In Reference to Murder

Mystery Melange

The winners of the 2016 Ngaio Marsh Awards were announced this past weekend, following a record number of entries this year. Trust No One, a psychological thriller about a writer with early onset Alzheimer’s who starts confessing the murders in his novels were real, earned Paul Cleave his record third Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, while Ray Berard won the Best First Novel award for Inside the Black Horse.

Likewise, the winners were announced for the 2016 Davitt Awards, celebrating the best works by Australian women authors, and handed out annually by Sisters in Crime Australia. Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic was a triple winner, taking home nods for Best Adult Novel, Best Debut Novel, and the Readers' Choice Award. Best Young Adult Novel went to Risk by Fleur Ferris; Best Children's Novel was won by Friday Barnes 2: Under Suspicion by R.A. Spratt; and the Best Nonfiction Book was given to Wild Man by Alecia Simmonds. Check out all the finalists via this list, courtesy of Fair Dinkum Crime.

Last, but not least, in the award winners list, the Australian Crime Writers Association handed out their annual Ned Kelly Awards this weekend. Best Fiction went to Before It Breaks by Dave Warner; Best First Fiction, Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic; Best True Crime, Certain Admissions by Gideon Haigh; S.D. Harvey Award for Short Stories: "Flesh," by Roni O’Brien; and Lifetime Achievement: Carmel Shute. For all the winners and finalists, click on over to the official Australian CWA website.

Meanwhile, crime writers Val McDermid, Chris Brookmyre, Doug Johnston, and E.S. Thomson have been shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year. The winner of the Scottish Crime Book of the Year will be awarded The McIlvanney Prize in memory of William McIlvanney at the opening ceremony of Bloody Scotland. 

Noir at the Bar is headed to Osaka Restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts, on September 11 at  7 p.m. Hosed by Brookline Booksmith, there will be readings from David Baillie, Joe Clifford, Rory Flynn, Stephanie Gayle, Bracken MacLeod, Tony McMillen, and Kim Savage.

Dean Street Press is publishing all six mysteries by a lost English Queen of Crime called Molly Thynne. Her rarely-found novels were originally published between 1928 and 1933 and are "classically delicious examples of the form." One highlight includes The Crime at the 'Noah's Ark', a Christmas mystery from 1932 in which a number of holidaygoers are forced by a snowstorm to take refuge in a rural inn over the holidays - with entertainingly murderous results. All feature a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

On the Mystery People blog, Molly Odintz updated her progress toward reading fifty books by women, and if possible, "fifty works of crime fiction by women; not just new releases, but also classic noir and domestic suspense," during 2016.  

Writing for the Pacific Standard Magazine, Jared Keller took a look at the HBO adaptation of the British drama The Night Of to show how it's a reflection of America’s abiding obsession with crime and punishment. The show comes in the midst of a true-crime revolution with mega-popular series like Making a Murderer and Serial, which have both brought the legal and moral ambiguities of murder investigations to hundreds of thousands of devoted followers each week.

Speaking of our fascination with true crime, JStor delved into the bloody, 450-year-old history of the genre and how the recent TV and web-based series are "merely the most recent iteration of a genre that has always been interested in more than bloody deeds and disfigured bodies."

Crime author Val McDermid took exception to a recent study that seemed to show reading "literary" fiction makes people more empathetic, but genre fiction doesn't. As she notes, not only did the research use old stereotypes, but in recent years, "most readers and critics have acknowledged the blurring of the outdated and misguided distinction between literary fiction and other genres. Good books make us care. It really doesn’t matter whether they include murderers, aliens, philosophers or kings."

The Vancouver Sun celebrated the release of Louise Penny's latest novel featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache with a look at how food has served as crucial an ingredient as the clues scattered about like brioche crumbs. But, as the article goes on to note, culinary crime novels have been served with crime ever since the first mystery novels appeared in the mid-19th century. (Bonus: there are recipes.)

Taiwan's first mystery-oriented independent bookstore, Murder Ink, opened in 2014 with a variety of mystery stories encompassing romance, crime, realism, suspense and detective genres from around the world. The store also regularly lists recommended books to readers of different age groups. The store is still going strong, as the China Post reports, and filmmakers have even used the store as a movie set.

Free books are being offered to Londoners in police custody via the Books in the Nick scheme. The program is the brainchild of Metropolitan police special constable Steve Whitmore, who had nothing to offer a teenager arrested on suspicion of assault and possession who asked for a book to read while being in custody. "The range and type of books available didn’t appeal to him, so I offered him my own book, The Catcher in the Rye, and told him to keep it," said Whitmore. "The look on his face was amazing, his attitude and hostility towards me completely changed and it created common ground for us to talk about. He said he’d never been given a book before to own, and that really moved me."

