In Reference to Murder

Mystery Melange

Kirkus Reviews named its list of the "Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2015."

Amazon editors also chose their Best Books lists for 2015, including Best Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense. For all the titles on the list, check out this link.

A bit of sad news from the mystery conference world:  the Love is Murder Conference, held annually since 1998 in Chicago and handing out the Lovey Awards, is cancelling its 2016 event. Organizers said that diminishing attendance and financial considerations caused not only the cancellation of this upcoming LIMCon but all future conferences, as well.

American Southern noir writer Joe R. Lansdale will be a featured guest at Italy’s Noir in Festival, held in the Alpine resort of Courmayeur, receiving the conference's Raymond Chandler Award. He'll also be showcasing his new book Honky Tonk Samurai, the latest in a series which is the basis for upcoming six-episode SundanceTV series Hap and Leonard.

The Boston Globe profiled Tess Gerritsen, who takes a break from her Rizzoli & Isles series with the standalone thriller, Playing with Fire, for which the author wrote the chilling musical composition at this new book’s core.

Lit Hub profiled Raymond Chandler - how his dual life in the UK and U.S. affected his writing and how plots were merely pegs on which to hang characters and language. Or, as the author himself said, "Very likely Agatha Christie and Rex Stout write better mysteries. But their words don’t get up and walk. Mine do."

Crime Syndicate Magazine has announced that the guest editor for their first issue is Eric Beetner, who is seeking submissions through December 5 for crime stories of 1500 to 4500 words. As to what types of stories they're looking for, "We love stories about violence, greed, lust, debauchery, and any combination of those things." (Hat tip to Sandra Seamans.)

Brenda Starr, the glamorous, feisty redheaded reporter created by Dale Messick, captivated newspaper readers from 1940 through the comic's demise in 2011. But Brenda Starr is staging a comeback to headline a mystery novel series created by USA Today bestselling author J.J. Salem, with the first title, Black Orchid Murders, set for publication in Spring 2016. The 21st century version finds the character in her early 40s working as a TV pundit and visiting college professor. But she returns to hard news at a digital start-up when a series of murders targeting Chicago's elite hits too close to home, "all while navigating the complexities of modern life with a younger lover, a tycoon ex-husband and a head-strong, college-aged daughter showing signs of becoming Brenda Starr 2.0."

Eighty-five years after its first publication, Agatha Christie’s short story series, "The Mysterious Mr. Quin," is getting new life as an app. The story follows a group of socialites who gather for a party in a ritzy British country home and obsess over Derek Capel, a friend of the group who committed suicide 10 years earlier under suspicious circumstances. Over the course of the night Mr. Quin, a mysterious interloper, helps the guests piece together the true cause of Capel’s death. The app updates the action to the present day and allows viewers to click through the characters’ social media walls, feeds and albums to learn the plot.

The new crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Another Death" by Jennifer Lagier.

In the Q&A roundup this week, the MysteryPeople grilled Alen Mattich, author of the Marko della Torre novels; Matt Hilton takes Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Sharp Interview" challenge about his eries featuring PI Tess Grey, and her sidekick, Nicolas “Po” Villere, who is an ex-con; and David Baldacci was featured in a Q&A via The Telegraph.

Media Murder for Monday (Belated)

MOVIES

Christopher Nolan’s 2000 breakout thriller, Memento, is getting a remake courtesy of AMBI Pictures. The original version starred Guy Pearce as a man who is tracking down his wife’s killer but suffers from a unique from of memory loss. AMBI head Monika Bacardi added that "We intend to stay true to Christopher Nolan’s vision and deliver a memorable movie that is every bit as edgy, iconic and award-worthy as the original.”

Starz subsidiary Anchor Bay Entertainment has acquired U.S. Rights to What Lola Wants, a new crime drama from The Sheinberg’s The Bubble Factory. The project focuses on Lola, the 16-year old daughter of Hollywood royalty who fakes her own kidnapping to cover her running away from home, only to get kidnapped for random money.

Morgan Freeman has signed on for Cold Warriors from Millennium Entertainment, with Raja Gosnell set to direct the spy action/comedy.  Morgan will play a retired CIA agent and current stepfather who enlists the help of his video gram programmer stepson to finish a Cold War era mission.

