali Karim at the Rap Sheet chatting with private eye thriller writer Thomas Kaufman about his novels and recently released eBook collection Erased and Other Stories; Declan Burke quizzes Chris Allen; and Mark Pryor joins The Mystery People to talk about his new release, The Crypt Thief.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

There's always interesting news to come out of the annual Cannes Film Festival. LA-based British filmmaker Trevor Miller is taking on a contemporary film noir project set to a soundtrack of covers by L.A. bands of legendary British group The Smiths. It follows a surveillance contractor who drifts through Los Angeles at night photographing "cheating couples," falls for a jilted wife and unwittingly photographs her husband burying the body of dead girl in the high desert.

In other Cannes news, The crime/action movie The Gunman, starring Sean Penn, is lining up U.S. and international deals. The screenplay by director Peter Travis is an adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's 1981 novel The Prone Gunman and centers on an international contract killer betrayed by the organization he works for.

Anna Paquin is taking on the true story crime drama Free Ride, which will be the directorial and screenwriting debut for Shana Betz, whose own past was the inspiration for the film. The story follows Paquin as the mother of two daughters who tries to find a better life in Florida in the 1970s but is soon pulled into the dangerous drug trade business.

This year, the movie news coming out of Cannes may well have been upstaged by this.

Lights Out star Holt McCallany has booked a starring role opposite Chris Hemsworth and Viola Davis in the untitled cyber terrorism thriller being directed by Michael Mann. McCallany will play a street-smart U.S. Marshal charged with the custody of Hemsworth’s character.

Hailee Steinfeld has joined Sam Worthington in the cast of For The Dogs, the Phillip Noyce-directed film based on a novel by Paul Leyden. The story follows a solitary assassin (Worthington) who agrees to help a precocious teenager (Steinfeld) exact revenge on those who murdered her parents and younger brother.

Reese Witherspoon has joined stars Joaquin Phoenix, Owen Wilson and Benicio del Toro in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the novel Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.

The film adaptation of the TV series The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington in the title role, has signed its villain, actor Marton Csokas (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, The Lord of the Rings).

The producers of James Bond have finally settled on Christopher Nolan to direct the next film in the franchise.

TV

The crime drama Criminal Justice, written by Richard Price, directed by Oscar winner Steven Zaillian, and starring James Gandolfini, has been ordered by HBO as a seven-part limited series. The show is set in New York and loosely inspired by the acclaimed 2008 BBC series of the same name created by Peter Moffat.

CBS has officially picked up the spy pilot Intelligence to series. The show stars Josh Holloway (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) and Marg Helgenberger who called it, "James Bond meets Frankenstein meets Mission: Impossble."

ABC may have decided to cancel Body of Proof, but that may not be the end of the show. TNT, USA and WGN America are all showing some degree of interest in picking up the forensic/police procedural starring Dana Delany. It's a bit of a puzzle as to why ABC dropped it, anyway, considering its ratings were on the uptick, and it ranked as the third-most-watched ABC drama this season, behind only Castle and Grey’s Anatomy.

The UK's Channel 4 announced a new an eight-part series titled Shameless set in a "crumbling Victorian cop shop on the wrong side of Manchester." Creator Paul Abbott calls it a "jet black" comedy drama that promises to be a police procedural with a difference.

Fox released a trailer for the J.J. Abrams and J.H. Wyman show Almost Human, a futuristic buddy cop drama set a few decades into the future when cops are partnered with humanoid robots.

NBC unveiled a trailer for its new police drama Ironside, a remake of the Raymond Burr series, with the reboot featuring Blair Underwood in the role of the wheelchair detective, as well as the new James Spader spy series, The Blacklist. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Amazon has landed streaming rights to NBC Universal shows, including Grimm, Covert Affairs, Hannibal, and Warehouse 13.

