In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

Here's the latest crime drama news from stage and screen:

MOVIES

Skydance Productions, MGM, and Paramount TV are shopping around a remake of Sydney Pollack's 1975 spy thriller Three Days of the Condor (starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway). Like the original, the new project is based on James Grady's novel Six Days of the Condor, with Jason Smilovic (Lucky Number Slevin) and Todd Katzberg on board to write the reboot.

Kenneth Branagh and Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese are joining forces for a screen version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It will be an adaptation of the recent Branagh production that originated at the 2013 Manchester International Festival and was subsequently staged in Manhattan at the Park Avenue Armory.

Screenwriter/director Tom Ford is teaming up with George Clooney for for the post-modern noir thriller Nocturnal Animals, an adaptation of Austin Wright's 1993 book Tony and Susan. The story follows a woman named Susan who receives a book manuscript from her ex-husband that forces her to confront the darkness that inhabits her life. Jake Gyllenhaal is attached to star, while Amy Adams is in talks to join him in the cast.

Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn will co-write the female-led revenge thriller Widows with Steve McQueen, who will also direct the film. Based on a British miniseries of the same name, the project is set in the aftermath of a heist gone wrong where four widows of the armed robbers killed in the failed caper join forces to pull off the robbery themselves.

Fox 2000 has acquired an untitled book Jeffrey Toobin is writing about Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and brainwashed into becoming a bank robber and spokesman for the radical group’s causes before landing in prison.

Idris Elba has been hired to replace Jamie Foxx in The Trap, which will co-star Benicio Del Toro, James Franco and Al Pacino. Set against the backdrop of the Miami music scene, the story centers on an ex-con (Del Toro) out for revenge against a gangster rapper and former friend (Elba) who let him take the fall for a robbery they committed 14 years earlier.  Franco will play Elba’s drug-addled manager, Pacino will play Del Toro’s parole officer, and Pattinson will play a surfer who helps Del Toro exact revenge.

Matthew McConaughey has been signed to star in The Billionaire’s Vinegar, about the real-life scandal surrounding an auctioned cache of wine bottles purported to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson that were called fakes.

David Strathairn has joined the cast of Sacha Gervasi’s November Criminals, starring alongside Ansel Elgort, Chloë Grace Moretz and Catherine Keener. Steven Knight wrote the script adaptation of Sam Munson's novel about two teenagers in D.C. who investigate the murder of their friend while falling in love for the first time.

"Noir City: The 17th Annual Festival of Film Noir" will open April 3 in Hollywood at the Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre. Presented by the American Cinematheque in collaboration with the Film Noir Foundation, the festival features American movies, British thrillers, three rarities from Argentina, and even a new noir from the Humphrey Bogart Estate's Santana Films.

The first trailer was released for the upcoming James Bond film, Spectre. The producers also announced the film will be distributed in IMAX when it first opens worldwide on November 6.

A full trailer was released for the next Mission Impossible installment, titled Rogue Nation.

A Hindi-language trailer (subtitled) was released for for Anurag Kashyap’s period crime drama Bombay Velvet, starring Ranbir Kapoor. Set against the backdrop of Bollywood’s Golden Age and based on Gyan Prakash’s book Mumbai Fables, the film is about an ordinary man who must forge his destiny in the City of Dreams.

TELEVISION

Thirteen years after The X-Files ended its nine-season run on Fox, the official announcement was made that the series will return as a six-episode event series from series creator/executive producer Chris Carter, with stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson returning to their roles as FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

Although TNT passed on the original drug-trade pilot from Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, they liked the setting (the wild and unpredictable world of the Florida drug trade in the 1970s) enough to ask for a retooling of the project.

Madison Lintz has been promoted to a series regular for Season 2 of Amazon’s drama series Bosch. Lintz plays Maddie, daughter of Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver), and will have a more prominent presence in the new season.

Connie Britton has joined the upcoming American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson. She'll be playing murder victim Nicole Brown's friend Faye Resnick, who went on to write a controversial book about Brown.

