In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Lionsgate has made a preemptive deal for The Second Life of Nick Mason, the first installment in a forthcoming book series by Steve Hamilton. The project has been pitched as "Taken meets The Equalizer," and centers on career criminal Nick Mason who is released from prison but has to deal with a crime lord as well as the determined cop who arrested him.

Robin Stevens’ children’s detective series Murder Most Unladylike has been optioned for television and film by independent production company Pilot Media. The series is set in a 1930s boarding school and features schoolgirl detectives Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong.

Phillip Noyce has been hired to direct Ambulance, a remake of the 2005 Danish thriller, to be scripted by Chris Fedak (co-creator of the cult television show Chuck). The plot follows two desperate brothers who attempt a robbery in order to pay for their dying mother’s health care, but the job takes a worse turn when they steal an ambulance and discover it's occupied by a dying heart patient. The new production is being conceived as "a breathless crime thriller in the vein of Dog Day Afternoon and Heat set in downtown LA."

Haley Bennett has landed the third lead female role in The Girl On The Train to play Megan, starring alongside Emily Blunt and Rebecca Ferguson in the Tate Taylor-directed adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel for DreamWorks.

50 Shades of Grey actor Luke Grimes is set to star in a film about a Polish crime writer convicted in 2007 for a murder similar to one he had described in his debut novel.

A trailer was also released for the upcoming film Legend, based on John Pearson’s 1972 biography, The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins. Tom Hardy takes on both roles, playing the gangster brothers.

TELEVISION

HBO acquired TV rights to Ryan Gattis’ All Involved, set over the six days of the Los Angeles riots after Rodney King's LAPD assailants were acquitted, following 17 people caught up in the chaos. The adaptation will be produced by Alan Ball, whose credits include True Blood and Six Feet Under.

A crime drama pilot from Black Box creator Amy Holden Jones and Burn Notice creator Matt Nix has landed at CBS. The project drama centers on an "explosive, rule-breaking, fearless female detective with no filter who enlists the help of a polite and gentle brainiac who studies the biology of evil to solve cases for the LA Violent Crimes Unit."

Grey’s Anatomy star Katherine Heigl is replacing actress KaDee Strickland in the retooled pilot for CBS' legal drama, Doubt, playing the lead role of Sadie, a defense attorney who becomes romantically involved with one of her clients charged with a violent crime. Original cast members Dule Hill, Laverne Cox, Kobi Libii, Elliott Gould and Dreama Walker are still in the cast for the reworked version of the pilot, although male lead Teddy Sears is also likely to be recast.

Betty White is joining Season 11 of Bones where she'll play an unusual role: she’s signed on to play the latest squintern at the Jeffersonian. She'll tackle the role of Dr. Beth Mayer,  who is brought in to assist in a murder linked to fantasy football — which just happens to be one of her many areas of expertise.

Michelle Pfeiffer is joining Robert De Niro in HBO’s Bernie Madoff movie Wizard of Lies, playing Madoff's wife, Ruth, while Alessandro Nivola will play their eldest son, Mark Madoff.

Former Dexter co-stars Desmond Harrington and Jennifer Carpenter will reunite in CBS' series Limitless, based on the Bradley Cooper film of the same name. They'll both play FBI agents who share a working and possible romantic relationship.

Another Dexter alum, Julie Benz, has signed a multi-episode deal to star in the CBS police procedural Hawaii Five-0, playing a detective from San Francisco leading the task force modelled after Five-0, who ends up developing a bond with with Chin, played by Daniel Dae Kim.

David E. Kelley’s high profile new law drama The Trial, headed for Amazon, has added Big Driver’s Maria Bello and Lost actress Tania Raymonde to the cast that already includes Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt and Olivia Thirlby. Bello will play a high-profile lawyer who is the ex-wife of Billy Bob Thornton’s character, while Raymonde will play a former legal secretary who later got into prostitution.

Shameless star Emily Bergl will appear in a recurring role opposite Timothy Hutton in the second season of the anthology series American Crime. She'll take on the role of the mother of Pollari’s character Eric, whose family becomes embroiled in the fallout of an alleged sexual assault.