Scott Eastwood has been cast as the brother of the character Ben Affleck will play in the upcoming prohibition-era crime drama Live By Night, based on Dennis Lehane's novel. Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, the son of a prominent police captain, who enters a world of organized crime that takes him from Boston to Florida and Havana, Cuba. Also in the cast are Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Elle Fanning, Max Casella and Chris Cooper.

Danish actor Pilou Asbæk has landed the male lead in Rupert Sanders' adaptation of the Japanese manga Ghost in the Shell, teaming up with female lead, Scarlett Johansson. The story follows the exploits of a member of a covert ops unit of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission, which specializes in fighting technology-related crime.

To celebrate Sarah Weinman's new anthology, Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, New York City’s Film Forum will host a series of films in December based on the works of pioneering mid-century women crime writers. Included in the series are Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes and Don’t Bother to Knock, adapted from Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief.  

TELEVISION

Fox has put in development Crooked, described as a family soap with a procedural spine that explores the bonds – and corruption – of police brotherhood in New Orleans. The show, said to be inspired by true events, centers on a longtime corrupt detective who is busted, his cases overturned and a thousand of the city’s worst criminals are released back onto the streets, one case at a time.

Jada Pinkett Smith will star and executive produce the ABC thriller pilot Murder Town. She'll play Wilmington, Delaware’s, first African American District Attorney, who finds herself confronted by old loyalties and loves, a shocking revelation about her murdered husband, and a polarizing, racially charged case that threatens to burn her and her city to the ground.

Canada's CTV announced it has picked up a TV series based on the 2000 John Cardinal mystery book by author Giles Blunt, Forty Words for Sorrow. The project, which tells the story of the gruesome murder of a 13-year-old girl found in an abandoned mine shaft, snagged Orphan Black and Saving Hope's Aubrey Nealon as writer and showrunner and will air in late 2016 or early 2017.

Close on the heels of NBC announcing it was adding an extra episode to the first-season order for the crime drama Blindspot, comes word that the network is renewing the freshman series for a second season. The show centers on a beautiful woman (Jaimie Alexander) with no memories of her past who is found naked in Times Square with her body fully covered in intricate tattoos who must partner with the FBI to discover the truth about her identity and get to the bottom of a conspiracy.

NBC announced it is renewing both Chicago Fire and Chicago PD for the 2016-2017 season.

ABC’s Wicked City wasn't so lucky, however, becoming the first new series this fall to be yanked off the schedule. The show centered around a killing spree set against the backdrop of the sex, politics and popular culture of 1980s Los Angeles

AMC announced a return date for Better Call Saul, returning for Season 2 on Monday, Feb. 15.

Meanwhile, ABC announced its midseason schedule return dates.

Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings) is joining the cast of ABC’s Quantico, beginning with the show’s 10th episode. She'll play Hannah Wyland, a Quantico graduate whose ambition, combined with her looks and her confidence, has rocketed her past her competition.

Fox is revamping its mid-season beginning in January to accommodate American Idol, which returns for its final season, relocating Sleepy Hollow to Fridays, while Bones is being put on the bench, with a return date and slot TBD. The new drama Lucifer will be paired with The X-Files revival on Mondays.

TNT has renewed Murder In The First for a third season to air in 2016. The crime drama, created by Steven Bochco and Eric Lodal, averaged an OK 2 million viewers in its second season, which wrapped its run on August 25. Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson star.

Netflix announced an original true-crime, 10-part docuseries, Making a Murderer, which is being billed as "the most compelling American crime story you've never heard of." Set to premiere in December, the show tells the story of Steven Avery, wrongly convicted of assault and subsequently awarded millions of dollars based on the way his case was handled. But at the same time his assault case was prompting reforms to the criminal justice system, he became the prime suspect in a horrific second crime.

PODCASTS/RADIO/VIDEO

HarperCollins and the team at Killer Reads have shared a couple of videos featuring crime authors Tim Rob Smith and Mark Billingham being interviewed on their work by fellow crime writer Simon Toyne.