Alex Steele has been added to the cast of the ABC pilot Original Sin, which also includes Joan Hart, Zach Gilford and Andrew McCarthy. The story centers on the return of a politician’s son presumed murdered after disappearing over a decade earlier, which ends shockwaves through his tight knit family.  

Melissa Joan Hart is set to guest-star on The Mysteries of Laura as an internet radio host named KC Moss who runs a website bent on solving a 15-year-old cold case. However, she clashes with Laura (Debra Messing) when Laura thinks KC's site is getting in the way of the actual investigation.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

NPR interviewed Omar Shahid Hamid, a former cop turned crime writer whose books are set in his native Pakistan.

Hosts Jan Burke and D.P. Lyle welcomed Judge Donald Shelton to talk about "Forensic Science And The Courts" on Crime and Science Radio.

The Today Show featured Harlan Coben, talking about his latest novel, The Stranger.

BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a documentary on David Lynch's Twin Peaks in April. Presented by Danny Leigh, the program will include Rob da Bank discussing the influence of the show's soundtrack and commentary from crime writer Denise Mina and Andy Burns, author of the Twins Peak book Wrapped In Plastic.

THEATER

Atlanta's Alliance Theatre is presenting the world premiere production Edward Foote from award-winning Atlanta playwright and author Phillip DePoy. The play is a Gothic murder mystery set to haunting Appalachian folk songs and runs through April 19, 2015.

Quote of the Day

FFB: Final Proof

As this year's Edgar Awards ceremony approaches, I particularly enjoy looking at the debut novel nominees, wondering where their literary careers might take them from here. This prompted me to look back at previous nominees and winners, and I ran across one by an author I hadn't heard of before, Marie R. Reno, nominated for her first novel, Final Proof, in 1977. 

Yet, when I tried tracking down Ms. Reno, I found practically nothing available in the way of biography or career. The dust jacket indicates Reno had a long and notable career in the book-club world, and was also an editor of This Week magazine. Her book-club connections are probably why she is listed as editor of A Treasury of Modern Mysteries, Volumes 1 and 2, from 1973 and later An International Treasury of Mystery and Suspense, from 1983. It also helps explains why she wrote this first novel, Final Proof, set in a New York book club publishing house.

At the beginning of the Final Proof, Marcia Richardson is found in her home office, shot twice through the head at close range by a .22 revolver and slumped over a set of galley proofs. Although her fingers had been wrapped around the gun in an attempt to make the death look like suicide, there's little doubt she's been murdered. Marcia was editorial director of the Readers' Circle, one of the Big Three book clubs along with Book-of-the-Month and the Literary Guild, and in the small, interconnected world of New York publishing, Marcia's death is talk of the town.

Marcia's friend and colleague, Karen Lindstrom, editor of the Mystery, Suspense and Intrigue line, finds herself working with, and at cross-purposes to, Lieutenant Jack Morrison of the NYPD. At first, he merely seems fascinated by Karen's endless fount of information about the publishing world and isn't particularly thrilled to have her assistance. As the case grinds on, Karen and the Lieutenant find themselves drawn to each other in personal ways that could jeopardize the investigation.

It's quite obvious from all the insider details and observations that the author was indeed employed with such a book club, which seems to be both the inspiration and raison d'etre for the book. I also suspect Reno is a pen name, one reason there isn't much in the way of biographical details—changing the names to avoid getting sued or incurring the wrath of fellow employees (if anyone out there knows his/her real name, feel free to add it in the comments).

As the publishing world seems to change almost daily in our current day, it's a bit of a throwback to read about a segment of the literary establishment that's shrinking, perhaps disappearing altogether. However, some of the author's observations (speaking through the likely-autobiographical character of Lindstrom) are timeless:

We're caught up in such a tide of manuscripts and galleys that we get sort of jaded. I mean, every once in a while something comes along that I really love, but six months later I'd have a hard time remembering it.