Free books are also the focus of a promotion in New York City, which is in the process of adding Wifi to its subway stations. To promote the new service, NYC hit upon the gimmick of offering free ebook excerpts to passengers.

Not to be outdone, The Australian organization Books On The Rail has established a campaign asking people to leave books on trains, trams and buses in an effort to get people sharing their most loved books.

Ever wonder what kinds of things librarians find in returned library books? Well wonder no more, because Diana Garrisi has spent the last two months visiting 20 public libraries and taking pictures of more than 100 objects found inside books.

The featured crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Waiting for Gale Outside the Bijou" by John Grey, and the latest featured story at Beat to a Pulp is "Back Then, Our Monsters Were Real ..." by Gary Dobbs.

In the Q&A roundup, Aoife Clifford (author of the debut thriller All These Perfect Strangers) listed "10 Things I want my readers to know about me" for FemaleFirst; The National Book Review spoke with Julia Keller about the latest installment in her West Virginia mystery series, Ackers Gap; Jake Needham was interviewed by the Dorset Book Detective about his Jack Shepard and Inspector Tay novels set in Asia; and the CBC hosted Louise Penny to answer questions from readers about her writing and Armand Gamache's latest adventure, A Great Reckoning.

Media Murder for Monday

Hard to believe it's the beginning of another week, but happily, this also means it's time for the latest wrap-up of crime drama news:

MOVIES

James Franco is developing three movies based on novels by crime fiction writer Tom Franklin, with screenwriters already attached for each project and plans to shoot all three in the next one to three years:  Poachers is a collection of short stories, with the title story (which won the Edgar Award) focusing on three wild boys confronting a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt; Smonk is set in 1911 Alabama, where every Saturday night for a year, E.O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, and beating men; and Hell at the Breech takes place in 1897 and focuses on a group of poor cotton farmers who form a secret society to punish townspeople believed responsible for murdering an aspiring politician.

Vincent D'Onofrio (Law and Order) and Dean Norris (Breaking Bad) have joined Bruce Willis in Paramount and MGM's revamp of the 1974 Charles Bronson film Death Wish, which was in turn based on the book by Brian Garfield. Eli Roth has been tapped to direct the picture that follows a man whose life is destroyed by a violent crime against his wife and daughter and starts hunting for the perpetrators himself.

Dean Devlin's thriller Bad Samaritan has announced filming will start later this year in Portland, Oregon. Starring David Tennant (best known for his work on Doctor Who), the drama centers on two young car valets who use their business as a front to burglarize the houses of their unsuspecting patrons. Life is good for the petty thieves until they target the wrong house, changing their lives.

The North American rights to the action thriller Dog Eat Dog starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe have been acquired by RLJ Entertainment. Based on the novel by Edward Bunker, Dog Eat Dog tells the story of three ex-cons who mess up a kidnapping and lose a big payoff, then find themselves on the wrong side of the mob as they become the city's most wanted fugitives.

Horror movie veteran Tom Holland is making his way back to the big screen with Rock Paper Dead. The movie follows Peter Harris, who is also known as The Doll Maker, a serial killer who returns to his family estate after being released from the hospital for the criminally insane after 20 years. Once inside the old house, horrible memories from a tortured childhood and visitations from past victims torment him, but it isn't until the lovely young Ashley enters his life that Peter makes a fateful decision that rekindles old desires that always have ended in murder. (For fans with macabre sensibilities, you may be delighted to note that a line of serial killer-inspired dolls and masks based on the film will be available in stores on Halloween 2017).

Sarah Paulson (who starred in American Crime Story as Marcia Clark) is in talks to join Warner Bros.' all-female Ocean's Eleven spinoff, currently called Ocean's Ocho. Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Mindy Kaling, and Awkwafina also are part of the Ocean's ensemble cast.

TELEVISION

The BBC has struck a deal for not one, not two, but seven Agatha Christie adaptations to be delivered over the next four years. Mammoth Screen (the producer behind the upcoming Christie-based film Witness for the Prosecution and last year's And Then There Were None), will be the creative team behind the new projects, to include Ordeal by Innocence, Death Comes As The End (set in ancient Egypt), and The ABC Murders, about a serial killer in 1930s Britain.  

In addition to the above-mentioned Witness for the Prosecution, the upcoming BBC slate of dramas includes the six-part contemporary thriller Bodyguard, which tells a fictional story following a team from the Royalty and Specialist Protection Branch of London's Metropolitan Police Service whose officers are tasked with protecting royals, politicians and diplomats; plus a move of the police procedural Line of Duty to BBC One from BBC Two for Season 4, with Thandie Newton joining the cast as Detective Chief Inspector Roz Huntley.

