In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Jake Gyllenhaal is reteaming with filmmaker Denis Villeneuve to bring Jo Nesbo’s crime novel The Son to the big screen. The project tells the story of Sonny Lofthus, a once-gifted 15-year-old and promising wrestler, whose life enters a downward spiral when his cop father commits suicide. After spending 12 years in prison, Sonny escapes when he learns the truth of his father’s death and begins hunting down the people responsible for his wrongful sentence.

Daniel Craig and Katherine Heigl are said to be finalizing deals to join Steven Soderbergh’s heist film Logan Lucky about brothers who plan a crime during a NASCAR race in Charlotte. The film is scheduled for a fall start date, which Deadline notes "puts further into question the actor’s willingness to return to the Bond franchise for MGM."

As news about Daniel Craig's will-he-or-won't-he status of appearing in the next James Bond movie continue to swirl (along with potential replacements), news comes that Sam Mendes says he won't be directing the next outing. As he explained, "It was an incredible adventure, I loved every second of it. But I think it's time for somebody else."

Jeff Bridges has joined the cast of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow up to his spy action adventure film, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Picking up from where the original film left off, Kingsman: The Golden Circle sees Gary "Eggsy" Unwin (Taron Egerton) and his supervisor Merlin (Mark Strong) heading to the US to join forces with the "Statesman," the Kingsman agency's American counterparts, after the destruction of Kingsman HQ at the hands of evil mastermind Poppy (Julianne Moore).

Zack Whedon’s feature debut Come and Find Me was acquired by Saban Films. The thriller stars Aaron Paul and Annabelle Wallis and centers on David (Paul) as he must track down the wherabouts of his mysterious girlfriend (Wallis) after he realizes she’s not who she was pretending to be.

Simon Pegg, Mike Myers, Max Irons, and Dexter Fletcher have joined Margot Robbie in the cast of Vaughn Stein’s noir thriller Terminal. The crime drama tells the story of two hit-men (Fletcher and Irons) as they embark on a borderline suicide mission for a mysterious employer and a high paycheck. Along the way, the unlikely pair come across a dynamic woman named Annie (Robbie) who may be more involved than they had originally suspected.

Thora Burch and Johnny Knoxville are set to join the dramatic thriller Above Suspicion starring Emilia Clarke and Jack Huston. Based on a true story, Above Suspicion follows a newly married star FBI agent that is assigned to an Appalachian mountain town in Kentucky and gets involved in a huge scandal that leads to the first conviction of an FBI agent for murder. Birch will play Clarke’s sister, while Knoxville will play Clarke’s ex-husband.

Octavia Spencer and John Hawkes have been tapped to star in the thriller Small Town Crime, directed by Eshom and Ian Nelms. Hawkes is set to play an alcoholic ex-cop trying to get his life and career together by investigating the death of a young woman, putting his family in danger. Spencer will take on the role as Hawkes' sister.

The Nordic young adult crime thriller series, The Snow White Trilogy, by Salla Simukka (who has has been already been compared to the likes of Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson) is to be adapted for the silver screen by Zero Gravity Management in association with Elina Ahlback Literary Agency. The trilogy follows the adventures of 17-year-old Lumikki Andersson as she encounters money-launderers, religious cults and a stalker. 

A trailer was released for The Infiltrator, directed by Brad Furman and starring Bryan Cranston as Robert Mazur, a federal agent tasked with exposing the drug empire of Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.

TELEVISION

Another Stephen King property is headed to the small screen. A ten-part series based on the novel Mr. Mercedes (adapted by David E. Kelley) that stars Brendan Gleeson and Anton Yelchin is coming to AT&T's Audience Network. The story centers on a demented killer who taunts a retired police detective with a series of lurid letters and emails, forcing the ex-cop to undertake a private, and potentially felonious, crusade to bring the killer to justice before he can strike again.

Epix has given a series order to Get Shorty, based on the novel by the late Elmore Leonard that was previously adapted for a 1995 film starring John Travolta. The hour-long show is being spearheaded by Davey Holmes (Shameless, Damages), with production is set to begin in the fall and a premiere slated for summer 2017.

Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa confirmed at a panel last week that Quinn, the character will be back played by Rupert Friend, is returning to Homeland as a series regular in Season 6. Quinn's fate was left up in the air at the end of last season and Gansa added, that although he'll return, "he may not be the same Quinn we know and love."

BBC America has added several cast members to Dirk Gently, BBC America’s eight-episode series based on the cult Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels by Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams. Filming got underway today in Vancouver, with premiere slated for the fall. 