The tough thing is dealing with author. All those fragile egos.

There's a lot of sly humor and oblique poking fun at the industry, and if you want some light entertainment with a touch of publishing nostalgia and romance thrown in, then Final Proof is right up your "galley." FYI, if you're wondering about who actually won the best first novel in 1977, it was a book titled The Thomas Berryman Number by someone you may have heard of, a fellow by the name of James Patterson.

Author R&R with Peter Swanson & a Giveaway!

It's time once again for some Author R&R (Reference and Research), today featuring Peter Swanson. Plus at the bottom of this post, look for details on how to win a free book!

Peter Swanson is the author of two novels, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, and his latest, The Kind Worth Killing. Swanson's poems, stories and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Atlantic, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epoch, Measure, Notre Dame Review, Soundings East, and The Vocabula Review. He has won awards in poetry from The Lyric and Yankee Magazine and is currently completing a sonnet sequence on all 53 of Alfred Hitchcock’s films.

I enjoy hearing how different authors approach researching their novels, be it through job shadowing, being buried in library stacks, going online, interviews, news reports, or whatever techniques and methods they use in getting the details just right. Or whether they feel too much research and over-planning can be deadly to a manuscript. Swanson probably falls into the latter category, as you will see from his unique take on research:

 

Truth is, I do very little research. And it’s not because I don’t have to, it’s because I don’t really want to—it’s because I’m lazy. There’s nothing worse, for me, than being in the middle of writing a scene in which a search warrant is presented, and then I suddenly realize that I have no idea what a search warrant would even look like.

 

But here’s the good news. I can just go ahead and Google it, which is pretty much what I do these days. Voila. An image of a search warrant on the web that I can describe in my book. Here’s the rub, though. That image is probably attached to some interesting story, and suddenly I’m reading the story instead of working on my book. It’s a double-edge sword, the internet—great for research, and equally great for time wasting.

 

I did do one solid research trip for my last book, The Kind Worth Killing. There’s a crucial scene set in an old cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. I could picture the cemetery, perched on a steep hill that overlooks the town center. I live very close to Concord so I went on a quick research trip one cold and blustery weekday, and spent the afternoon alone in The Old Hill Burying Ground, taking some pictures, but mostly just reading gravestones, and soaking up some atmosphere.

 

Afterwards, I went to the lovely old tavern in the Colonial Inn and had a drink. Both the graveyard and the tavern wound up in my book. I might not have described them perfectly, but it helped that I was there. I think this is the best kind of research. Just going somewhere and walking around. Getting away from your computer for a little bit. So much more rewarding than looking up what a search warrant looks like.

 

 

The Kind Worth Killing was called "Chilling and hypnotically suspenseful … could be an instant classic," by Lee Child (of the Jack Reacher novels). Entertainment Weekly added, "Is The Kind Worth Killing the next Gone Girl? This homage to Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train shares a lot of Gone Girl’s hallmarks but cranks up the volume on each. There aren’t just two unreliable narrators, there are four. There isn’t just one enormous, game-changing twist. Try three, including one at the end that will take your breath away. You’ll also lose count of all the sociopaths. Or are they psychopaths? It doesn’t matter—just know that they’re each deranged but oh-so-compelling."

For your chance to win a copy of Swanson's novel The Kind Worth Killing, just send along an e-mail to [email protected] with Contest Entry in the subject line, and you'll be entered into the random drawing. And if you want to be added to my newsletter list for occasional news updates, you can mention that in your e-mail (you won't be added without your consent and can unsubscribe at any time). Good luck!

Mystery Melange

This year's Crime & Mystery Weekend at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, August 14-16, is dedicated to the late PD James. Highlights will include lectures by special guests Ann Cleves and Alan Bradley, as well as sessions like "Detecting Couples, "The Romance Of The Lone Detective", "Reader, I Murdered Him", and "Love: The Perfect Motive For Murder."