Debbi Mack's Crime Cafe podcast featured a Q&A with guest blogger Austin Camacho, or rather, his literary creation Hannibal Jones, a DC detective.

Crime Fiction FM welcomed debut author Sue Coletta to discuss her new book, the chilling psychological thriller, Marred.

THEATER

The 39 Steps, a "mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a dash of Monty Python," is being staged by the San Jose Stage Company from November 25 to December 20.

GAMES/APPS

TELL and Agatha Christie Productions (ACP) have launched a new storytelling app based on Christie's short story collection The Mysterious Mr Quin, starring Game of Thrones actor Gethin Anthony in the lead role. The app allows viewers not only to experience the drama but to share and comment on their favorite content. On reaching the mystery's conclusion, the audience is then able to revisit content, to uncover further details of the plot and continue piecing the puzzle together.

J.J. Abrams' production company Bad Robot has partnered with Infinity Blade developer Chair Entertainment for a video game set in the shadowy world of espionage. Spyjinx is described as "a mix of action-strategy, dynamic world-building and RPG character development," and it's coming to PC and mobile devices in 2016.

More Golden-Age Punshon

UK-based publisher Dean Street Press is reissuing five more E.R. Punshon golden age mysteries in December, some of the rarest of the author's Bobby Owen series. Published between 1938 and 1941, the titles have been unavailable for seventy years, with some print copies going for some pretty hefty change. The titles include Comes a Stranger, Suspects - Nine, Murder Abroad, Four Strange Women, and Ten Star Clues.

Dean Street founder Rupert Heath sent along a copy of Comes a Stranger, a bibliomystery set in a legendary private library in the world of rare books. As the novel begins, Bobby Owen and his fiancée are drawn into a dispute over Kayne Library, including charges of maladministration and familial desires to sell off the collection for profit. But things take a more sinister turn when a body is found in the library and the local police force press Bobby into service to help solve the crime. Along the way, as Curtis Evans notes in his Foreword, "a slashed portrait, a tale of an old lover’s long-hidden poems, an American with the remarkable, Elmer Gantry-ish name of Bertram A. Virtue, and a box of forget-me-nots all play parts in one of E.R. Punshon’s most beguiling tales of mystery."

Your Sunday Music Treat

You're probably familiar with gamelan music and don't even know it. This form of music found in Indonesia that's mostly percussion instruments (gongs, xylophones, drums, etc.) has been used in many film scores and commercials. Here's a sample from Bali:

Quote of the Day

FFB: More Good Old Stuff

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986), author of over 70 novels, is best remembered for the books featuring Florida-based private eye Travis McGee, who the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley called "one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction - not crime fiction; fiction, period." MacDonald himself admitted he enjoyed the detective genre because it gave him a captive audience for his favorite parts of the books, the asides. He said, "I can have the hero hanging on a ledge with somebody pounding on his knuckles with a hammer, and I can go off and make a comment on something in the world that's bugging me, and when I come back, the readers will still be there."

The prolific author actually got his start writing short stories. While he was in the Army in 1945, he sent a short story home to his wife, who promptly typed it up and submitted it to Story magazine. The editors bought it for $25, thus giving MacDonald the idea that he could make a career as a writer. He told Ed Gorman in an interview that after leaving the Army, "I wrote eight hundred thousand words of short stories in those four months, tried to keep thirty of them in the mail at all times, slept about six hours a night and lost twenty pounds."

He eventually sold over six hundred stories to a variety of magazines in a variety of genres, from mystery to sports, to sci-fi, to westerns, to romances. Some of the publications his stories appeared in included crime pulps like Dime Detective and Black Mask, but he was also published in higher-profile glossy 'zines like Esquire, Playboy and Cosmopolitan. His stories were also included in various anthologies and in collections including:

    End of the Tiger and Other Stories (1966)
    S*E*V*E*N (1971)
    Other Times, Other Worlds (1978)
    The Good Old Stuff (1982)
    More Good Old Stuff (1984)

The 1984 collection, More Good Old Stuff, contains 14 of MacDonald's earlier stories from the pulp mystery/detective magazines of the late 1940s. They include "Deadly Damsel," the story of a professional widow (who has wed and murdered five husbands) and an amateur con man who get fatally tangled in a web of their own devising, from which we get lines like these:

"Death gave her a feeling of power that she bore with her wherever she went. She looked at the dull, tidy little lives of the women in the small cities in which she lived, and she felt like a goddess. She could write all manner of things on the black slate of life, and then, with one gesture, wipe the slate clean and begin all over again. New words, new love, new tenderness and a new manner of death... It was good to kill men..."