Investigation Discovery has ordered six episodes of Las Vegas D.A. (working title), which follows Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson and his team in the Clark County D.A.’s office.

Fox unveiled a teaser trailer for Season 2 of its crime drama Gotham.

CBS released still photos from the upcoming CSI series-ending finale, "CSI: Immortality,” which includes the return of fan favorite characters Det. Jim Brass (played by Paul Guilfoyl) and Catherine Willows (played by Marg Helgenberger). Gil Grissom (William Petersen) is also reprising his former role for the two-hour finale event.

Showtime released a 2.5-minute trailer for Homeland, set two years after the previous season. Whereas last year Carrie Matheson (played by Clare Danes) was still busy at the CIA and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) was working in the private sector, in the new season, Saul appears to be back with the CIA while Carrie is now no longer working for a government. Other characters returning from prior seasons include Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) and Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham).

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Suspense Magazine's Story Blender podcast chatted with investigative reporter and author Hank Phillippi Ryan, while the zine's Inside Edition show welcomed Linwood Barclay, Richard Godwin, and Ed Aymar.

The latest Crime Cafe featured host Debbi Mack talking with author TS Hottle about his crime writing and sci-fi fiction.

The latest Speaking of Mysteries podcast, hosted by Noir Magazine's Nancie Clare, welcomed author Belinda Bauer to talk about her award-winning novel Rubbernecker, about an anatomy student with Asperger’s Syndrome who suspects the cadaver he’s dissecting is the victim of murder.  

The guest on the latest Thrilling Reads podcast was J. David Core who discussed his Lupa Schwartz mystery thrillers.

THEATER

Kevin Bacon is heading to Hartford Stage in Connecticut this fall, taking on the iconic role played by Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window on the big screen. The stage production, is adapted by playwright/actor Keith Reddin and directed by Hartford Stage chief Darko Tresnjak, is schedule to run from October 22 through November 15.

Lauren Luna Velez, who played a murderer in the hit TV series Dexter with Michael C. Hall, will be featured in the Off-Broadway premiere of Adam Seidel's dark comedy Catch The Butcher, which centers on a single woman's hunt for a serial killer of other single women. The show will begin previews Sept. 23 at the Cherry Lane Theatre with a limited engagement through Oct. 30.

Key Change, a piece devised by women from a prison in the U.K., was awarded the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award after playing at this year's festival. The award means the show will receive a New York run January 6-31, 2016, at New York Theater Workshop's 4th Street Theatre. The play was written by Catrino McHugh based on a concept by women from a prison in the North of England and only uses a few chairs, a "ghetto blaster" and four rolls of masking tape.

Quote of the Day

FFB: Thorne in the Flesh

  Rhona Petrie (1922-2010) was the pen name of British author Eileen-Marie Duell Buchanan, who also wrote under the name Clare Curzon. She didn't start her  literary career until the 1960s, with the publication of Death in Deakins Wood, the first installment in a series featuring Police Inspector Marcus Maclurg. She went on to publish over forty novels, and the most successful was her series focusing on Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley Serious Crime Squad, some 24 books in all.

Her numerous books weren't just throw-away quickies, either. Guilty Knowledge (1999), the first book in the Stakerly Series set in 1900s London and featuring Lucy Sedgewick, was short-listed for the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger in 2000. It actually won an award in that same year, the Herodotus Award for Best First International Historical Mystery.

Perhaps it was the author's studies in French and psychology at King's College, London, that culminated in the publication of Thorne in the Flesh in 1971, a standalone suspense/political thriller novel. Just about every page is heavily laced with the philosophical musings of the protagonist, and there's a strong Francophile-oriented angle, as well.

The titular protagonist of the book, Ellis Thorne, is a dedicated London schoolmaster living a fairly quiet life renting a single room whose entrance is crammed between Express Dairy and the launderette. One day, out of the blue the police arrive with word that a great uncle whom Thorne knows only by name, Sylveste Aury, has been seriously injured in a car crash that at first glance appears to be an accident. Thorne makes a promise to his dying relative who tells him "No accident—all yours now—you'll find—in the file—you'll take it over?"