FX has renewed The Americans for Seasons 5 and 6, which will be the series' last. The critically-lauded drama will get a 13-episode fifth season in 2017, and will wrap up the story of Russian spies Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) with a 10-episode sixth season in 2018.

Limitless creator and showrunner Craig Sweeny made it official that the show is officially dead after CBS has canceled it and no new network or platform stepped in to pick it up, ruling out a last minute save from Netflix, Amazon or Hulu.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Best-selling author John Hart talked about his new book Redemption Road with Kansas City Live.

NPR's Maureen Corrigan chatted with Fresh Air host Terry Gross about "4 First-Rate Thrillers Deliver A Summer Of Suspenseful Reading."

John Lescroart, author of the  the San Francisco based Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky series, joined Alex Dolan on Thrill Seekers.

Your Sunday Music Treat

It's hard not to be cheered by this video featuring Luciano Pavarotti (who was one of my favorites) and an unusual singing partner:

 

Quote of the Week

FFB - Trouble with Product X

Joan Aiken (1924-2004) began her writing career with YA fiction as a 16-year-old contributor for the BBC Children's Hour. Indeed, one of her most popular creations was her prize-winning Wolves of Willoughby Chase series for children. She also delved into horror and fantasy (which Todd Mason profiled on a FFB installment a while back). All told, Aiken published over 90 novels for children and adults, 38 story collections, four plays, several picture books and dozens of other short stories, many included in anthologies.

Aiken's efforts at mysteries and suspense novels won her an Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel (Night Fall) in 1972. The same touch of the quirky, whimsical inventiveness in her writing for young people often found its way into her adult crime fiction. She once said, "Stories are like butterflies, which come fluttering out of nowhere, touch down for a brief instant, may be captured, may not, and then vanish into nowhere again."

Trouble with Product X (aka Beware of the Bouquet) dates from 1966 and is one of the author's earlier novels for adults. Product X is a new perfume to be manufactured by a small company aiming to go upmarket. The ad agency hired to handle the promotion is Salmon & Bucknell, including employee Martha Gilroy, who suggests shooting a television commercial in the same remote Cornish castle where she spent her honeymoon—before her husband had a nervous breakdown and left her.

Another bad idea is to use the beautiful young Italian wife of the client as a model, as it soon becomes clear she's at the heart of a conspiracy regarding the origin of Product X. The remote TV shoot soon turns into a parade of nightmares and intrigue, including the kidnapping of a baby; monks who oppose the filming and one particularly mysterious monk who Martha thinks she recognizes; a venomous spider mailed as a "gift"; exploding soup cans; and an assortment of gothic thrills and chills that will please fans of Mary Stewart.

As The Telegraph said in Aiken's obituary, you could usually count on "slightly scatty but independent-minded young women who end up marrying slightly scatty but charming young men. Mysterious, corridor-ridden Gothic houses figure prominently, along with a variety of curses and enchantments. And there is always a strong sense of right and wrong." Although bits of that formula are present in Product X, so too is Aiken's trademark humor:

I spent a moment or two wondering where the devil I was, who the devil I was, in a weak and lackadaisical way...My mind wobbled about like a half-set jelly, full of unrelated fragments: the address of a man I'd meant to write to about detergents before coming down to Cornwall, lines from Twelfth Night, the fact that my library subscription needed renewing, a series of slogans for Bom which I'd been trying to hatch on the way down. 'Whether you're coming or going, mending or mowing, scything or sewing, reading or rowing...you need Bom, the meat'n milk drink, made from pure fresh milk and lean juicy beef. Bom, tiddly, om BOM!' I can't offhand think of any nastier beverage than Bom, but at that moment, I felt hazily that I might even have accepted a cup of the stuff if someone had offered it to me, hot.

Martha tends to muse on Bom promotions while she's in the midst of danger, but ultimately she proves to be an insightful sleuth, even as she fights her feelings for her ex and for a fellow employee who seems to be taking a suspiciously keen interest in the client's beautiful wife. The plot isn't so much a whodunit as a pleasant modern (albeit 1960s) Gothic romp.

Mystery Melange

The Strand Magazine released its lineup of nominees for the 2015 Strand Magazine Critics Awards:

Best Novel

• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith
• A Banquet of Consequences, by Elizabeth George
• The Lady from Zagreb, by Phillip Kerr
• Forty Thieves, by Thomas Perry
• The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt
• The Cartel, by Don Winslow

Best First Novel

• The Truth and Other Lies, by Sascha Arango  
• Normal, by Graeme Cameron 
• The Marauders, by Tom Cooper  
• Past Crimes, by Glen Erik Hamilton
• The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins  
• Disclaimer, by Renée Knight

Strand managing editor Andrew F. Gulli also announced via The Guardian that Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Endeavour Morse, and Jeffery Deaver, the inventor of New York City forensic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme, have been chosen to receive this year’s Strand Critics lifetime achievement awards.  