Or there's "Death for Sale," about a hired killer with a broken soul who stalks a French Nazi-collaborator to a New Orleans restaurant, where hunter and quarry suddenly trade places. MacDonald wrote in the Foreword that he was "tempted to clean up some of the very stilted dialogue" and change the gimmick at the end of this story, but it would "be unfair to excise the warts to make myself look better than I was."

MacDonald was almost apologetic in his Foreword about how dated some of the stories were (he updated some minor details because of that), but as he also said, "The events of these stories are in a past so recent they could just as well have been written today. And that is a portion of my intent, to show how little the world really changes." Those words could almost serve as a summary of these early stories; although they lack the polish and the more intense, well constructed plots that were to come, the nugget of great storytelling that marks the author's work is all there and changed very little over time, but just got better.

Mystery Melange

The shortlist for the Ireland AM Crime Book of the Year was announced last week (hat tip to The Rap Sheet). The finalists include:

• Even the Dead, by Benjamin Black
• Freedom’s Child, by Jax Miller
• Are You Watching Me? by Sinéad Crowley
• Only We Know, by Karen Perry 
• The Game Changer, by Louise Phillips 
• After the Fire, by Jane Casey

Nominations are now open for the Crime Writers Association’s 2016 Dagger in the Library Award, where the winner is chosen by readers. As Crime Fiction Lover explains, it’s a unique part of the Dagger awards because it celebrates an author’s entire body of work rather than just one book. You can nominate up to three authors between now and March 1, 2016. You can also nominate your favorite library, with the library receiving the most votes also in line for some prizes.

An American Writers Museum is in the planning stages for Chicago, which would make it the only museum in the world dedicated to American writers. The museum was dreamed up by founder and president Malcolm E. O'Hagan, an east-coast engineer and book lover inspired by visits to the Dublin Writers Museum in his native Ireland. Its mission is to "engage the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture and our daily lives," and organizers hope for an opening in 2017.

Speaking of American writers, the Morgan Library is hosting an exhibit called “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars.” Items on display include early short stories, notebooks, manuscripts, pictures, and letters between the Nobel Prize-winning author and other writers such as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The closing date has been set for January 31, 2016.

The Library Journal turned its spotlight on Titan Books, which started out in the graphics novel business but expanded in 2009 to include a fiction line emphasizing sf and fantasy, crime, and horror. After the company bought Hard Case Crime in 2011, their line has expanded to the point they will issue forty brand-new fiction titles in 2016, with a focus on crime fiction.

The Mystery People have been celebrating the fifth anniversary of the blog with authors offering up their "best book" lists. And now, the Mystery People have compiled their own choices for Top 100 Suspense & Crime Novels.

The Sidney Morning Herald profiled Pierre Lemaitre, a crime fiction author who recently won France's greatest literary prize with The Great Swindle (published in French as Au revoir la-haut).

Some good magazine news and some not-so-good: Thuglit is again open to submissions, seeking hardboiled stories of around 3,000-6,000 words; but we also got the sad news that Crossed Genres is closing up shop due to some staff issues, but mostly due to financial reasons. They'll still print up the December issue, but that will be the last.

Writing for The Guardian, novelist Jonathan Lee chose his favorite "Top 10 assassination plots in fiction," from Hilary Mantel to Ian Fleming.

In light of the release of the new James Bond movie, Mashable offered up all 193 gadgets James Bond has used - every Bond gadget ever. They also posted a list of 007 destinations where you can travel like the suave spy.

The new crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Not So Super" by John Grey.