The USA Network announced its scripted drama projects last week, including the political/financial thriller The Edge; Bank, about a young FBI agent who works in the bank crimes division in Los Angeles; Blanco County, based on a series of mysteries by Ben Rehder; and Shadow Counsel, a legal thriller about a former Army JAG attorney now working as a criminal lawyer in NY who's recruited by the FBI to crack an ongoing investigation. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Confused about what made the fall schedule and what didn't? The Hollywood Reporter has the full schedule at a glance, as well as trailers for new shows on the CW Network; NBC; Fox; ABC; and CBS.

Friday's Forgotten Books - Exeunt Murderers

In honor of the recently-announced Anthony Award nominations, with winners to be honored at the annual Bouchercon convention, I'm reposting this FFB. It's fitting to feature a book of short stories penned by Anthony Boucher since the mystery convention is named after the writer, reviewer, and editor. Born William Anthony Parker White in 1911, he at first seemed headed into the sciences until he was bitten by the literature bug, selling his first story when he was 15, "Ye Goode Olde Ghoste Storie," published in Weird Tales in January 1927. He would later add that in retrospect the story was so bad, the editor must have had a "sadistic grudge against the readers."

After his college career, he turned his hand to detective fiction in 1937, with a standalone followed by one series with amateur criminologist Fergus O'Breen and the other Sister Ursula of the Order of Martha of Bethany (published under the pen name H.H. Holmes). Although a moderate success as a novelist, he found his true calling when he started reviewing mysteries and science fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle (another node of connection with this year's conference), followed by editing anthologies and translating other books. He landed a job as the regular mystery fiction critic for the New York Times in 1951, a job he held for close to 17 years.

His contributions to the genre didn't end there—he was a founding member of the Mystery Writers of America, a charter member of the Baker Street Irregulars in San Francisco and wrote scripts for "Sherlock Holmes" and "Ellery Queen" radio programs, co-edited the True Crime Detective magazine, wrote a monthly review column for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and created a regular mystery-review show for the public radio station KPFA.

His dozens of short stories reflect his multi-faced interests outside literature, with one of the editors to the Boucher collection Exeunt Murderers, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., adding that Boucher wrote mysteries delving into "religion, opera, football, politics, movies, true crime, record collecting and an abundance of good food and wine along with clues and puzzles and detection." (Nevin's co-editor for this collection was the prolific Martin H. Greenberg.)

Many Boucher stories pivot around talented and brilliant amateur sleuths, although the first third of Exeunt consists of nine stories featuring former police Lieutenant Nick Noble, once a rising star in the force until he took the rap for a bad cop. The second part is a series of Sister Ursula stories grouped under the title "Conundrums for the Cloister." Although technically an amateur, Sister Ursula is the daughter of a police chief who'd once planned on entering the field herself until poor health changed her plans. These stories mirror Boucher's own life in two ways—he was a devout Catholic who also struggled with poor health his entire life, ultimately dying of lung cancer at the age of 56. Part Three of Exunt is "Jeux de Meurtre," narrated by both cops and amateurs, and in one case, the murderer.

These are thoroughly enjoyable stories, and as a former Friday's Forgotten Books feature by Jeffrey Marks on Boucher's novel Nine Tmes Nine for the Rap Sheet attests, it's almost a shame that he spent so much of his time on other projects. But it is that very legacy of support to the crime fiction community which Bouchercon celebrates, and so we'll just have to be content with the body of work we have (see George Kelley's FFB feature about the Anthony Boucher Chronicles) from someone who managed to pack more into a half-century than most people do with decades more.

Mystery Melange

 

Book sculpture by Brian Dettmer

Four independent publishers—Grove Atlantic, Akashic Books, Melville House, and Europa Editions—have joined forces to create what they're calling "International Crime Month." It's actually a little longer than a month, since events start in late May and continue through June. The initiative kicks off in New York with events at Bookcourt and Mysterious Bookshop during the final week of May and a panel discussion at Book Expo America on Friday May 31.