At this past weekend's Crime Fest in the UK, the winners for the Audible Sounds of Crime Award (for best unabridged crime audiobook) was announced as The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, read by Clare Corbett, India Fisher, and Louise Brealey. Other awards handed out included the Kobo eDunnit Award (for the best crime fiction e-book), won by The Crossing, by Michael Connelly; The Last Laugh Award (for the best humorous crime novel) to Bryant & May and the Burning Man, by Christopher Fowler; The H.R.F. Keating Award (for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction) to The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards; and the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year went to The Caveman, by Jørn Lier Horst, translated by Anne Bruce

The CWA (Crime Writers Association) 2016 Dagger Award longlists were announced at Crimefest last weekend, with the finalists for the Goldsboro Dagger for Best Novel including Dodgers by Bill Beverly; Black Widow by Christopher Brookmyre; After You Die by Eve Dolan; Real Tigers by Mick Herron; Finders Keepers by Stephen King; Dead Pretty by David Mark; Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina; and She Died Young by Elizabeth Wilson. As the term "longlists" would suggest, the roll call in the various categories takes up a lot of real estate, which Mystery Fanfare has thoughtfully provided via this link.

Crimefest also announced the winner of this year's Margery Allingham short story contest, "The Box-Shaped Mystery" by Peter Guttridge. And just in time, too.

A Noir at the Bar across the Pond is coming up soon on Wednesday, June 1st at the Town Wall pub (Pink Lane, Newcastle), the first such event in the north east of England. Authors slated to appear and read from their works so far include Tess Makovesky, Graham Smith, and Jacky Collins, with more added soon.

London's first-ever female-led crime festival will launch this autumn, with the arrival of the Killer Women conference, set for Saturday, October 15. Killer Women is made up of 18 female, London-based crime novelists, including Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train, Jane Casey, and Tammy Cohen. The program will feature a variety of readings and debates ranging from Victorian Crime to modern forensic psychology to How To Solve A Murder with real-life detectives, and there will also be master classes with some of your favorite Killer Women authors, as well as an exclusive Murder Mystery, Killer Women cocktails, and more.

The Economist penned a fond farewell to the Kenneth Brannagh-starring Wallender series and the series' author, the late Henning Mankell.

Judy Blume offered up an essay for The Guardian on why US indie booksellers are thriving and why - at age 78 - the multimillion-selling author has begun a new career, opening her own bookshop.

Did you know the CIA has an art gallery? CIA museum director Toni Hiley spoke with NPR about the latest painting, the 21st in the collection, and why the CIA has an art gallery at all.

For fans of the recently-canceled TV series Castle, you can take some comfort in the knowledge that the book series spawned from the series, the Nicky Heat books "written" by Richard Castle will continue with the eighth and ninth books and even beyond. The real name of the author of the Castle/Nikki Heat books has long been a mystery, but the Castle producers and series publisher Hyperion will only admit "that the real author has appeared on an episode of Castle." Authors who have appeared on the show include James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane (and the late Stephen J. Cannell), although it's hard to imagine any of those folks signing on for ghostwriting. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Bored with your usual reading chair? Try one of these "10 Gorgeous Outdoor Reading Nooks."

In the Q&A roundup, Omnimystery News welcomed BJ Bourg, who discussed his Magnolia Parish mysteries and more; multiple award-winning author Steve Hamilton chatted with the Huffington Post about his new series featuring Nick Mason, an ex-con trying to break away from his criminal past; Criminal Element held a Q&A with Marla Cooper, Author of Terror in Taffeta; Crime Watch snagged a 9mm interview with Fever City author, Tim Baker; the Tampa Bay Examiner chatted with Louise Penny about her latest novel, A Great Reckoning, number twelve in her Inspector Gamache series; Laura Lippman chatted with Alex Segura over at Do Some Damage about her new novel, Wilde Lake; and the Mystery People snagged Larry D. Sweazy to discuss his new book, See Also, Deception, his second book to feature indexer Marjorie Trumaine.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Martin Scorsese's next project is the Oscar-winning director's long-awaited return to mobster epics, The Irishman, an adaptation by Steve Zaillian (Gangs of New York) of Charles Brandt's bestselling novel. Robert De Niro will play Frank Sheeran, a high-ranking Teamster with ties to the Bufalino crime family, who confessed that he killed fellow Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, whose body was never found. Al Pacino also is on board the long-gestating project, and The Irishman would mark the first collaboration between the actor and fellow gangster-movie icon Scorsese.