As Thorne digs deeper into his great-uncle's business, he's pulled down into a seamy world of strippers, a squatter's siege, 1960s counterculture and anarchism, muggings, and the high-profile kidnapping of a politician that sets off riots. With pressure on all sides from thugs, the police and the intelligence service, he soon decides he's had enough and almost turns his back on the whole lot. But he can't seem to tear himself away from Tina, one of the night-club employees, and the responsibility he feels for the unlikely-named Katte Mandu, an African girl Aury was taking care of, as well as Millie, the oversized English sheepdog that came with Thorne's apartment.

The writing and subject matter is still relevent today, and Petrie manages to weave some fanciful turns of phrase and wit along with the dark atmosphere:

His mind, he'd prided himself, was a tidy one. Now it was ransacked, its contents churned and pawed over like a room that had been pillaged. He had thought he'd known what it contained and where everything was kept. Now he wasn't sure. Hidden prejudices were brought to light, the junk stuffed away behind furniture.

and

A girl took off her clothes and danced, and the audience watched serpents of light wriggle and coil over her limbs, saw stardust powder the upward curves of her pagoda body.  But from where Thorne had sat, without neophiliac needs, he had seen the mechanics, recognized not spangles but sweating flesh, seen on the nakedness the sad little marks of tight elastic, pubic stubble and bitten nails. Things that on a loved body would be endearing, but here were pathetic.

and

. . . before them the muffled sounds of people boxed up inside the building—water running, a child's fretful crying, voices raised in angry dipute, a woman suddenly screaming abuse from only a few yards distant; the sound of fist on flesh and a moment's silence, then moaning and sobs of something subhuman, pleading and hating and desperately needing.

Although her last novel, Devil in the Detail (part of the Yeadings series), was published as recently as 2010, she isn't all that widely known, especially in the U.S. Fortunately, several of her books are still available in paperback and hardcover, worth seeking out for a first, or second, look.

Mystery Melange

The Australian Crime Writers Association has announced the 2015 winners of the Ned Kelly Awards, which are voted on by booksellers, book industry luminaries, readers, critics, reviewers and commentators. This year's winner for Best Novel is Eden by Candice Fox; Best First Novel: Quota by Jock Serong; True crime: This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner; and the S.D. Harvey short story award: "Short Term People" by Andrea Gillum.

J. E. Irvin won the inaugural Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award on Saturday, August 15, during the annual Mystery Writers Key West Fest, a three day mystery genre festival set in the tropical paradise of the Florida Keys. The other finalists were Jack Bates for All Hocked Up; Gregory S. Dew for Portside Screw; and Lewis Haskell (a/k/a Crichton Lewis) for Square Grouper.

Tomorrow evening, Mystery Readers NorCal is hosting a Literary Salon featuring international mysteries set in present day China and Thailand with Lisa Brackmann & Timothy Hallinan. There is limited space, but you can RVSP via Janet Rudolph's Mystery Fanfare blog.

Hat tip to Paul D. Brazill for taking note of ALIBI, the first Slovenian festival of Crime and Noir literature, where Brazill will be one of the featured authors, along with Richard Godwin, Eddie Vega, Andrej Predin, Neven Škrgatić.

The 2016 Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel is accepting submissions until December 31 of this year. Any author of a first novel by a North American woman published by an American publisher during the 2015 calendar year is eligible. For more information, check out the award website.

After searching through Agatha Christie's archives, theater producer Julius Green unearthed ten previously unknown plays by the author, which will be published by HarperCollins on September 10 in Green's book, Curtain Up: Agatha Christie - A Life in Theatre.  

This year's Library of Congress National Book Festival (at the Washington Convention Center on September 5) will have increased broadcast coverage. In addition to C-SPAN's Book TV, PBS will offer a live-stream broadcast via PBS.org from noon to 6 p.m. hosted by Jeffrey Brown, senior correspondent and chief arts correspondent of PBS NewsHour, and Rich Fahle of the Detroit public station's Book View Now. The media project is spearheaded by Fahle, who has also brought such coverage to the Miami Book Fair, the Los Angeles Times of Books, BookExpo America, and BookCon. (Hat tip to Shelf Awareness.)