Congratulations to the winners of the second annual Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, named in memory of Diana Pinckley, longtime crime fiction columnist for The New Orleans Times-Picayune. Bestselling author Nevada Barr was honored with the Pinckley Prize for a Distinguished Body of Work, and Adrianne Harun won the Pinckley Prize for a Debut Novel, for A Man Came Out Of A Door In The Mountain.

Keep your eye out for the shortlist for the 2015 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel published in English in 2014, which will be announced tomorrow.

A previously unpublished short story by playwright Tennessee Williams appears in the spring issue of the Strand. Titled "The Eye That Saw Death," the work is a horror story with undertones of Edgar Allan Poe, focusing on a man who receives an eye transplant from a convicted killer.

The Stiletto Gang blog welcomed the authors nominated for the Agatha Best First Novel Award, to be announced at the annual Malice Domestic conference.

Time magazine examined the resurgence of the "continuation novel," i.e., those books which author estate reps approve as sequels to the deceased writer's original canon. Examples cites included Benjamin Black's take on Raymond Chandler’s famous PI, Philip Marlowe, as well as William Boyd as Ian Fleming, Sophie Hannah as Agatha Christie, and Anthony Horowitz as Arthur Conan Doyle.

Speaking of Arthur Conan Doyle, was he a victim of a police conspiracy? The Guardian makes the case that the Staffordshire police fabricated evidence to  discredit Doyle’s investigation into the case of a Birmingham solicitor accused of maiming horses and sending poison-pen letters at the turn of the 20th century.

The sight of a drone delivering your Amazon puchase may have taken one step closer; the FAA announced it was issuing an "experimental airworthiness certificate" for the retailer to begin testing of the potential future service.

Inspector Rebus fans can rejoice in the news that Ian Rankin is bringing out the 20th installment in that series about a year's hiatus.

A new app called Clean Reader is arousing the fury of authors everywhere. By allowing readers to swap swear words in their novels with sanitized versions without the approval of authors, the authors claim it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship.

The new featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "True Confessions" by Etta Abrahams.

In the Q&A roundup, David Morrell (author of the Rambo series), chats with the Huffington Post; Hallie Ephron spoke with WBUR about her latest suspense novel, Night Night, Sleep Tight, based on her Hollywood childhood; Declan Burke grilled Richard Beard about the second novel in his trilogy; and Harlan Coben tells The Guardian why "Every successful author still has to treat it as a job."

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Universal is moving forward with a remake of Scarface, hiring Jonathan Herman to do the rewrite and Pablo Larraín to direct. The new film is said to be an update and will be set in Los Angeles intead of Miami, exploring an immigrant's rise in the criminal underworld.

Black List screenwriter Annie Neal has been tapped to pen a script re-imagining Agatha Christie as a swashbuckling sleuth. The spec script for Agatha is described as "an action adventure in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes meets Romancing the Stone," and focuses on the eleven days Christie went missing in 1926 that led to a media frenzy.

Lionsgate is in negotiations to acquire the rights to Anna Carey's YA novel Blackbird, with Danny Mackey to potentialy pen the adaptation. The story centers on a game of cat-and-mouse that ensues with a young girl wakes up on the tracks of the L.A. subway with no memory, a tattoo of a blackbird, a code, and instructions not to call the police.

Alchemy Entertainment has acquired U.S. rights to distribute the all-star espionage thriller Survivor, with a cast that includes Milla Jovovich, Emma Thompson, Robert Forster, Angela Bassett, James D'Arcy, Dylan McDermott and Brosnan as the bad guy. The film centers on a Foreign Service officer (Jovovich) who tries to prevent a terrorist attack but is forced to go on the run after being framed for crimes she didn't commit.

Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8 picked up feature rights to the high-concept thriller The Brain Hack from writer-director Joe White, which centers on two students who create a way to induce hallucinogenic visions of God and then are stalked by a mysterious cult bent on destroying them.