The busy Beeb also announced they are producing a six-part adaptation of Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries. The project, which will also be  written by Catton, is a Victorian mystery tale set during the New Zealand gold rush. The New Zealand author became the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize at the age of 28 when The Luminaries won in 2013, and the 832-page book was also the longest work to win in the prize's history. The judges described it as a "Kiwi Twin Peaks".

The Departed, the Oscar-winning 2006 Martin Scorsese crime drama, is getting a TV series reboot at Amazon. Written by Detroit 1-8-7 creator Jason Richman, The Departed puts a new, updated spin on the two-way-undercover concept in the Scorsese movie and will be set at present-day Chicago, amidst the shifting tides of warring ethnic drug gangs. The story will center on a young cop who goes undercover to infiltrate a ruthless Latino gang, which simultaneously plants its own man in the police department. The show follows these two embattled moles as they attempt to fulfill their mission and stay alive.

The ITV and Netflix crime series Marcella has been picked up for a second eight-part season. Described as "Scandinavian noir on the streets of Britain," the first season of the series centered on troubled detective Marcella (played by Anna Friel) as she investigated a serial murder case upon returning to duty after a 10-year hiatus. Also appearing in the first season were Downton Abbey's Laura Carmichael, Nicholas Pinnock (Fortitude), Sinead Cusack (Eastern Promises), Nina Sosanya (Last Tango In Halifax), Ray Panthaki (Convenience), Jamie Bamber (Law & Order: UK), Patrick Baladi (The Office), and Harry Lloyd (Game Of Thrones).

Chris O'Dowd and Ray Romano are in negotiations to star in Get Shorty, Epix’s 10-episode original series based on Elmore Leonard’s 1990 bestselling thriller comedy novel. (The book was previously adapted by MGM in a 1995 feature starring John Travolta, Danny DeVito, Gene Hackman, and Rene Russo.) Written by Davey Holmes, the TV version of Get Shorty centers on Miles Daly (O'’Dowd), who works as muscle for a murderous crime ring in Nevada. When he tries to leave the criminal life behind, he accidentally brings it with him to Los Angeles and his new job in the film industry. Romano would play Rick, a washed up producer of low quality films who becomes Miles' partner and guide through the maze of Hollywood.

Jennifer Lopez will serve as executive producer of a new legal drama at CBS from Michael Rauch. The story follows polar opposite identical twin brothers who duke it out in their personal lives but are at their best teaming up in the courtroom.

Former NFL player turned Good Morning America co-host Michael Strahan is expanding his relationship with ABC, having sold his first scripted project, Hobbs, to the network. The drama centers on Tommy Hobbs, a former Heisman Trophy winner who joins the Miami police force after not being drafted by the NFL, as well as a meticulous, rule-following detective who has trained her whole life to become a police officer. Michael Caleo (The Sopranos, Rescue Me) will pen the script and exec produce.

A legal procedural is headed to NBC that's based on former prosecutor Marcia Clark's personal experiences and the events of her new novel Blood Defense. The project would follow the legal struggles of criminal defense attorney Samantha Brinkman who gained a reputation as a lawyer who will never give up on her clients but has to adjust her approach when she's handed an extremely high-profile Los Angeles murder case.

Star Trek actor John Cho is headed to a new series on the USA Network with Connoisseur, which explores the world of con artists. Cho will star as Clay Park, a man who pulls off his scheming cons by tricking the wealthiest people in the country to buy fake wine. But when his confidence trick forces him to cross paths with a crime syndicate, he gets involved with the FBI and learns about a tragedy that hurt his family years ago in Korea.

Toni Collette is set to star in and executive produce Unit Zero, an action dramedy for ABC from Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and supervising producer Lindsey Shockley. The project follows a brilliant, but unassuming CIA engineer and single mom, Jackie Fink (Collette), as she "leads a team of CIA underlings who are thrust into the field as first time spies. Each week, this team of zeroes races against the clock to gather intelligence and solve cases of national security. And they succeed partly because no one in their right mind would ever suspect they were spies."

Criminal Minds is looking to add two new characters in the wake of Thomas Gibson's firing earlier this month, with one of the characters eyed to succeed Hotchner as team leader. The changes come on the heels of other cast transitions following last spring’s departure of original cast member Shemar Moore, Adam Rodriguez’s full-time arrival as Alvez, Paget Brewster’s short-term return as Prentiss, and Aisha Tyler’s promotion to series regular as Dr. Tara Lewis.

Lifetime is developing an untitled movie about real estate magnate Robert Durst, subject of HBO’s The Jinx, who’s serving a seven-year prison sentence in Louisiana for weapons possession. Based on Matt Birkbeck’s book A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst, the film will tell the troubling story of Robert Durst through the eyes and relationship of his wife, Kathy Durst, who disappeared in New York in 1982. Robert Durst was a suspect in her disappearance, but was never charged. Durst was expected back in Los Angeles this month to be arraigned on murder charges in a separate case — the killing of his confidante, Susan Berman.