Crime fiction author Laura Lippman penned a heartfelt essay for Tin House about her hometown of Baltimore, noting that it took the city a long time to recover from the riots of 1968 and wondering how long it will take "Charm City" to get anywhere close to that name again after the recent riots and unrest.

BBC Magazine profiled the enduring relevance of Eric Ambler's 1930s spy novels such as The Mask of Dimitrios, which created a new type of thriller and how reading Ambler today, you can't help having a sense of deja vu with the cycles of history returning to something not so very different from Ambler's Europe.

Jezebel investigated Investigation Discovery (ID) and its lineup of grisly true-crime documentary programming, wondering why women are "obsessed" with the network. ID has become the third-most-watched ad-supported network among women ages 25-54 in just seven years on air, according to Nielsen, and is currently the 11th most popular network on all of cable television.

Speaking of true crime, Harold Schecht spoke with the True Clime blog about his new book based on Alfred Packer, the Wild West cannibal who became an unlikely folk hero.

Book Riot's Leila Roy is on a virtual trip around the world via female crime writers. Her first stop is Norway, where she takes a look at the land of canned mackerel for breakfast, fjords and authors Anne Holt, Karin Fossum, Kjersti Scheen, and Pernille Rygg.

Suspense Magazine's August issue has interviews with Gayle Lynds, Todd Moss, Shane Gericke, Sean Chercover, and Sandra Campbell, as well as D.P. Lyle on forensics, a look at social media, and book excerpts, reviews, stories, and more.  

The latest issue of the e-zine Mysterical-E is out, with nine thrilling new short stories and the usual entertaining interviews and columns by Gerald So, Christine Verstraete, and more. You can read it for free via the zine's website.

Also new and free for your reading pleasure is the latest issue of Yellow Mama, with original noir stories, poetry and other dark goodies in an issue "dedicated to the majestic Cecil the lion."

The new crime poem at the 5-2 is "A Fall to Grace" by Elizabeth Lash.

In the Q&A roundup, Peter Robinson spoke with the Huffington Post about his crime novels set in Yorkshire featuring Inspector Alan Banks; Brad Parks was grilled by The Mystery People about his series with New Jersey newspaper journalist Carter Ross; the Mystery People also chatted with Richard Goodfellow about his debut thriller, The Collector Of Secrets, set in Japan; and Omnimystery News welcomed author David Hagerty about his new mystery, They Tell Me You Are Wicked.

Media Murder for Monday

Although the last-minute vacation crunch means an absence of news, here are a few of the latest crime drama tidbits:

MOVIES

Producer Mark Gordon (Ray Donovan, Criminal Minds) is taking on the suspense thriller Paris Trap, based on a script by Daniel Taplitz. The story follow a woman on vacation in Paris who agrees to take part in an elaborate international sting operation after she's mistaken for the infamous mistress of a notorious financial criminal.  

Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) is negotiating to star in The Girl On The Train, the Tate Taylor-directed adaptation of author Paula Hawkins' novel. There are three lead female roles in the thriller, with Emily Blunt already on board to play the narrator of the tale who becomes entangled in a mystery when she sees something shocking on a train that passes by her house. Freguson will take on the role of "Anna."

A trailer was released for the psychological thriller Carol, with Cate Blanchette and Rooney Mara starring in Todd Haynes's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel.

TELEVISION

The family thriller Home from writer Aron Eli Coleite and Jerry Bruckheimer TV has landed a pilot order at TNT. The project delves into the secrets lingering behind the façade of a seemingly idyllic suburban family that is shattered when a wife and mother discovers long-buried secrets that threaten to destroy the very foundation of her life.

Writer/Director John Mulholland and Producer Richard Zampella are working on a documentary about the late author Elmore Leonard titled Elmore Leonard: The Dickens of Detroit. The documentary, from Transmultimedia Entertainment, will explore Elmore Leonard’s life, his more than 40 novels and dozens of short stories, and his impact on crime fiction.