The 17th Annual Los Angeles Film Noir Festival (a/k/a NOIR CITY: Hollywood), is scheduled for April 3–19, 2015 at the Egyptian Theatre. This year's program includes tributes to actors Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck and novelists Dorothy B. Hughes and Cornell Woolrich. (Hat tip Mystery Fanfare.)

The first trailer for the latest installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise was released, with Tom Cruise returning as Ethan Hawk.

TELEVISION

Bosch has been given a second-season order by Amazon after only a month into its first season. The series is based on Michael Connelly's novels featuring LAPD cop, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, and stars Titus Welliver in the title role.

Steven Moffat, co-creator of Sherlock along with Mark Gatiss, told Entertainment Weekly that the crew had been filming a special episode set in the Victorian era, which will be separate from the new series. As to how the detective duo wind up back in the 1880s, Moffat has been cagey. No date has been set by the BBC for the broadcast, but it's expected to air during the Christmas 2015 period.

Kelli Williams (The Practice) has been cast as the lead in the UP network’s first scripted series, Ties That Bind. Williams will a tough police detective who has to bring her brother's teenage children into her own home after she arrests the brother for aggravated assault, and he's sent to prison.

Sony Pictures TV has sold a 10-episode series to Fox that's based on the real-life friendship between Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and illusionist Harry Houdini. The drama, from David Ticher (The Librarian) and David Shore and David Hoselton (House), is titled Houdini and Doyle and will feature the duo grudgingly joining forces to investigate crimes with a supernatural slant.

THEATER

One of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films, Notorious, is being adapted by the Gothenburg Opera of Sweden's resident composer Hans Gefors, along with librettist Kerstin Perskiwill. The spy thriller opera will hit the stage in September through November of this year.

A new tour of the musical Bullets Over Broadway will launch in August. Based on the Woody Allen film, the musical centers on an aspiring playwright who finds out his play is getting the Broadway treatment thanks to a wealthy gangster who's taken a sudden interest in producing—with the caveat his dimwitted moll has to star in one of the leading roles. 

Quote of the Day

FFB: Lonelyheart 4122

Colin Watson (1920-1983) was a British author who started out in life as a journalist, first as a reporter for the Boston Guardian and later as an editorial writer, theater critic and book reviewer. In 1958, while still working for newspapers, Watson published the first Flaxborough novel, Coffin, Scarcely Used, a book that Cecil Day-Lewis (who also wrote mysteries as Nicholas Blake) called "a great lark, full of preposterous situations and poker-faced wit."

Following the publication of the second book in the series, Watson retired to write full time and published a dozen mystery novels between 1958 and 1982. His mystery series came to known as The Flaxborough Chronicles, set as they were in Flaxborough, a fictional East Anglian city, population 15,000, loosely based on the Lincolnshire area of Boston where Watson worked as a journalist. The lead character in the series is Inspector Walter Purbright, assisted by his somewhat naive sidekick, Sergeant Sidney Love, and the Chief Constable, Harcourt Chubb. Watson's third book in the Chronicles, Hopjoy Was Here, won him a Silver Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association in 1962, and five years later he won a second Silver Dagger with Lonelyheart 4122.

Jeffery Ewener, a fan of Watson's work, wrote for the Mystery Magazine Web that in Watson's fictional world, "you find this...combination of superficial blandness deceptively concealing an uproar of animal spirits - like a hymn book hollowed-out to hold a hip flask. Watson gives us geriatric gentlemen patting bottoms, matronly housewives jumping into orgies, MI5 agents running up huge unpaid bar bills for reasons of National Security, austere solicitors blackmailing the local gentry."

As an example of what Ewener is referring to, take this excerpt from Lonelyheart 4122:

"Well, they didn't seem very pleased to see me, sir. Singleton wouldn't come out of the garden. He was going up and down with a lawn mower all the time. I had to ask each question as he went by one way, and try and catch the answer when he passed on the way back."

"Very trying for you, Sid."