AT&T-owned DirecTV Latin America has acquired rights to European heist thriller The Last Panthers, marking a move by Sky and Canal Plus to partner on crime thrillers that have the authenticity of great U.S. modern TV classics but bring a distinctly European take. The Last Panthers kicks off with a daring diamond robbery in London, which has all the hallmarks of the Balkans' Pink Panthers, then transfers to Marseilles and the Balkans as a British loss adjuster is sent by her shady boss to investigate the crime. The project features a prestigious European cast – Samantha Morton, French star Tahar Rahim, Croatian Goran Bogdan, and John Hurt, and was shot in English, French and Serbo-Croat and set in London, Marseilles and the Balkans.

A&E is the latest network to mount a project on the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, titled The Killing Of JonBenét: The Truth Uncovered, a two-hour documentary set to premiere Monday, September 5 on A&E. It joins three other previously announced TV projects, from Lifetime, Investigation Discovery and CBS, as well as a feature project directed by Kitty Green, timed to the 20th anniversary of the six-year-old beauty queen's killing.

Another star of American Crime is set to return for the third installment of the ABC anthology series. Benito Martinez, who co-starred in the first season and guest starred in Season 2, joins fellow returning players Timothy Hutton, Felicity Huffman, Regina King, Lili Taylor, Richard Cabral and Connor Jessup in the acclaimed series, executive produced by John Ridley and Michael McDonald. His character provides a further glimpse into Season 3, which explores labor issues, economic divides and individual rights in North Carolina.

A trailer was released for the second season of Narcos, the crime drama about the criminal exploits of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The Cheat Sheet has trailers for 25 new show premieres coming in September, including Crackle's latest original series, Startup, which stars Martin Freeman as Phil Rask, an FBI agent who specializes in financial crimes; the Cinemax show Quarry, based on the novels by Max Allan Collins about a Marine who returns home to Memphis from Vietnam in 1972 and gets drawn into a network of corruption and killing spanning the Mississippi River; CBS's unscripted true-crime anthology series that will focus on the JonBenet Ramsey case; the legal drama Bull on CBS; ABC's conspiracy thriller Designated Survivor, starring Kiefer Sutherland; the Fox procedural series Lethal Weapon, based on the film of the same name; and the CBS reboot of MacGuyver.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The St. Hilda Mystery & Crime Conference, which was held over the weekend of August 19-21, has posted a link to the featured conference lecture, "Seven Million Years of Thriller Fiction" by internationally-bestselling author Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher series.

True crime author Denise Wallace chatted with author/screenwriter Debbi Mack on Crime Cafe about her debut true crime book and the events that inspired it.

Edgar-nominated novelist Duane Swierczynski joined the podcast Poets of the Tabloid Murder to discuss his new thriller, Revolver.

The Conan show welcomed Jeffrey Toobin, author of American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst.

THEATER

Peter James' The Perfect Murder is making its first-ever theatrical appearance in the U.S. at Abingdon, Virginia's Barter Theatre, beginning September 8. The comedy-thriller centers on Victor Smiley, who finds himself searching for a way to get rid of his wife Joan...forever. But, things don't always go as planned.

Quote of the Week

FFB: Troublemaker

American author Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) was born in South Dakota, the son of a shoe shop owner who lost the business during the Depression, prompting moves to Minneapolis and eventually a citrus grove in California belonging to the author's married sister. Hansen was to spend the rest of his life in California, making a living as a writer and teacher.

Hansen fell in love with a worker at Lockheed's Los Angeles aircraft plant, Jane Bancroft, and married her in 1943. He was gay, she was a lesbian, and they both had affairs, but as the author later remarked, "something was right about it, however bizarre it may seem to the rest of the world." They remained happily together until Jane's death 51 years later, and had a daughter who later underwent gender reassignment.

Hansen penned over 40 books and other works, many with homosexual themes, not widely accepted during the pre-Stonewall 1960s, prompting him to use a pen name with small West Coast publishers. His breakthrough, and the first of his works to use his own name, came with the detective novel Fadeout in 1970. In the St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, Hansen said that  "Homosexuals have commonly been treated shabbily in detective fiction - vilified, pitied, at best patronized...I wanted to write a good, compelling whodunit, but I also wanted to right some wrongs. Almost all the things folks say about homosexuals is false. So I had some fun turning clichés and stereotypes on their heads in that book. It was easy."

