In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Before I move on to this week's "Media Murder" news, I have a correction to make from last week. Although the Internet (Deadline, CinemaBlend, DigitalSpy, Hollywood Reporter, et al.) was abuzz with the report about a movie titled Depravity that was based on a Dennis Lehane script was in production, this is apparently news to Dennis Lehane. In 2010, he noted in an interview that he had no idea about the project, and yet his name is still attached to it in 2013. After checking with a Lehane representative, I can verify that the author has never written such a script, and his name being associated with the project is completely untrue.

Fox Searchlight Pictures has acquired the North American rights to the dark comedy crime caper Dom Hemingway, starring Jude Law as a safecracker known for his profane and dangerous ways.

Paramount Pictures acquired film rights to The Testing, a YA novel by Joelle Charbonneau about a group of the best and brightest high school graduates in a post-apocalyptic U.S., who are put through a series of tests to determine whether they have what it takes to become the leaders of future generations.

Sony Pictures and producer Neil Moritz optioned remake rights to A Prophet, the French film about a young man’s rise to the top of a crime syndicate. The original film earned a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee in 2010 and won Grand Prize at Cannes and nine César Awards in France.

Javier Bardem is taking another villainous role, starring opposite Sean Penn in the international assassin thriller The Gunman, from Taken director Piere Morel.

Christoph Waltz has signed to star in True Crimes, a project based on a feature by David Grann in The New Yorker about the case of Krystian Bala, a Polish writer who was convicted of murder in 2007.

Kirsten Vangsness and Joe Mantegna of Criminal Minds are the latest Hollywood celebrities to take to Kickstarter to try to fund pet projects. The CM duo hope to turn the 2009 stage production of the comedy noir Kill Me, Deadly! into a feature film.

In an article roundup of casting additions, Deadline reported that Ken Howard and David Krumholtz have joined Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall in The Judge, a film about the murder trial of Judge Joseph Palmer (Duvall) who is defended by his estranged attorney son (Downey); and Max Ryan has landed a role oin Tokarev with Nicolas Cage and Danny Glover, playing a woman who aids a reformed crook in finding the Russian mobsters who kidnapped his daughter.

TV

MRC and Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way production company are adapting the historical fiction/gritty crime/sci-fi novel The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. The story follows a serial killer who uses a house in Depression-era Chicago to time travel, but has to kill "shining girls," or those with talent and potential, in order to keep traveling.

ITV has ordered a second season of Endeavour, the prequel series to the long-running Inspector Morse based on crime novels by Colin Dexter, with Shaun Evans playing the Inspector as a younger man. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Bridget Regan will appear in a 10-episode arc on USA's White Collar, playing a beautiful rare book scholar who becomes entangled with Neal's (Matt Bomer) latest con and Neal himself.

Christina Ricci has signed on to play Lizzie Borden, the woman who was accused of killing her stepmother and father with a hatchet in 1892. The untitled made-for-TV will appear on Lifetime, although the broadcast date hasn't been set.

BBC America released a "launch trailer" for the upcoming third season of Luther, starring Idris Elba stars as DCI John Luther. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

PODCASTS/VIDEO
 
Jason Matthews, a 33-year veteran of the C.I.A and author of the debut spy thriller Red Sparrow, was a guest on CBS This Morning.

Suspense radio featured James Tabor, David Morrell and Hank Steinberg on June 1st and also a one on one with John Lansing as part of the new Partners in Crime author tour radio series.

Lee Goldberg is the first guest on "Pulp Friction with Paul Levine, " chatting out his new book The Heist, co-written with Janet Evanovich.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Port of London Murders

Since I'm on the road this week, I'm reposting this "classic" FFB, The Port of London Murders, in honor of Crimefest held in the UK this past weekend.

Josephine Bell, the pen name of Doris Collier Ball, was born in Manchester in 1897, educated at Cambridge, and became a University College Hospital of London physician. She married a fellow physician who died at a young age in 1936, which is when Bell turned her hand to writing, even as she maintained her medical practice.