"Not really. The answers were all very short. And him being so busy made it easier to get the writing samples. I just pinched three or four of the labels on his rose bushes. Of course," Love added, nodding at the file,  "I trimmed them down a bit and mounted them properly."

"So I noticed. Most neat. Now I understand why I couldn't make much sense out of "Peace Mrs. Pettifer Brevvitt's Pride Lancashire Ascending."

Lonelyheart 4122 introduces us to the character of Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who subsequently appeared in all Flaxborough novels save one. In this outing, Inspector Purbright's investigation into the disappearance of two respectable middle-aged women leads him to a matrimonial bureau where he meets another client, Miss Teatime, whom Purbright fears may also be in danger. But Miss Teatime doesn't want anything to do with his protection, and neither Miss Teatime nor her shady beau, a retired naval officer, is what they appear to be.

Four of The Flaxborough Chronicles were filmed for the BBC's  "Murder Most English" program, including Lonelyheart 4122. For a review of the TV episode based on the novel, check out Martin Edwards's estimable blog.

Mystery Melange

 

Deadly Pleasures magazine announced the finalists for the annual Barry Awards for crime fiction in the categories of Best Fiction, Best First Novel, Best Paperback Original, and Best Thriller. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Foreword Review's INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award finalists were announced last week, including the categories of Mystery and Thrillers & Suspense.

The Chipping Norton Literary Festival, April 23-26, is scheduled to include talks from leading crime fiction authors Lee Child, MC Beaton and SJ Watson.

The New England Writers' Centre and the Armidale Dumaresq Library are sponsoring six Thunderbolt Prizes for Australian crime writers, including Emerging Writers, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The entry deadline closes on August 24, 2015.

Pushkin Press is establishing a new imprint, Pushkin Vertigo, which will start publishing "crime classics" from around the world by international masters from the 1920s to the 1970s. Stephanie Seegmuller, co-editor of Pushkin Vertigo, commented: "The Pushkin Vertigo books are truly for everyone who loves classic crime, from Agatha Christie to Robert Chandler." The first six titles will be released in September in the U.K. and North America, and another fourteen titles are slated for next year.

Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Rankin is best known for his two series and over 20 novels featuring policemen John Rebus and Malcolm Fox.

Dave Zeltserman penned an essay for Boston's WBUR public radio about his thoughts on noir and "an essential noir reading list."

In celebration of Women's History Month, The Weekly Lizard blog (from Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) listed "5 Fictional Females Who Rock."

Stephen Marche, witing for Esquire, penned an essay on "How Genre Fiction Became More Important Than Literary Fiction." As he notes, "Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books."

This week's featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "Diseases Without Borders" by Charles Rammelkamp."

The Q&A roundup includes psychotherapist and thriller author Dennis Palumbo chatting with the Huffington Post about the latest installment in his series featuring Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, a psychologist and trauma expert; the Sirens of Suspense welcomed Glen Erik Hamilton, who talked about his earliest crime influences; Rachel Amphlett talked with Omnimystery News about her new political thriller; Michael Robotham spoke with the Mystery People about his new thriller, Liife or Death; and Christoph Fischer took Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Sharp Interview" challenge.

Media Murder for Monday

Here's the latest news of crime dramas on stage and screen:

MOVIES

Although the reboot of Murder on the Orient Express has been on hold for some time, it seems to be moving forward with the hiring of Michael Green to pen the script. The original 1974 movie from Sidney Lumet was based on Agatha Christie's iconic mystery novel and starred Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot.

Peter Dinklage and Nicola Peltz are in talks to join Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike in the adaptation of Deep Blue Goodbye, based on the detective novel by John D. MacDonald.

Josh Duhamel and Alice Eve have joined Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino in the cast of Beyond Deceit, a legal thriller marking the directorial debut of screenwriter Shintaro Shimosawa. The project centers on an ambitious young lawyer (Duhamel) who takes on a big case against a ruthless executive of a pharmaceutical company, only to get drawn into a murder case where he becomes the prime suspect.