The Q&A roundup includes Joelle Charbonneau stopping by Publishers Weekly to talk about her latest suspense YA novel where an anonymous social network claims it can fulfill the deepest desires of its users in exchange for the completion of several seemingly benign tasks; Sophie Masson returned to Omnimystery News to discuss the second book in her Trinity occult thriller series, The False Prince; Pulp Curry interrogated Eddie Muller, sometimes known as "the Czar of Noir," who is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation; over at The Rap Sheet, Ali Karim profiled and interviewed horror writer turned crime fictionist Conrad Williams; and Scott Butki interviewed Robert Crais for the Mystery People.

Author R&R with Diana Renn

Diana Renn is the Fiction Editor at YARN (Young Adult Review Network), an award-winning online magazine featuring short-form writing for teens. She's also the author of a new YA mystery called Blue Voyage, which School Library Journal called "witty and engaging, this book hearkens back to works by Agatha Christie. A great addition to any library that has a teen fan base for thrilling mysteries." 

Blue Voyage centers on Zan, a politician’s daughter and an adrenaline junkie who loves to live on the edge. But she gets more of a rush than she bargained for on a forced mother–daughter bonding trip to Turkey, where she finds herself in the crosshairs of an antiquities smuggling ring. These criminals believe that Zan can lead them to an ancient treasure that’s both priceless and cursed. Zan’s quest to save the treasure—and the lives of people she cares about—leads her from the sparkling Mediterranean, to the bustle of Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, to the eerie and crumbling caves of Cappadocia.

Diana Renn stopped by In Reference to Murder today to talk about the book and her writing and researching process:

 

Blue Voyage: The Short Story that Wanted to Be a Book

Once upon a time there was a short story that really, really wanted to be a novel. It was called “Blue Voyage.”

It was long – nearly thirty pages, and therefore unmarketable to most literary journals or commercial magazines. It was set on a boat off the coast of Turkey, and that boat contained a cast so large it nearly sunk the ship: two families, each with three similarly-aged children (and thus great potential for confusion of characters), six older passengers of various nationalities, and a crew of three: a captain, a cook, and a first mate.

In this story, very little happened. The children squabbled. The adults in the two families talked in hushed voices about things the kids could only guess at. A shore expedition resulted in somebody going missing for awhile. A vendor pulled up to the boat and sold them some baklava. A British mystery writer on board seemed to be plotting a new novel based on the characters, and added a vague air of menace to the setting. And through it all, the main character, a teenage girl with a chip on her shoulder, resolved that she was not going to travel with these people anymore as soon as she turned eighteen.

This story was unmarketable not only because of its length, but also because it was supremely boring. After years of revising it, I set it aside in resignation.

It haunted me, though. I had become inspired to write it after a “Blue Voyage” cruise I took with my husband off the coast of Turkey. We had booked last-minute tickets on a boat that happened to have – this will shock you, I know – two traveling families with three children each, six older passengers of various nationalities, and yes, a crew of three. I thought I was clever in changing those nationalities and fictionalizing the real families we met on the cruise (who were actually perfectly nice, and never squabbled). I had loved writing about Turkey most of all. And maybe that was the problem. Was it possible I had the right setting but the wrong characters? Was it possible too that the story wanted to ramble and explore a terrain far bigger than a short story?

Years after that first draft, I looked at the story again in the cold light of day. I poked at it with a stick. I still liked parts of that story. The parts about Turkey. The boat. The baklava vendor who pulled up on a boat. The teenaged girl with a chip on her shoulder. But it didn’t feel like a story.

I began to experiment, writing some false starts in new directions. I cut the big families and pared down to a mother-daughter duo. I attempted a sibling, but cut her out too. Then I added an aunt. Suddenly the tensions and dynamics felt sharper, without all those extra people clamoring for attention. Still, I kept the boat so I did need some passengers, and some eventual suspects for a crime. So the older passengers of various nationalities packed their bags and trotted over from the long short story to what was now, quite clearly, becoming a novel. And that British mystery writer from the story? That, I realized was me (though not British) just trying to make sense of the characters. I didn’t need to be a character. I would stay behind the scenes.

I did keep the baklava vendor, a minor yet important character. When I realized he wasn’t just selling baklava, my page count started to rise and rise. I had the crux of my mystery.