Actors Lance Gross and Zach Appelman have been added as series regulars on the supernatural procedural Sleepy Hollow for Season 3. Gross will play an FBI Agent who will take over the Sleepy Hollow police headquarters, while Appelman will continue his role as Joe Corbin.

Andrew Howard and Manuel Uriza have landed series regular roles in FX’s drama pilot Snowfall, set against the infancy of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Amazon and Open Road Films signed a multi-year licensing deal allowing Amazon Prime subscribers to stream select Open Road titles such as action-thriller Triple 9 and the thriller Sleepless Night.

Ben Robson (Vikings) has landed a lead role in TNT’s drama pilot Animal Kingdom. The pilot centers on 17-year-old Joshua Cody (Finn Cole), who moves in with his wild, freewheeling grandmother (Ellen Barkin) and uncles and soon learns their indulgent lifestyle is funded by bank robberies they commit. Robson will play Craig, the tough, fearless middle son of the Cody crime family.  

Narcos star Stephanie Sigman is joining the cast of American Crime for Season 2, playing an administrator at an Indianapolis public school whose loyalties and values are put into conflict as she’s faced with systemic bias within the school system.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

CrimeFiction.FM hosted Ann Brown to talk about her Psycho Cat and the Landlady cozy mystery series.

Quote of the Day

FFB: The Saint in Europe

Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin (1907-1993) was born in Singapore to a Chinese father and English mother, which would later come to haunt him when he was denied permanent residency in the U.S. due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law prohibiting immigration for anyone with  "50 percent or greater" Oriental blood. Eventually, after his success in literature and in Hollywood, an act of Congress personally granted him and his daughter the right of permanent residence in the United States.

He later changed his name to Leslie Charteris and became one of the more colorful crime fiction authors of his day. Before his literary success, he worked variously on a freighter, as a bartender, prospecting for gold, fishing for pearls, working in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, toured England with a carnival and drove a bus. He also rode on the Hindenburg on its successful maiden voyage.

His success lies almost entirely upon his famous literary creation, Simon Templar, known as "The Saint," featured in over 50 novels, novellas and short-story collections, as well as several TV and movie incarnations, and a long-running comic strip.

As to the genesis for the character, Charteris once said,

"Who knows where an idea comes from? The Saint was just originally a character who came to life in my head not so long after I started writing, but he was not the first character I thought of. He was, as a matter of fact, the fifth...I looked back over the characters I had created so far and picked the Saint, liked him the best, and decided to go on with him."

The books and stories never disclose Simon Templar's origins, other than the the possibility he started his career as a criminal. He was suave, mysterious, a daredevil, a gentleman thief or, as often called, a "modern day Robin Hood." In the earlier novels he was more violent than in later outings, such as the various short stories.

The Saint in Europe collection was first published in 1953, the 29th book to feature the character, and it marked not only a resumption of the book series after a five-year hiatus, but the 25th anniversary of the the Templar series. All seven stories in the collection were used as plots for episodes of the 1962-69 TV series, The Saint, starring Roger Moore (later James Bond).

The theme that ties all these stories together, if you can call it that, is the Saint travlling to different parts of Europe where he has runs into trouble of one kind or another. Or as Templar says, he "seldom went anywhere with the intention of getting into trouble. But trouble had that disastrous propensity for getting into him."

The first story is set in Paris and titled "The Covetous Headsman," in which the body of a young, honest, hardworking Parisian shipping clerk is found murdered and decapitated. Templar steps in to help when a web of money and betrayal dating back to the resistance during WWII threatens to make the naive sister of the victim the murderer's next target.

"The Rhine Maiden" is probably the best of the lot, hearkening back to the Templar of the earlier novels, where he was "judge and executioner." Templar gets drawn into the plight of a pitiable man and his daughter traveling with him on a train who have been swindled by the man's boss, also a passenger on the same train. The man, his daughter, and the boss remind Templar that

"The Saint has been something of a crook sometimes, even if that didn't hurt anybody but specimens like you. And since I reformed I've become rather sophisticated. Maybe it's a pity. Once loses sight of some simple elementary things that were very good."