Mila Kunis and Bryan Cranston are attached to star in the Will Gluck-helmed comedic thriller Jackpot, a remake of a 2011 Norwegian film directed by Magnus Martens based on a Jo Nesbo story. Jennifer Garner is also in talks to join the project that opens with a man who wakes up in a strip bar clutching a shotgun surrounded by dead men and police guns aimed at him.

Universal Pictures is teaming up with screenwriter James Vanderbilt to craft a series of movies based on the works of Robert Ludlum, the best-selling author behind the studio’s hit Jason Bourne spy franchise. First up in this universe will be the adaptation of Ludlum's The Janson Directive, which will star Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The story centers on Paul Janson, a former operative and best private security consultant in the world, who is framed for the murder of a prominent Nobel laureate and must join forces with the protege sent to kill him in order to survive.

John Cusack is in negotiations to star in the chase thriller Misfortune, playing Miller, a businessman embezzles a client’s money, leaves his family and everything behind to start a new life. Everything goes according to plan until he is separated from his cash in the middle of the wilderness, where three young friends stumble upon it. Miller, desperate and violent, will do anything to get it back.

Italy’s Colorado Films is teaming up with bestselling author Donato Carrisi, whose serial killer thriller The Whisperer has sold millions of copies around the world, to form a new company specialized in producing Italian thrillers for the international film and TV market. Not surprisingly, the short-term focus of the company's production roster will be two Carrisi books including The Whisperer, which takes its cue from six severed arms found arranged in a circle in a forest clearing, and The Girl in the Fog, about the disappearance of a teen girl in the Alps.

Sean Bean and Patrick Sabongui are set to star in Jason Bourque's action-thriller film Drone. The project centers on Neil (Bean), a high-level private drone contractor whose family doesn't know about his secret life until an enigmatic Pakistani businessman tracks him down, believing Neil to be responsible for the deaths of his wife and child. A harrowing confrontation takes place in Neil's house, which proves to be far more complex than a simple act of revenge.

Noomi Rapace is in negotiations to join Will Smith and Joel Edgerton in David Ayer's Bright, to be written and directed by Max Landis for Netflix. Bright is described as a cop thriller with fantasy elements, including orcs and fairies.

TELEVISION

Fox is already tweaking their fall schedule, with plans to move the Prison Break reboot and also Bones to mid-season debuts, mostly to make way for new baseball drama Pitch, which would be a natural follow-on to the network's Major League Baseball coverage.

Ewan McGregor is the latest feature actor who will star in FX’s Emmy-winning anthology series Fargo. McGregor will play the two central characters — brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy — in the upcoming third season, which is supposed to be set closer to present day than the first two installments.

Netflix has nabbed worldwide rights to the Jeremy Rush-directed action thriller Wheelman starring Frank Grillo as a getaway driver who is double crossed during a bank robbery. When plans go south, it is up to him to find out who betrayed him while he races to survive with a car full of money and his family on the line.

Netflix (in partnership with Univision) is also developing a series based on the life of infamous drug lord, El Chapo, made famous after a high-profile prison escape, his controversial interview with Sean Penn, and his subsequent recapture last year.

Fans of the long-running CSI franchise shows may be able to breathe a sigh of relief; after CBS announced they'd cancelled the last-remaining series, CSI: Cyber, the network hinted that the show "may come back in another incarnation." According to Deadline, the producers of the billion-dollar drama franchise also have been open to revisiting it and, after a break, that may happen.

USA Network has released the first trailer for the action thriller series Shooter, based on a character created by Stephen Hunter and featured in a novel Point of Impact.  (HT to Omnimystery News.)

The USA Network released trailers for two of its new fall series including Shooter, starring Ryan Phillippe as an expert marksman living in exile who is coaxed back into action after learning of a plot to kill the president, and also the psychological thriller Falling Water.

CBS released a trailer for Michael Weatherly’s new show, Bull, in which Weatherly plays Dr. Jason Bull, the founder of a very successful trial consulting firm. Bull is actually based on the early work of Dr. Phil McGraw, who ran his own trial consulting firm before becoming a talk show host. The network also dropped trailers for several other of its new shows, including the MacGuyer reboot and Training Day.

ABC released trailers for their new fall shows, including Conviction, Designated Survivor, Notorious, and Time After Time.

Confused about the fall television schedule and which shows are new or returning and on which nights? The Wrap has a handy guide for you. Or if you prefer it in grid format, here you go.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Cybersecurity expert Fred Bedrich and ethical hacker Michel Cusin stopped by 2nd Sunday Crime co chat with host Libby Hellmann about cyber security, why it's such a threat, and what they do to deal with it.