Sometimes a story is just a story. The character arcs may be smaller, the plot points fewer or even scarce if one is writing a slice of life or flash fiction. Maybe the story is building toward a shift in a character’s perception, or a deeper understanding of something, and that is satisfying in itself.

But sometimes a story wants to be a novel if it is resisting the structure and word count imposed on it. A character prone to reflection about the past might be happier in a novel with more room to ruminate – if those reflections or flashbacks do in fact serve a purpose. Complex families and multi-generational issues can, in general, be more fully explored in a novel. Complex mystery plots almost always belong in a novel—and that, I realized, is what my story really wanted to have. That missing person story line turned out to be a key ingredient of the novel Blue Voyage, as well as a missing object.

My short story that wanted to be a novel now has a publication date, a pretty cover, and a rather hefty page count, clocking in at over 400 pages – a far cry from its original 30. I’m glad I didn’t give up on that story, and maybe it required an embryonic stage of several years so that I could figure it out. For me, that’s a happy ending.

 

You can learn more about Diana Renn and her books via her website, Facebook page, and you can follow her on Twitter. For more about where you can purchase Blue Voyage, check out this link.

Media Murder for Monday

Here's this week's crime drama news:

MOVIES

Nicole Kidman will star in The Silent Wife, based on the novel by A.S.A. Harrison and directed by Adrian Lyne from a script by Billy Ray. The story centers on a spouse who discovers that her husband is leaving her for a younger woman and responds by beginning to plan his murder.

Oscar-nominated actor Liam Neeson is set to star in the Watergate thriller Felt, to be directed by filmmaker Peter Landesman. The spy thriller centers on “Deep Throat,” the pseudonym given to the notorious whistleblower for Watergate. The true identity of the secret informant remained a mystery until 2005 when special agent Mark Felt (Neeson) revealed himself as the tipster.

Sony is hoping to revive The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo franchise by potentially skipping to the fourth novel in the series, The Girl in the Spider's Web, a continuation novel by David Lagercrantz. Writer Steven Knight is in early talks to pen the script, but it's unknown if actors Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig, as well as director David Fincher, will return, especially if the budget costs are trimmed. It is rumored that Alicia Vikander is in early talks to take over the role of Lisabeth from Mara.

The musical-chairs casting of the adaptation of the novel The Girl on the Train continues with Luke Evans taking over a part that Jared Leto was once circling before he had to depart due to scheduling conflicts, and Lisa Kudrow was also added to the cast. Meanwhile, the studio released a first look at Emily Blunt in the film.

Paramount Pictures and GK Films will release Robert Zemeckis' untitled WWII movie starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard on Nov. 23, 2016. Pitt and Cotillard will play assassins who fall in love during a mission to kill a German official. They soon marry, but their romance is cut short when Pitt learns a devastating secret about his wife that prompts him to turn on her.

Johnny Depp has joined Sherlock Gnomes, the sequel to the 2011 animated hit Gnomeo and Juliet, which starred James McAvoy and Emily Blunt. The duo will return for the sequel as they enlist the help of legendary detective Sherlock Gnoes (Depp) to investigate a string of garden gnome disappearances around London.

Last year, it was announced that a long-lost Sherlock Holmes movie from 1916 starring William Gillette, the Connecticut native whose take on Holmes helped established many tropes now associated with the character. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, and Robert Byrne, film restorer, film preservationist, and president of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, revealed key insights into the restoration process behind Sherlock Holmes.

TELEVISION

CBS has put in development drama Recall, from CBS TV Studios and studio-based Timberman/Beverly Prods. Written by Sleepy Hollow showrunner Mark Goffman and writing duo Bret VandenBos & Brandon Willer (King & Maxwell), Recall centers on a brilliant inventor. When he discovers a way to travel back in time 24 hours, he and his team join forces with the CIA, going into the past to prevent crimes and other disastrous events from happening

CBS is also developing a spy drama written by Austin Winsberg (Gossip Girl, The Sound Of Music Live!) and Alex Litvak (Predators, The Three Musketeers). The project is described as a "fun, action-packed, female-empowerment spy show in the vein of Kingsman and Alias" and is centered on a young American woman who marries the Prince of England and discovers she’s now part of a longstanding secret society of princesses who use their access to the seats of power to be the best secret agents on the planet.