The stories have some of the same flair as in the novels, with Templar's wit and imperturbability shining through. They're a good introduction to the character and Charteris style, and a pleasant enough way to while away an hour or so (it's a fairly short book).

Mystery Melange

The annual Fall for the Book festival at George Mason University in Virginia announced the lineup for this year's event, including "an evening of mystery (and maybe mayhem)" on Tuesday, September 29. A headline event with Megan Abbott kicks off the evening, followed by a panel moderated by award-winning author Art Taylor with crime authors Sherry Harris, Josh Pachter, B.K. Stevens, and LynDee Walker.

The Chicago Tribune profiled the American Bar Association's new publishing venture, Ankerwycke. Named for the tree that sheltered the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, the new imprint features law-themed true crime and crime fiction, including classics like Perry Mason re-releases to new works such as a novel by a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Future, the company behind Total Film, SFX and GamesRadar+, is launching the quarterly magazine Crime Scene. The UK-based publication will cover TV crime drama, as well as novels from authors such as Ian Rankin and James Ellroy and offer up opinion, analysis, previews, and in-depth articles.

Brown’s Hotel in London will be offering an Agatha Christie Afternoon Tea during September, which is appropriate since the author was a regular hotel guest and her novel At Bertram's Hotel was based on Brown's. The themed tea, which is offered in celebration of Christie's 125th anniversary, will feature a variety of teas and cakes including Miss Marple’s orange and poppy seed cake, which appears in At Bertram’s Hotel; black coffee tiramisu, which makes reference to Miss Marple’s love of coffee cake; clock-face macaroons, referencing Christie’s novel Rosemary Clocks; and plain and fruit scones served with clotted cream, strawberry jam and honey – an all-time favorite of Miss Marple. (HT to Good Housekeeping UK.)

The Sunday Post spoke to ten authors will be appearing at the upcoming Bloody Scotland festival to ask them about their writing inspirations and to name their favorite authors and the stories that scare them.

If you're heading to the Shetland area of the UK, you can read mystery author Ann Cleeves' take why the islands offers the perfect inspiration for crime fiction (for her award-winning series of novels and a hit BBC TV Series starring Douglas Henshall) and her list of "top five things to do in Shetland."

Maureen Corrigan penned an essay for The Washington Post, about how female crime writers handle aging in their series' charaters, titled "In mysteries, does the trail grow cold when the detective grows old?"

An ancient real-life mystery may have been solved: archaeologists in Egypt believe they have found the long-missing tomb of Nefertiti hidden in plain sight - in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The new crime poem over at the 5-2 this week is "Mortal Terror" by Sarah Stockton.

The Q&A roundup includes Steve Hockensmith, who stopped by Ominimystery News to interview himself about his second mystery co-written with tarot expert Lisa Falco; Writers Who Kill snared Susan Froetschel about her Afghanistan-set novel Fear of Beauty; Lisa Unger chatted with the Do Some Damage blog's Alex Segura about her novel Crazy Love You; the Mystery People grilled Jenny Milchman about her latest suspense novel, As Night Falls; and EuroCrime welcomes Lin Anderson, who was just shortlisted for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year for Paths of the Dead.

Author R&R with Robert Masello

The prolific Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer (for such projects as Charmed, Sliders, and Poltergeist), and the bestselling author of many books, most recently the historical thriller, The Romanov Cross, which Kirkus praised for its "delicious sense of creeping dread."

His new thriller, The Einstein Prophecy, beings around the end of World War II, when an Egyptian sarcophagus is brought to Princeton University for study by army lieutenant and professor Lucas Athan. Assisted by archaeologist Simone Rashid, Lucas soon discovers the box's contents could hold the key to victory in the war and and possibly the downfall of mankind. As they uncover a connection between the mysterious relic and the work of Albert Einstein (then living in Princeton), Lucas and Simone must turn to science and the supernatural to save the world from potential destruction.

Robert Masello stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some Author R&R:

Now that I think about it, I started researching my new novel, The Einstein Prophecy, about forty years ago.  I just didn’t know it at the time.