Suspense Radio welcomed author Ryan Quinn to discuss his thriller featuring ex-CIA operative Kera Mersal, The Good Traitor.

Your Sunday Music Treat

Sometimes "happiness is a sad song" (usually in a minor key), but did you know that works in a major key can be sad? Or at least, wistful and a touch mournful, like one of Scott Drayco's favorite pieces (and mine), the Intermezzo in A Major from Opus 118 by Johannes Brahms, played here by Nikolai Lugansky:

 

 

Quote of the Week

FFB: The President's Mystery Plot

In this year of the (interminable) presidential elections here in the States, this seemed like an appropriate "Forgotten Book" offering:

Long before Elliott Roosevelt wrote murder mysteries featuring his mother Eleanor Roosevelt as a super sleuth, and even before first daughter Margaret Truman penned her crime fiction (despite rumblings of ghostwriting), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up with his own idea for a mystery novel. When he was Governor of New York he once said of detective stories, "Hundreds of such novels are published every year, but only a few are really worth the time and attention of intelligent readers. Even in the good ones there is often a sameness. Some one finds the corpse and then the detective tracks down the murderer. I do not believe that such stories have to follow an inevitable pattern or formula."

Apparently, even after he became President, FDR couldn't stop thinking about detective novels. He discussed with his friend, magazine editor Fulton Oursler, his thoughts that such stories appealed to the detective instinct in all of us and were a literary game, an intellectual recreation less purely intellectual than chess but more dramatic. He also told Oursler he'd been carrying around in his mind the plot for a mystery novel for years. His idea? "How can a man disappear with five million dollars in any negotiable form and not be traced?" Oursler suggested they ask the leading writers in the U.S. to collaborate on such a story, to which FDR replied, "Go ahead. See what you can all do with it."

Oursler did just that, contacting various authors and challenging them to take "the President's mystery plot" and contribute a chapter to the story by plonking the protagonist, Jim Blake, in a dire situation and then leaving him for the next author in line. The work of the first authors, Rupert Hughes, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Anthony Abbot, Rita Weiman, S. S. Van Dyne, and John Erskine, were serialized in Oursler's Liberty Magazine in 1935, and the book was published in 1936. However, poor Jim Blake was left hanging for thirty years until Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of Perry Mason) came along and tied everything up in a final chapter when the book was reprinted in 1967 and retitled The President's Mystery Plot.

More a literary curiosity than high literature, the book has a bit of camp and zaniness, and true mystery fans may be disappointed in the thin, zigzagging plot and weak characterizations that sometimes accompany collaborative ventures. Still, it was popular enough that a movie was made of the story in 1936, directed by Phil Rosen and starring Henry Wilcoxon as hapless Jim Blake (Marc Antony in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra). It's an interesting period piece, if you can get past the first chapter. Writer Rupert Hughes gave Blake a scheming Russian wife and writes out her dialogue with "phoenetic precision," as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., aptly notes in his introduction ("Jeem, how you can't see it is beecose I loaf you so dear I cannot deevide your loaf with even some babies?").

More telling may be what the book reveals about Roosevelt himself. When he proposed the idea to Oursler, the hero was conceived as "hating the falsity of his existence, the meaninglessness of his career, the sameness of his middle-aged routine, the absence of purpose and the boredom with his marriage."

Giveaway Time! Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions

The Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions is a middle-grade mystery from the creative team of author Tracey Hecht, founder of Fabled Films, who has written, directed and produced for film, and New York City-based artist Kate Liebman. The Nocturnals, which Kirkus Reviews called "A delightful adventure about the power of uncommon traits and the joys of newfound friendship," features three unlikely friends:  Dawn, a serious fox, Tobin, a sweet pangolin, and Bismark, the loud mouthed, pint sized sugar glider.

Together they form a brigade of the night after a random encounter with a blood-thirsty snake, and just in time because something is threatening their night realm - animals are disappearing without a trace. Together with the help of a wombat, a band of coyotes and many others, Dawn, Tobin and Bismark journey to the depths of the earth in a wacky, high stakes game that will determine all of their survival.

I have one print copy to give away today, so if you'd like a copy for your favorite young reader, head on over to my website giveaway page and just enter your email. (Or if you have problems with that form, just drop me an email to [email protected] with the subject "NOCTURNALS Giveaway.") The publisher does request that this particular giveaway be limited to U.S. addresses.

And if you'd like more information about the book, check out the official book website or their Facebook page.