She was a co-founder of the Crime Writers' Association, serving as its chair in 1959, and also became a member of the Detection Club. She eventually closed her medical practice at age 57 but continued to write full time until she was 85, creating numerous sleuths in her more than 40 crime novels (at the rate of two a year), such as AmyTupper, Dr. David Wintingham, Dr. Henry Frost, and Scotland Yard Inspector Steven Mitchell.

Not surprisingly, her novels often feature a strong medical component, not the least of which were two of her doctor-protagonists. She also featured poison and other unusual methods of murder prominently in her plots. Bell and her family were experienced sailors, and the author drew upon this knowledge, too, using many vivid passages in her books that relate to the water and to various nautical details.

Water is certainly at the heart of the setting in Bell's novel The Port of London Murders from 1938, specifically as the title suggests, the port area of London's River Thames. It's a tough neighborhood, but the death of one Mary Holland is still a bit of a shock, even though it appears at first to be a suicide by Lysol poisoning. Tell-tale needle marks on the victim's arm lead Detective Sergeant Chandler to suspect murder tied into a drug ring—which seems even more chillingly apparent when Chandler disappears shortly after he starts to investigate, right before he's due to testify at the inquest. It's up to Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard to unravel the layers of deception and addiction that are exploiting rich and poor alike in a way that hasn't changed much in the seventy years since the book was written.

Bell is particularly good with settings, even the squalid ones that pop up in the novel, no doubt witnessed first-hand in her role as a physician who saw people from every walk of life. Her take on the state of medicine in her day was often somewhat bleak, as in this passage from the book—again, as true today as it was in 1938:

For the great majority of these cases, too poor to have a doctor of their own, there was little he could do...Dr. Freeman could encourage them with a bottle of medicine and help them with a pint of milk a day, but it was not in his power nor that of anyone else to effect a lasting cure of their complaints. There were others, too, not old, but equally hopeless, who attended the dispensary as regular visitors; those struck down in youth or middle age by tuberculosis, rheumatism, heart trouble, and a number of more rare diseases. They had come to the end of their resources, their insurances, and their capacity for earning. The hospitals could do nothing more for them, but they still lived, in the worse possible surroundings, and the Public Assistance saw to it that they did not die too soon.

Mystery Melange

Dragon book sculpture

The Crime Writers of Canada handed out the annual Arthur Ellis Awards, recognizing excellence in Canadian crime fiction. The nod for Best Crime Novel went to Until the Night by Giles Blunt, while the Best First Crime Novel was given to The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James. For all the categories, check out the CWC website.

The Crime Writers Association of the UK announced the shortlists for several of its awards, including the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger; The International Dagger; the Dagger for Non-Fiction; the Dagger in the Library; the Short Story Dagger, and the Debut Dagger.

The inaugural Petrona Award winner, announced at the CrimeFest dinner June 1, went to Last Will by Liza Marklund. The award is handed out for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year and was established in memory of Maxine Clarke, who blogged as Petrona and specialized in Scandinavian crime fiction.

Although Canada's Bloody Words mystery conference is skipping 2013, the conference still presented the Bloody Words Light Mystery Award at the Bony Blithe Gala held in Toronto. The winner was Elizabeth J. Duncan for her fourth Penny Brannigan mystery, A Small Hill To Die On. The full conference will return next year to Toronto and in 2015 to Halifax.

The Audio Publishers Association handed out its 2013 Audie Awards, recognizing distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. The Audio Book of the Year Awards went to The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, as read by by Colin Firth; the winner in the Mystery category was The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny, read by Ralph Cosham; and the award for Best Thriller went to Red, White, and Blood by Christopher Farnsworth as read by Bronson Pinchot.

Poisoned Pen announced the winner of their second annual Discover Mystery Contest for unpublished novels. The award went to Eileen Brady for her cozy mystery, Dog Shows Are Murder. Finalists included Peggy McKeep Barnhill, Judy L. Murray, and Carmen Will.

Whodunnit?: Murder in Mystery Manor, from CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker, will hit the airwaves on ABC in June, but Zuiker announced a tie-in novel series based on the show to be released one week before the series premiere. The premise of both is an putting amateur sleuths’ investigative skills to the test in a mystery reality competition, with players employing crime scene investigation techniques to discover who among them is the "killer."