Fadeout and 11 subsequent books in the series featured Dave Brandstetter, an openly gay insurance investigator/private eye who still had the tough, no-nonsense qualities of the classic hardboiled protagonist. The novels are also known for their colorful descriptive portrayal of Los Angeles during the late 60's and 70's. Hansen was a fan of Ross Macdonald, "but it bothered me that his detective never had any personal life, and he never changed. My joke was to take the true hard-boiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well."

Troublemaker, the third book in the series from 1975, finds Brandstetter investigating the murder of Rick Wendell, the owner of a local gay bar and all-around nice guy. Wendell's body had been discovered by his mother, who found a young man, stark naked, wiping off a revolver with Rick lying dead at his feet. It seems like an open-and-shut case, but Brandstetter digs deeper, both in his job as investigator for Medallion Life Insurance and because he doesn't like easy solutions. What happened to the large sum of money Wendell had just withdrawn from the bar's bank account? And why are the only fingerprints on the gun those of the victim's mother - the beneficiciary of her son's insurance policy?

Hansen wrote compelling dialogue and multi-layered characters, as in this description of the victim's mother:

"She wore jeans, high-top work shoes, an old pullover with a jagged reindeer pattern. Somebody's ski sweater once, somebody even bigger than she was. Her son? She was sixty, but there was nothing frail about her. The hands gripping the grainy rake handle were a man's hands. Her cropped hair was white. She wore no makeup. Her skin was ruddy, her eyes bright blue. Hearty might have described her. Except for her mouth. It sulked. Something had offended her and failed to apologize. Not lately--long ago. A lifetime probably."

The New Yorker said of the Brandstetter series, "Unusual in two respects. One is that the insurance investigator, though ruggedly masculine, is thoroughly and contentedly homosexual, the other is that Hansen is an excellent craftsmen, a compelling writer." And as a nod to Hansen's writing as solid private-eye fiction, not just gay private-eye fiction, the Los Angeles Times called the author, "The most exciting and effective writer of the classic private-eye novel working today." In 1992, Mr. Hansen received a life achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Blood on the Bayou - for a Good Cause

Bouchercon 2016 starts just three weeks from now, and this year’s anthology — BLOOD ON THE BAYOU — is a stellar collection of stories set in and around New Orleans, the host city for this year’s convention.

If you’re attending Bouchercon, you can pre-order the book and pick it up there; if you’re not attending, you can still pre-order the book and have it shipped to your home after it is published on September 15th.

Or if you prefer to read it on your favorite ereader, it is available to pre-order from all major vendors: Amazon, Barnes&Noble, iTunes, and Kobo.

And remember, all proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit the New Orleans Public Libraries.

Here’s the synopsis from the back of the book …

Bestselling novelists David Morrell, Alison Gaylin and Elaine Viets headline a new anthology of 22 tales exploring the unique aura of mystery of New Orleans and the surrounding bayou country.

BLOOD ON THE BAYOU is published in conjunction with Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, which is being held in New Orleans in 2016. As with the convention itself, the anthology spreads a broad canopy across a wide variety of crime writers from across the country and around the world — including both veteran writers and the brightest up-and-coming talents in the field. These stories range from the light-hearted and fun to the darker side of crime, just as New Orleans and the bayou country can show both to the unsuspecting.

All participants contributed their efforts to support our charity — the New Orleans Public Libraries — and by extension readers and writers everywhere. ALL PROFITS GO TO THE LIBRARY.

Edited by Greg Herren with an Introduction by Heather Graham. Stories by Kaye Wilkinson Barley, Eric Beetner, G. J. Brown, Sheila Connolly, O’Neil De Noux, Barbara Ferrer, John Floyd, Alison Gaylin, Greg Herren, BV Lawson, R. T. Lawton, Deborah Lacy, Edith Maxwell, Liz Milliron, Terrie Moran, David Morrell, Dino Parenti, Mike Penn, Gary Phillips, Thomas Pluck, Paula Pumphrey, and Elaine Viets.

(Reblogging from Down and Out Books)

Mystery Melange

Over at the Sleuthsayers blog, some of the authors nominated in the Best First Novel category for the Macavity and Anthony Awards talk about their books, what their favorite first novel is, and how that book has influenced their writing.

From the department of "it pays authors to set up a Literary Trust," Canelo imprint Abandoned Bookshop is on a quest to locate the surviving relatives of crime author Clifton Robbins as it prepares to republish two of his books which have been out of print for over 80 years. Dusty Death and The Man Without a Face are the first of five successful novels by Robbins from the 1930s featuring Clay Harrison, a London barrister-turned-detective, and his clerk, Henry.

Christopher Irvin's short story collection Safe Inside the Violence and Tara Laskowski’s collection Bystanders both came out within the last year, with one considered crime fiction and the other literary fiction. But when Laskowski started reading Irvin’s stories and realized there were many similarities in the ways they explored violence, the two authors started a discussion and exploration about the challenges of writing about crime, the weird and delightful, which was published in the LA Review of Books.