More award news to report: this time, it's nominations for the Anthony Awards, handed out each year at the Boucheron crime fiction festival, which were recently announced. They include nods for Best Novel to Dare Me by Megan Abbott; The Trinity Game by Sean Chercover; Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn; The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny; and The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan. For all the nominees, check out the Bouchercon 2013 website.

Speaking of Bouchercon, if you're an unpublished author, the conference has a great opportunity in the form of a short story contest. There are three categories including high school students, college students and general attendees, with submissions capped at 200 per category. To submit, send along your mystery story of 8,000 words or less by June 15.

Noir at the Bar is returning to the Philadelphia area, Thursday, May 23 at John & Peter's at 96 South Main St. in New Hope, PA. Special guests are authors Wallace Stroby, Dennis Tafoya and a few more TBA.

Madison, Wisconsin's Booked for Murder indie bookstore, which was put up for sale in February, has found a new owner. Joanne Berg, a former vice-provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison is moving the former store's inventory to Berg's new bookshop, Mystery to Me, scheduled to open on June 15.

Lukcy Issue #13 of Crime Factory is out, with a cover design by Eric Beetner, a interview with Dwayne Epstein, author of the new Lee Marvin biography, a chat with creators of the new anthology, Black Pulp, and more interviews and reviews. There is a Kindle version for only 99 cents, although there are print and free PDF versions also available.

There's a new market for short crime fiction, The Hard-Boiled Dimension, with a mission of being "a place for speculative fiction and gritty crime stories." They are seeking stories in either or both genres, with a word limit of 2,500. (Hat tip to Sandra Seamans via her blog.)

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

The film remake of the 1960s TV spy show The Man From Uncle (originally starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum) has filled out its main cast. Tom Cruise is taking on the role of older spy Napoleon Solo and Armie Hammer (The Social Network and Lone Ranger) will play Russian secret agent Ilya Kuryakin. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair) is also in talks to play the female lead. 

Speaking of Tom Cruise, Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions have signed up the actor to star in and produce a fifth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) is adapting Len Deighton’s classic Cold War novels featuring iconic spy Bernard Samson for an 18-episode television series. The novels followed the exploits of an ex-MI6 field agent drawn back into active duty in a quest to uncover the truth about his wife’s defection to the KGB.

Benicio Del Toro is in talks to star in the upcoming film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's noir novel Inherent Vice.

Pre-production has started on Ben Affleck’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane's 2013 Edgar Award-winning novel Live By Night with an eye to an August or September filming start date. 

TV

Downton Abbey producer Carnival Films and BBC Two are to produce the final two TV movies in writer/director David Hare's The Worricker Trilogy. The first installment, Page Eight, starred Bill Nighy as MI5 officer Johnny Worricker, with an all-star supporting cast. Some of those actors are also due to return in the next two projects, including Ralph Fiennes and Ewan Bremner, with the additions of Christopher Walken, Winona Ryder, Helena Bonham Carter and more.

Criminal Minds is being renewed, although it was close for two of the stars, Kirsten Vangsness and A.J. Cook. They were holding out on initial contract offers due to the poor treatment of female cast members and the fact the show's female stars are paid less than half of what their male co-workers receive.

Upfront season is upon us, wherein the networks announce their fall schedules and the pilots they've picked up for full series orders. Fox picked up four new dramas including the legal drama Rake starring Greg Kinnear; Gang Related, starring Ramon Rodriguez as a rising star in the Los Angeles elite Gang Task Force; Sleepy Hollow, a modern retelling of the Washington Irving story; and Almost Human, from the Fringe/Star Trek team of J.H. Wyman and J.J Wyman and starring Karl Urban, Michael Ealy and Lili Taylor in a police drama set 35 years in the future.

Fox is looking to bring back its popular drama 24 as a limited series, with Kiefer Sutherland in talks to reprise his Emmy-winning role as Agent Jack Bauer.