The Q&A roundup this week includes Reed Farrel Coleman joining the Mystery People to talk about their "pick of the month," the author's latest novel Onion Street; and Scandinavian crime writer Jens Lapidus talked with the Wall Street Journal about his Stockholm Noir trilogy and the secret criminal side of Sweden.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

There has been much speculation (and some false reports, alas) of who the director for the next Bond movie will be, but it appears that Skyfall's Sam Mendes may still be in the running, after all. Mendes wanted to do Bond 24, but had prior theater commitments that had seemed to be too much of a conflict.

Katharine McPhee (star of the recently-cancelled Smash) is joining the cast of Depravity, a thriller with a script by Dennis Lehane, and Paul Tamasy on board to direct. The plot follows a  group of roommates who accidentally kill an innocent man they thought was a thrill killer.

Michael C. Hall (who played the serial killer in Dexter) landed the lead role in Cold In July, the adaptation of Joe Lansdale's cult novel. He plays Richard Dane, who shoots and kills an armed burglar in his living room, a move that seems like self defense to everyone but the burglar's father, who vows an eye-for-an-eye justice.

Glenn Close has signed on to play a major role in Guardians Of The Galaxy, potentially as the top cop who heads up Nova Corp, the intergalactic space patrol. In other casting news for the film, Doctor Who's Karen Gillan has been signed to play the lead female villain.

A mere week after it was announced that Tom Cruise was exiting the Man From Uncle film adaptation, it appears that Henry Cavill is the leading candidate to replace him in the role of spy Napoleon Solo.

If you're in San Francisco in mid-June, check out San Francisco's Silent Film Festival, which is airing the first nine films by Alfred Hitchcock with musical accompaniment. The films were recently restored by the British Film Institute and include the film the director considered "the first true Hitchcock picture," The Lodger.

Also in June, the Turner Classic Movies television network is airing Friday Night Noir, with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation hosting the 16 films scheduled during the month.

Josh Brolin is one of the latest stars to sign on to the cast of Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson's film adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon detective novel. The other is Katherine Waterson, who will play one of the female leads, a "free-spirited hippie chick." Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Martin Short, and Jena Malone are already on board, with Sean Penn also reportedly in talks.

Drafthouse Films has picked up North American rights to the film Borgman, the first Dutch film in the Cannes Film Festival's competition lineup in almost 40 years. The thriller is described as "an allegorical tale exploring the nature of evil in unexpected places. A vagrant enters the lives of an upper-class family, igniting a descent from darkly comic dream to maddening psychological nightmare."

Warner Brothers released a trailer for Prisoners, about two neighborhood girls who go missing.The cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal as a police detective and Hugh Jackman as the father of one of the girls who kidnaps the main suspect  (Paul Dano) with the goal of making him reveal where the girls are.

TV

Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is taking on the role of Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in a new BBC adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel novel by crime writer PD James.

BBC Two's new crime drama The Fall, starring former X-Files star Gillian Anderson as an FBI agent after a serial killer, premiered earlier this month and has done so well, the network quickly renewed it for a second season.  (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Tracy Letts is being promoted to a regular cast spot on Homeland. The Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning actor/playwright plays the role of Senator Andrew Lockhart, the powerful Committee Chairman.

NBC announced that the serial-killer drama Hannibal is getting a second season on the network.The series is based on characters from Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon and the working relationship between FBI special investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen)

British actress Ashley Davenport is leaving ABC's Revenge due to her option not being picked up. She joins fellow regular Connor Paolo, who also won't be returning for the third season.

Skipp Sudduth (The Good Wife) has joined the cast of the Cinemax pilot Quarry, about a Marine marksman who joins a network of contract killers after returning home from Vietnam and being shunned by the public. Sudduth will play the father of Logan Marshall Green's leading man.

THEATER

Via Martin Edwards comes a review of the Agatha Christie-penned play, Go Back For Murder, which began a run at the Regent Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent last week. The production is from the Agatha Christie Theatre Company and continues through June 1st at the theatre before taking the show on the road.