The rate and sheer number of technological changes in police procedures and forensics isn't that only thing giving contemporary crime fiction authors nightmares. In Scotland, changes to the structure of law enforcement has left many authors scrambling to keep up, something the Police Scotland chief addressed at a recent meeting of that nation's top crime writers. As bestselling author Ian Rankin noted, Chief Philip Gormley tried to "reassure" them over changes to force that had left them "horrified" about the future of their characters including Rankin's own Inspector Rebus whom the author feared might become a figure whose methods are increasingly outdated. (Another reason many top authors are beginning to set their novels in historical time periods.)

Twitter can be a harsh environment for many celebrities, but when internationally bestselling crime author Val McDermid was the victim of a sexist troll, she shut him down in "the best possible way," as Mashable notes, with other top authors Michael Connelly and JK Rowling coming to her defense. (The original poster's Twitter account has since been deleted.)

Another reason to go visit your local indie bookstore: Lit Hub wrote a piece about "the birth of a small town bookstore" and a behind-the-scenes look at what it took for a former nurse to bring Black Dog Books to Newton, New Jersey.

Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over one of the world's most mysterious books, the Voynich Manuscript, an intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women that some believe holds "magical powers." The book has been locked away in a vault at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, but now a small publishing house in Spain has secured the right to clone the document. The publisher's director explains that "Touching the Voynich is an experience...It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe."

Amazon’s Book Editors have rounded up their most anticipated books of the fall season, which includes several crime fiction titles from the likes of Carl Hiaasen, J.D. Robb, Harlan Coben, John Grisham, and many more.

"Independent bookstores are a great way to find new reading material while supporting local businesses," the Bluegrass Situation wrote, in compiling a listing of seven of their favorite independent bookstores in the U.S.

In one of The Strand's latest "best" lists, Jason Miller chose the "Top Ten Detective Duos,"  but as always, your mileage may vary.

New Zealand's Invercargill City Libraries and Archives decided that there was one important sport missing from the 2016 Olympics in Rio: synchronized shelving. The tongue-in-cheek effort wants to petition the IOC to recognize the event so that they can "send our boys to Tokyo 2020!" (Hat tip to Shelf Awareness.)

From the department of "life is stranger than fiction" comes a story of the mummified train robber who became a circus prop. (HT to Bill Crider.)

The new issue of Yellow Mama is out with new poetry and stories such as "The Hero" in Roy Dorman’s Walter Mitty-inspired tale; Liz McAdams’s "On the Ridge" with a likeable killer who preys on coworkers in a mental hospital; Kenneth James Crist’s "Tony Boy," where a biker outrider snakes the gang president’s girl with unforeseen consequences; and Steven M. Lerner’s "Jury Pool," where a blast from the past haunts a member of the jury.

This week's featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "Professions" by Sanjeev Sethi.

In the Q&A roundup, author Sandra Brown spoke with the Star Telegram about her new thriller and how she was able to turn a hit man into a hero; JR Lindermuth takes Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Sharp Interview Challenge"; Megan Abbott chatted with the Boston Globe about her new thriller You Will Know Me and about crime writing in general; and Judy Penz Sheluk stopped by Omnimystery News to discuss her new mystery series that starts off with Skeletons in the Attic.

Media Murder for Monday

It's Monday once again, which means we start off the week with the latest crime drama news:

MOVIES

20th Century Fox is closing on a deal that will have Ben Affleck directing and starring in Witness For The Prosecution, an adaptation of the Agatha Christie short story and play that first hit the big screen in 1957 (starring Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton with multiple Oscar nominations). This follows on the heels of the recent BBC announcement that they are producing an adaptation of the same work for BBC One (see TV casting note below).

The Clue remake has landed at 20th Century Fox after previously being under the Universal umbrella, although no director has been announced to helm the project. Clue is based on the popular murder mystery board game with one previous less-than-successful adaptation in 1985, a Paramount production released with multiple endings that starred Tim Curry, Eileen Brennan, Christopher Lloyd, Madeline Kahn, and Martin Mull.

In more remake/adaptation news, COPS is next in line to get the big screen treatment. Ruben Fleischer is set to direct the project and turn the long-time unscripted TV series into "an edgy narrative feature with a buddy comedy bent on the order of a Lethal Weapon."

Billy Crudup is set to star as the male lead opposite Naomi Watts in Gypsy, Netflix’s psychological thriller series. Gypsy follows the journey of Jean Holloway (Watts), a therapist who begins to develop dangerous and intimate relationships with the people in her patients’ lives. Crudup will play Jean’s husband Michael, who will "navigate their twisted and complicated marriage as well as his own morally gray relationships."