I was a freshman at Princeton University, and I was walking past a charming, two-story, white house with black shutters, tucked behind a fence and a small but tidy front garden, on Mercer Street in town.  112 Mercer Street, to be exact.

The house that Albert Einstein bought, and lived in, after fleeing the Nazi tide on the European continent once and for all.  

He had taken up a position at the relatively new Institute for Advanced Study, where he was the brightest star in a firmament that included such other luminaries as the topologist Oswald Veblen, the mathematician Hermann Weyl, and the quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli.  Although he wasn’t thrilled with the provincial attitudes of many Americans, there and elsewhere in the country, he liked the quiet, arboreal feel of the college town, along with its campus dotted with Gothic spires and cloistered walkways, its extensive libraries and massive chapel.  (Although he was Jewish, he had attended Catholic schools in his youth, and harbored a lasting affection and respect for many of the moral lessons and stories that were an integral part of the Christian tradition.)

Anyway, I think those impressions I had of the man, who had walked the same streets I was walking, and possibly under some of the very same ancient trees, stuck with me, and provided a nucleus for the novel I was to write decades later.

As with most of my recent books, this one was to be a dark fantasy steeped in real history and fact.  In Blood and Ice, I had written about the Crimean War.  In The Medusa Amulet, the Italian Renaissance and French Revolution.  In The Romanov Cross, the end of the Russian dynasty and the pandemic of the Spanish Flu.  Most of the time spent writing my books is spent not on writing the story itself, but on the reading and research necessary to make sure that the story, when I do get around to concocting it, feels authentic and convincing.  I don’t ever want to jolt the reader out of the story with some anachronism, or obviously counter-factual element.  I usually tell people that 90 percent of the history, whether it be about art or science or politics, is right, but that that last ten percent is pure conjecture.  In other words, don’t write a term paper based solely on the history you have read in one of my novels.

In the olden days, back when I lived in New York, I would haunt the main library on Fifth Avenue, where there were actually people – live human beings – who would go down into the subterranean stacks and retrieve any arcane text or long out-of-print book you asked for.  And get this – there was a phone line, too, that you could call and ask any question – “When was the Great Wall of China built?” “How many soldiers are there in a platoon?” “How much was a doubloon worth?” – and someone would go off and find the answer for you.  To those hard-working and information-bearing moles, I offer my most heartfelt thanks.

These days, researching is so much easier it’s a joke.  There’s this thing called Google, and I can look up anything, at any time of the day or night (and I tend to write into the wee hours), and nearly always find an immediate answer.  For this Einstein book, I was able to discover everything from a map of the Princeton University campus in 1944 (which is where and when the bulk of the book takes place) to a quick tutorial (and I needed several) on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.  I also wanted to get a sense of who Einstein was as a man, and not simply as the great genius of his age.  I learned that he hated to wear socks, loved to smoke (against his doctor’s orders), played violin to relax, flirted like crazy with the ladies, enjoyed a good joke.

There is a danger, however, to the Google era of research.  It’s easy to get lost, forever, in the endless supply of information, in the countless links to other sources.  There’s the temptation not only to research something endlessly, but to slip all of those gems that you uncover into the book itself.  Yes, readers want a sense of verisimilitude, but that’s not the main reason they’re there – they want a story first and foremost. Otherwise, they’d be reading a biography or a history textbook.

And if you do make a mistake, including some fact that’s just plain wrong, you will most definitely hear from some reader out there - usually in the form of a flame – who is an expert on that particular subject. Trust me on that.

 

Find out more about Robert Masello and his books via his website or you can follow him on Facebook. The Einstein Prophecy is available via all major ebook and print book retailers.

Media Murder for Monday

Here's the latest crime drama news to start your week:

MOVIES

The Wolf of Wall Street duo Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorses are re-teaming for The Devil in the White City. The project is an adaptation of Erik Larson’s 2003 nonfiction book The Devil In the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America, which chronicled the charming and prolific serial killer Dr. H.H. Holmes. Holmes stalked the fairgrounds at Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893 and is rumored to have killed up to 200 people and studied the remains for science.