Fox bought CAPER, an hourlong dark comedy described as a "Southern Gothic Texas Noir, done the Scandinavian way," as it follows the interconnected lives of three sets of criminals. Dutch Southern, screenwriter of the 2013 crime thriller Bad Turn Worse, will pen the pilot, with Magnus Martens (Banshee) attached to direct, and Dexter’s Tim Schlattman serving as showrunner.

ITV's mini-series Collision was a big hit for ITV in 2009, created by Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War). Now, a U.S. version is being developed with Horowitz as showrunner and also writing the first two episodes of a proposed 10-episode order. The drama tells the story of a group of strangers whose lives are forever changed following a major road accident that draw them into a world of government cover-ups, smuggling, torn relationships and murder.

Mark Billingham’s crime novel In The Dark is to be adapted into a four-part  drama for BBC1. Danny Brocklehurst, the Bafta-winning writer of Ordinary Lies and The Driver, is penning the adaptation, which centers on the "engaging, funny, outspoken, and complex" female detective Helen Weeks.

There are rumors of a possible X-Files spinoff featuring characters played by Robbie Amell and Lauren Ambrose. The two actors will be playing FBI Agents Mills and Einstein in one of the six episodes of the new series. Show creator Chris Carter is neither confirming nor denying the rumors.

Desperate Housewives' Marcia Cross is joining the cast of Quantico. She'll play the mother of FBI analyst Caleb Haas (Graham Norton) and wife of FBI Deputy Director Clayton Haas (Mark Pellegrino) who has transitioned from decorated FBI agent to high-ranking Senator and now Vice Presidential candidate.

A.J. Cook is returning to Criminal Minds for Episode 7, which is set to hit the schedule on November 11, after taking maternity leave.

ABC's American Crime will return for a second season on a new night on January 6. Whereas the first season of the show followed a racially charged murder and the subsequent trial, the new season will center on a case of drugging and sexual assault in a high school setting.

Idris Elba is returning to his popular role playing the London police detective Luther for a three-hour movie special on December 17 on BBC America. According to the network, Luther's chance for a normal life i"s thwarted when he’s drawn into a case involving a cannibalistic serial killer who 'delivers a devastating blow that not only pulls him out of seclusion but pushes him closer to the edge than he’s ever been."

NBC tacked on an additional episode to the current seasons of first-year breakout Blindspot and also to Dick Wolf's trilogy of shows, Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., and Law & Order: SVU, which will bring the episode counts for each to 23.

Amazon confirmed that it will premiere Bryan Cranston and David Shore’s Sneaky Pete series starring Giovanni Ribisi for debut exclusively on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S., UK, Germany, Austria and Japan in 2016.

You're going to have to wait a lot longer for Showtime’s new Twin Peaks series from David Lynch. CBS Corp CEO Leslie Moonves said during the company’s Q3 earnings call that the drama series will arrive sometime in 2017. Meanwhile, it was reported that Miguel Ferrer is set to reprise his role from the original series, playing a cynical city slicker FBI forensics specialist who butted heads with Twin Peaks Sheriff Harry S. Truman.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Paul Bishop returned to Crime and Science Radio, joining hosts D.P. Lyle and Jan Burke for a discussion of police procedures and interrogations.

The latest Crime Cafe with Debbi Mack featured author Dale T. Phillips chatting with about his Zack Taylor mysteries and other writing.

The Speaking of Mysteries podcast welcomed James Law to take his locked-room mystery, Tenacity, set in the claustrophobic world of a submarine.  

The guest on this week's Crime Fiction FM was author M.L. Malcolm, talking about her book The Cuban Connection, which introduces ace reporter Katherine O’Connor.

Your Sunday Music Treat

Meet Ryan, a talented 7-year-old who loves Darth Vader, Star Wars, and his cello. Instead of playing Mozart in a tux, Ryan decided he’d play "Sith Lord" in a Darth Vader costume.