The latest James Bond movie Spectre has added The Bridge star Stephanie Sigman to the cast playing a woman named Estrella, rumored to be a femme fatale character.

TELEVISION

The BBC greenlighted a third season of the UK crime drama The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson as Superintendent Stella Gibson and Fifty Shades Of Grey's Jamie Dornan as serial killer Paul Spector.

Anne-Marie Duff has snaggled the lead role in the four-part BBC psychological crime drama, From Darkness. The series follows Clare Church, an ex-police officer who left the force in the mid-90s after the impact of violence became too overwhelming, but the discovery of four bodies from a past investigation pulls her back in to a world she thought she'd left behind.

The USA network greenlighted a pilot commitment for Shooter, a drama series adaptation of the 2007 film (based on the bestselling novel Point Of Impact by Stephen Hunter), which is being executive produced by the film’s star Mark Wahlberg. The TV drama centers on a highly decorated Marine sniper who goes on the run when he's framed for an attack on the President and has to track down whoever set him up.

The USA network also handed out a pilot order to the drama Falling Water, described as "a mind-bending thriller intersecting reality and unconscious thoughts."

A&E picked up the rights to Impact, a drama series from filmmaker Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), journalist-turned-TV writer Jason George (Nashville) and All3Media America. Impact is described as a fast-paced thriller about the downing of a major commercial flight near the nation’s capital, and "when the country’s best airline investigator learns her son may have been on the flight, everyone she once trusted will become a suspect."

The Netflix Canadian thriller Between will debut on May 21, but you won’t be able to binge watch like other Netflix series, since the six one-hour episodes will only appear on a weekly basis. The survivalist thriller drama tells the story of a town where everyone over 21 years old has been wiped out by a mysterious disease, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves.

Lauren Ambrose, currently seen in USA’s limited series DIG, is the last of the four main leads to be cast in the ABC pilot Broad Squad, is a fictionalized account of the graduating class of Boston’s first female patrol officers in 1978. The other three female stars are Charlotte Spencer, Cody Horn, Rutina Wesley. Rounding out the cast are Michael Gaston (The Mentalist), Kenneth Mitchell (Jericho) and Alberto Frezza.

Rachel Boston (Witches Of East End) has been hired as a series regular in the CBS civil rights crime drama pilot For Justice, based on James Patterson’s crime novel, The Thomas Berryman Number. The series centers on Special Agent Natalia "Nat" Chappel (played by Anika Noni Rose), a cool, laser-focused, FBI agent who works in the Criminal Section of the Department of Civil Rights Division. Boston will play another DOJ lawyer with Nat’s team.

Fox has delayed production on its American remake of the UK police procedural Luther to wait until the crush of pilot season is over before resuming its search for a leading man.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

NPR's "All Things Considered" spoke with real-life cyber psychologist Mary Aiken, who's also a producer on the new show CSI: Cyber.

WBUR in Boston interviewed native son Dennis Lehane about his writing and latest novel, World Gone By.

The newest Crime and Science Radio podcast, "Spy vs Spy vs Spy," featured hosts Jan Burke and D.P. Lyle interviewing "the Queen of Espionage," Gayle Lynds.

The latest podcast from Suspense Radio's "Inside Edition" welcomed guest authors A.J. Tata, Aric Carter, CJ Box, and Leon Opio.

THEATER

Following its successful premiere at D.C.'s Arena Stage, Ken Ludwig's Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery moves to New York City's McCarter Theater. Inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the show stars Gregory Wooddell (The Lyons, As You Like It) as Sherlock Holmes with Lucas Hall (Tales from Red Vienna) as Doctor Watson, and Stanley Bahorek, Michael Glenn, and Jane Pfitsch playing more than 40 additional characters.

The Minnesota Opera is staging the premiere of a work by Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell based on the novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon (also made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury). Like the book and movie, the opera centers on an American soldier brainwashed by Chinese Communists to kill on command, hence becoming “the perfect assassin."  (Hat tip to the Parterre blog.)