This year's Tony winner for Best Actor in a Musical (Hamilton), Leslie Odom Jr,  is in talks to board Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. The film is based on one of Christie’s best known books, which was first published in 1934. and revolves around a murder of an American businessman on board the famous train with multiple suspects.

Serious fans of the Sherlock Holmes canon and its many works inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's creations may be less than enthused about an upcoming Sony project, but all that aside, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are teaming up to play comedic versions of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson for the studio's Holmes and Watson. Etan Cohen will direct from his own script about the duo "that faces off against enemies from across the globe."

A dispute over salary between Tom Cruise and Paramount has halted pre-production on Mission: Impossible 6, which had slated a January 2017 production start. This is the second production issue this summer for the project, after it threatened to fall apart over "script issues" back in July.

Just for fun, IFC.com posted "The 10 Best Offbeat Spy Movies" (with trailers).

TELEVISION

HBO is developing a Perry Mason series from Robert Downey Jr. and True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto that will be short-run installments in the vein of True Detective (whose seasons have consisted of 8 episodes each). The drama, based on the legal crime books by Erle Stanley Gardner, is being eyed as an ongoing series, with new seasons’ timing contingent on Downey’s availability,

True Blood star Anna Paquin has lined up her next big TV project, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace. She'll play Nancy Montgomery, a Canadian woman living in the mid 1800s who is housekeeper for Thomas Kinnear, a man who was famously murdered along with Montgomery. The novel is known for the way it is constructed, with a shifting point of view that looks at the murders and subsequent investigation.

Emmy-winning actor Aaron Paul is stepping behind the camera at NBC for a one-hour drama script at the network that he will produce. Titled Blackmail, the project centers on a young married couple who suffer a life-changing accident and decide to get back at the man responsible by threatening to reveal his infidelity to his fiancee, but a hitch in their plan turns into a dark game of cat-and-mouse.

Amazon has greenlit Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, a 10-episode reboot of the iconic spy character starring Jon Krasinski (The Office). The series will follow the CIA analyst as he tries to unravel a global terrorism plot, with planned shooting locations including the U.S., Europe and Africa.

The ratings were so good that midway through its second-season run, USA Network’s drama series Mr. Robot has been renewed for a third season to air in 2017. The hacker drama was recently nominated for six Emmys, including best drama series and best actor for star Rami Malek.

The second season of ABC's American Crime featured a notable cast of Timothy Hutton, Regina King, and Felicity Huffman, but some feel it was 22-year-old Connor Jessup who stole the show with his portrayal of a victim of sexual abuse. The show's producers announced Connor will return for Season 3 as they put the young man's character through the wringer again, helping to shed "new light on the opiate addiction epidemic that is plaguing America.”

Bosch (the titular character from the adaptation of Michael Connelly's novels) will have a new enemy to face in season three: Arnold Vosloo, who will play Rafael "Rudy" Tafero, an ex-cop who has gone into private industry and now works as a security chief for director Andre Holland.  With a penchant for needling Bosch (Titus Welliver), Rudy might be dirty enough to have planted evidence against Bosch in a case.

Bosch's producers also announced that Jeffrey Pierce (The Tomorrow People) has booked a recurring role in the series, playing Trevor Dobbs, who is a former lieutenant with a tight knit Special Forces group in Anwar Province.

Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall and Toby Jones (Dad's Army) have come aboard the BBC’s two-part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Witness for the Prosecution. Cattrall will play glamorous Emily French, the murder victim, while Jones is set to take on the role of the attorney who has to defend the victim's heir and chief suspect (Billy Howle). The project, which also stars Andrea Riseborough, Monica Dolan, and David Haig, recently began filming in Liverpool, with no broadcast date yet announced.

Peaky Blinders star Helen McCrory has been set as the lead in ITV’s six-part legal thriller, Fearless. Written and exec produced by Homeland's Patrick Harbinson, it will center on Emma Blunt (McCrory), a solicitor known for defending lost causes who's investigating the killing of a schoolgirl in East Anglia and trying to free the man she thinks was wrongly convicted of the murder. As she digs deeper into the case, Emma begins to sense powerful forces, in the police and the intelligence services at home and abroad, who want to stop her uncovering the truth.

Robert Knepper has booked a recurring role on Season 6 of Showtime’s flagship drama series Homeland. The new season of the series, starring Claire Danes, is set following the U.S. presidential election with a newly elected female POTUS (Elizabeth Marvel).

For the first time, Amazon is making several original series pilot episodes available on Amazon Video’s YouTube channel and Facebook page, including Bosch, the Emmy-nominated series based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling novels, following LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch.