TNT has ordered a second season of the unscripted police-centric docudrama Boston's Finest, which joined the schedule in March. CNN (owned by the parent company of TNT) also announced plans to encore the eight-episode freshman run of the show.

TNT has also ordered 10 episodes of the drama Legends, starring Game of Thrones actor Sean Bean. The project is based on the a book by the same name by Robert Littell, and follows an undercover agent named Martin Odum who works for the FBI's Deep Cover Operations division

A&E picked up news shows, including the serial killer drama Those Who Kill, based on a Danish series and produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. It stars Chloe Sevigny and James D'Arcy and will premiere in 2014.

NBC has placed a full series order for the reboot of Ironside, starring Blair Underwood as wheelchair-bound Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside, played in the original NBC series by Raymond Burr. The network also gave the go-ahead to the Chicago Fire spinoff, Chicago PD, about -- you guessed it -- the Chicago police department.

USA announced that the seventh season of Burn Notice, which premieres June 6, will be its last. Creator Matt Nix is developing a new medical drama for the network titled Complications, about an emergency room doctor whose life drastically changes following a traumatic experience

NBC cancelled Deception, the series starring Megan Good as a detective who goes undercover in a wealthy family to solve a murder.

Everyone has been expecting ABC to pick up its popular quirky procedural Castle starring Nathan Fillion for another season, but it appears the network may actually be working on a two-year pickup.

Omnimystery News reported that ITV has renewed The Bletchley Circle for a second season. The show, which is based on the lives of four brilliant women who worked at top-secret HQ Bletchley Park during World War II, airs on PBS stations in the U.S.

Speaking of Omnimystery News, check out the site's scoresheet on all the mystery and suspense TV renewals and cancellations, including some of the latest shows to get the axe: Body of Proof, CSI New York, Vegas and Southland. The Hollywood Reporter also as an updated "who's winning and losing" look at the upfront season so far, including CBS's surprising rejection of the Beverly Hills Cop reboot.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Mary Higgins Clark, author of Daddy's Gone A Hunting, was a guest on CBS This Morning.

Margaret Atwood, winner of the Innovator's ward in this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, joined KCRW's Bookworm to talk about her exploration of digital literary innovations

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction

Hofstra University hosted an Agatha Christie interdisciplinary conference in 1991 in honor of the centennial of Christie's birth. The result of that conference was the book Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction, published in 1997 and edited by Hofstra professors Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy. The editors were attempting to offer "a variety of new and innovative approaches to classic detective fiction," by including essays of a theoretical approach to the genre, then tracing the genre back to Agatha Christie and traditional British detective fiction.

Part I looks at the nature of and the audience for detective fiction, as well as at the genre as a literary form. This first half of the book includes an inquiry into the role of the detective, applications of psychology to the genre, and a look at literary criticism positing that "traditional detective fiction contained the seeds of its own subversion." Part II focuses on the writing of Agatha Christie and her heirs in the British ratiocinative tradition.

The 16 essays include topics such as "Shamus-a-um: Having the Quality of a Classical Detective" by Timothy W. Boyd and Carolyn Higbie; "Parody and Detective Fiction" by Janice MacDonald; "Christie's Narrative Games" by Robert Merrill; "The Game's Afoot: Predecessors and Pursuits of a Postmodern Detective Novel by Kathleen Belin Owen; and "Class, Gender, and the Possibilities of Detection in Anne Perry's Victorian Reconstructions" by Iska S. Alter.

Some of the themes underlying the book are the way the genre reflects important social and cultural attitudes, contributes to a reader's ability to adapt to the challenges of daily life, and provides alternate takes on the role of the detective as an investigator and arbiter of truth. As one of the essays notes, thanks to the detective novels of Tony Hillerman, set among the Native American population around New Mexico, "many American readers have probably gotten more insight into traditional Navajo culture from his detective stories than from any other recent books."