The big screen adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 1997 thriller/dark comic novel Andorra is moving closer to a production start with Fred Schepisi hired to direct and James Ivory on board as executive producer, with filming hopefully starting next year in Europe. The project centers on the handsome and charming Alexander Fox, who forsakes his American life and ends up in the tiny eponymous nation - but when a dead body turns up in the harbor, the local detective is convinced Fox is involved.

Matt Dillon is set to star as FBI Agent Hamer in the Zach Braff's remake of Going in Style. Dillon's chracter will be tasked with tracking down three lifelong pals who become bank robbers when their pensions are sold out from under them. The original 1979 film starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg, roles that will be handled by Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alak Arkin in the reboot.

Rosario Dawson and Katherine Heigl will star in Unforgettable, a female-centric thriller marking the directorial debut of veteran producer Denise Di Novi. The script is written by Christina Hodson and David Leslie Johnson and focuses on a woman (Dawson) with a new husband and his daughter who is tormented by the man’s manipulative and mentally unstable ex-wife (Heigl).

Cobie Smulders (who played Agent Maria Hill in the blockbuster Avengers movies) is in early talks to play the female lead opposite Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher 2, based on Lee Child's novels.

New Line is developing an adaptation of the Vertigo comic 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, with Tom Hardy set to produce and possibly star. The story follows a group of victims who are given a gun and 100 untraceable bullets with which to visit consequence-free retribution on the people who wronged them.

Mark Wahlberg has signed on to Partners, a buddy cop comedy movie witha gender twist: he plays an LAPD detective who falls in love with a mysterious woman on a one-night stand, only to learn she's both an FBI agent and his new boss and is assigned to work with him on a case.

TELEVISION

Showtime will premiere The Spymasters, a documentary which looks inside the workings of the Central Intelligence Agency, on November 28 at 9 PM. The program include over 100 hours of "intimate and candid conversations" with all 12 living directors of the CIA, the agency’s top operatives, and unprecedented access to America’s spy network.

Showtime also announced it is renewing crime drama Ray Donovan, starring Liev Schreiber as a professional "fixer" for the rich and powerful. The network also hopes to premiere the Twin Peaks sequel in 2016.

In its two-hour season premiere, NBC's Law & Order: SVU will take on a storyline ripped from the headlines, inspired by alleged killer Robert Durst, who was at the center of the six-part HBO documentary and confessed to multiple murders. 

NBC announced three crossovers are planned for Dick Wolf’s “Chicago” trilogy, which consists of Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and new drama Chicago Med, including a four-way event that will also include Law & Order: SVU in February.

Matt Cohen (Supernatural) has signed on for a three-episode arc on ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder, playing a man described as a "sexy, edgy working class guy."

Sarah Shahi is returning to Person of Interest for the show's upcoming fifth season. Her character was shot in the middle of Season 4, but it was the actress' maternity leave that prompted her hiatus from the show.

Although fans of the supernatural detective series Constantine were disappointed when the show was recently cancelled by NBC, Matt Ryan will reprise his role for an episode of Arrow's fourth season.

Annabeth Gish is returning for The X-Files limited series on Fox, reprising her role as FBI Agent Monica Reyes.

A trailer was released for Longmire Season 4, premiering September 10 at its new home on Netflix.

VIDEOS/PODCASTS/RADIO

KiwiCrime's Craig Sisterson was interviewed by Wallace Chapman on his Sunday Morning programme on Radio New Zealand, discussing the state of New Zealand crime writing, the finalists for the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, what makes good crime, and more.

CrimefictionFM welcomed former Air Force intelligence officer Lance Charnes to talk about his international spy thriller DOHA 12.

THEATER

David Arquette (Friends, Scream) will star as Victorian sleuth Sherlock Holmes in a newly imagined Steampunk Sherlock Holmes at Chicago's Oriental Theatre Nov. 24-29, which also features Michael Trevino as Dr. John Watson.  

The new play Impossible explores the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the legendary magician Houdini and how it ultimately broke down over their disagreements regarding spirituality, seances, and the afterlife. Impossible is premiering at the Pleasance during Scotland's Edinburgh fringe festival through August 31st.