Investigation Discovery gave the green light to Scene of the Crime with Tony Harris (working title), a six-part series that looks at the world behind and beyond the crime. The series starts production this summer, and will air exclusively on ID in 2017.

A trailer was released for Doubt, Katherine Heigl's return to the small screen playing a defense lawyer who she struggles with a case that gets a bit too personal when she falls for the client (Steven Pasquale) who is as dreamy as he is possibly murderous.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Obsessed with traditional crime writing as a child, author Leye Adenle explains on a BBC podcast why he chose to set his own crime fiction in Nigeria.

The Story Blender welcomed Kathleen Antrim, journalist and award-winning author of the bestselling political thriller, Capital Offense.

SoundCloud is currently featuring a drama performed by LA Theatre Works (which nabbed the 2015 Audie Award for Audio Drama with its production of The Hound of the Baskervilles):  Reginald Rose's juror drama Twelve Angry Men (1954) featuring actors Hector Elizondo, Robert Foxworth, and Joe Spano. It was directed by John de Lancie (Star Trek: The Next Generation), who can be heard on the program as the judge in the case. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

THEATER

Casting was announced for The American Wife, a new thriller coming to London's Park Theatre September 7 to October 1. The show centers on San Diego housewife Karen Ruiz (Julia Eringer) who discovers that her soccer coach husband Eduardo (Vidal Sancho) has been arrested on terror charges. As she rushes to save him from the confines of his new Afghan prison, with the help of Press Association war correspondent, Mark Loomis (George Taylor), Karen has to navigate discrepant claims and accusations being made by governments, journalists and her own husband, making her wonder who she can believe when there is no unified official truth.

Your Sunday Music Treat

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the birth of French composer Claude Debussy (August 22, 1862 - March 25, 1918), the famous French impressionist. Here's one of the composer's best-known works, the ethereal piano piece, "Clair de lune" (referenced in my second Scott Drayco novel, Requiem for Innocence), as played by French pianist François-Joël Thiollier:

 

Quote of the Week

FFB: She Shall Have Murder

Delano Ames (1906-1987) was born in Ohio to a newspaperman father. In 1929 Ames married Maysie Grieg, who later became a highly successful author of lighthearted romances, and the duo settled in Greenwich Village where Ames published his first novel, a philosophical look at the Greek gods entitled A Double Bed on Olympus. When the couple divorced, Ames moved to England where he remarried and worked for British intelligence during the second World War.

After the war, according to his tongue-in-cheek autobiography, he "translated an erudite history of keyboard instruments from the French, and believes that at least 100 copies were sold." Fortunately, his later efforts were more successful, beginning with in 1948 with She Shall Have Murder, the first in what was to become a 12-book series featuring the British husband-and-wife sleuthing team of Jane and Dagobert Brown. Ames produced a Brown book every year until 1959 when he moved to Spain and switched to writing a four-book
series featuring Juan Llorca of the Spanish Civil Guard.

She Shall Have Murder, made into a movie on British television in 1950, introduces Jane Hamish, a pretty young executive in the law firm Daniel Playfair and Son, and Dagobert Brown, Jane's lover and a researcher/writer who is so absorbed in the thriller he and Jane are concocting around the law firm's staff, that he is astonished when the wrong victim dies. Said victim is Mrs. Robjohn, the least favorite client of the firm, thanks to her frequent calls, letters and visits and unwavering paranoid belief that the mysterious "they" are out to get her.

She Shall Have Murder was labeled as "Detection with Wit" when first published in 1948, an apt description of the characters of Jane, always the common-sense, down-to-earth narrator, and her other half Dagobert, whose eccentricities and passing fads often leave Jane alternatively delighted and driven to despair ("Dagobert is my hero, but he persistently refuses to behave like one.") One of Dagobert's primary pursuits is amateur sleuthing that he puts to good use as he resorts to bluffs, disguises, charm and insightful detection in his efforts to prove Mrs. Robjohn was murdered.

Jane makes a delightful narrator, as in this bit about her thoughts on her potential novel-writing career at the start of the story:

"On the other hand, thrillers have nowadays become an accepted art-form; bishops and minor poets read practically nothing else, and the New Statesman reviews them....The beginning of a book is always the tricky part. It should arrest. A shot should ring out in the night, or if you prefer, a rod should cough or a Roscoe belch forth destruction. Personally, I like to meet my corpse on page one, and I like him (or her) to be very dead."

In Peter Walker's foreword to the Black Dagger edition of She Shall Have Murder, he notes that the novel is a time capsule of post-World War II life, with utility clothing, conscription, rationing, listening to the wireless, putting lavender in the clothes closet, feeding gas meters with shillings and girls who resemble Rita Hayworth. But the writing sparkles over 60 years later and is far from dated in its ability to entertain.