In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

Another new week means another new wrap-up of the latest in crime drama news:

AWARDS

The Screen Actors Guild awards were handed out last night at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

The Academy Award nominations announced last week included a few nods to a few crime dramas, including To Hell or High Water (Best Picture), Best Actor (Jeff Bridges), and Original Screenplay (Taylor Sheridan); Isabelle Huppert was nominated in the Best Actress category for the psychological thriller Elle; and Michael Shannon was nominated for Best Actor for his role in the noir psychological thriller Nocturnal Animals. The biggest winners with the most nominations included the musical La La Land (14), the mystery-scifi film Arrival (8), and dramas Moonlight (8), Hacksaw Ridge (6), Manchester by the Sea (6), and Lion (6).

MOVIES

Paramount Pictures has acquired film rights to the Sonia Purnell book A Woman Of No Importance and attached Star Wars' Daisy Ridley to star. The story is based on real-life American heiress and super-spy Virginia Hall, who attempted to break into the ranks of the American Foreign Service in the years before World War II. Rejected because of gender and a disability — she lost part of her leg in a hunting accident — Hall worked during the war for the British intelligence unit SOE. She later joined the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

Samuel Goldwyn Films and AMBI Group will partner on the domestic release of the thriller Lavender starring Abbie Cornish. The project centers on a photographer (Cornish) who suffers severe memory loss after a traumatic accident, and strange clues amongst her photos suggest she may be responsible for the deaths of family members she never knew she had. A psychiatrist (Justin Long) helps her recover the lost memories. Diego Klattenhoff and Dermot Mulroney co-star.

Ethan Hawke and Noomi Rapace have signed on to star in Stockholm, a thriller written and to be directed by Robert Budreau. The story is based on the true story of a 1973 bank heist and hostage crisis in Stockholm that was documented in a 1974 New Yorker article "The Bank Drama" by Daniel Lang. The hostages bonded with their captors and turned against the authorities, and gave rise to the psychological phenomenon "Stockholm syndrome."

House Of Lies star Dawn Olivieri and Mo McRae have been cast in lead roles in the crime thriller Den of Thieves, which stars Gerard Butler. Directed by Christian Gudegast (who also co-wrote the script with Paul Sheuring), the story is based on true events and follows an elite crew of bank robbers who set out to pull off the ultimate heist and get to the money first, right under the noses of Los Angeles’ most feared division of law enforcement. Olivieri will play Debbie, the estranged wife of Butler’s corrupt cop character "Big Nick" Flanagan, and McRae will play a sheriff working under Big Nick. Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and Meadow Williams are also in the cast.

A trailer was released for the thriller My Cousin Rachel, based on the Daphne du Maurier novel, which tells the story of a young Englishman (Sam Claflin) who plots revenge against his mysterious, beautiful cousin (Rachel Weisz), believing that she murdered his guardian. But his feelings become complicated as he finds himself falling under the beguiling spell of her charms.

Fans of murder mystery themes in cinema should check out this listing of "20 Great Murder Mystery Movies That Are Worth Your Time."

TELEVISION

CBS has given pilot orders to two projects: the crime drama Killer Instinct, starring and executive produced by The Good Wife cast member Alan Cumming, and Perfect  Citizen, a legal drama written and executive produced by former Good Wife executive producer Craig Turk. Killer Instinct (f/k/a Dr. Death) is based on the upcoming book by James Patterson and centers on a former CIA operative (Cumming) who has since built a "normal" life as a gifted professor and writer but is pulled back into his old life when the NYPD needs his help to stop a serial killer on the loose. Perfect Citizen centers on the former general counsel for the NSA who, after his involvement as a whistleblower in an international scandal, embarks on a new career at a storied law firm in Boston.

ABC has ordered a female buddy cop comedy pilot from executive producer Elizabeth Banks. The pilot centers on a driven but stubborn detective who finds unlikely help from her precinct’s trustee, a larger-than-life ex-con finishing out her prison sentence doing menial tasks for the police department. Though these two have completely opposing views on crime and punishment, a "highly entertaining and successful partnership is born."

Paula Patton has been cast as the lead of ABC's supernatural thriller drama series Somewhere Between, which was given a 10-episode straight-to-series order for summer 2017. It follows superstar news producer Laura Price (Patton) who knows when, where, and how her daughter Serena is going to be murdered but doesn’t know who the murderer is. Despite this, all of her attempts to keep her daughter safe fail, and Serena’s fixed, unmovable, terrifying fate keeps her directly in the path of her killer.

UnReal alum Breeda Wool has landed a series regular role in AT&T Audience Network’s upcoming drama series Mr. Mercedes, based on Stephen King's 2014 book, set for premiere in the fall. Mr. Mercedes follows 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 is able to strike again. Wool joins previously announced fellow cast members Kelly Lynch and Justine Lupe.

Second Chance alumna Amanda Detmer has booked a series regular role on ABC’s Marc Cherry untitled southern drama pilot. The drama stars Reba McEntire as Ruby Adair, the sheriff of colorful small town Oxblood, KY, who finds her red state outlook challenged when a young FBI agent of Middle Eastern descent is sent to help her solve a horrific crime.

Transparent's Melora Hardin is heading to The Blacklist next month, playing Isabella Stone, described as "a socialite by day, character assassin by night." The show also announced that Brent Spiner, who played Star Trek's android, Data, will be featured on an upcoming February episode, playing a master criminal known as "the Architect" who offers his services for the right price.

IFC Midnight has acquired domestic rights to director Alexandre O. Philippe’s 78/52, the Sundance documentary that deconstructs the infamous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The title comes from the 78 setups and 52 cuts that were required to construct Hitchcock’s meticulously choreographed two-minute shower sequence in his 1960 iconic film. Philippe breaks down the scene shot for shot, enlisting the help of film buffs and filmmakers including Guillermo del Toro, Bret Easton Ellis, Karyn Kusama, Eli Roth, and Peter Bogdanovich.

A trailer was released for the spin-off Better Call Saul, which returns to Netflix this spring.

A trailer was also released for The Blacklist spinoff, The Blacklist: Redemption, in which Tom Keen (Ryan Eggold) joins a team of highly trained black ops professionals led by his mother, Scottie Hargrave (Famke Janssen).
 
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 featured Brad Ricca, author of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes: The True Story of New York City's Greatest Female Detective and the 1917 Missing Girl Case That Captivated a Nation.

The Next Steps podcast with host Jenny Milchman welcomed the ITW present best-selling author Elizabeth Heiter and debut novelist KJ Howe.

The Thrill Seekers podcast featured E.A. Aymar and DJ Alkimist talking about their collaboration that fuses together music and storytelling.

The BBC's Sarah Brett and Nihal Arthanayake interviewed former journalist and crime fiction writer Peter May who talks about his new Enzo Macleod novel, Cast Iron.

Two Crime Writers And A Microphone chatted with guest Sarah Pinborough, the author of Behind Her Eyes, about her inspiration for the work.

Noir on the Radio host Greg Barth welcomed crime fiction author Tony Knighton, a Lieutenant in the Philadelphia Fire Department who's also published short fiction in Static Movement Online and Dark Reveries.  

Dystopian crime fiction author A.R. Shaw stopped by Authors on the Air as they continued their Female Crime Fiction Writers Month theme.

Writer Types is a brand-new podcast hosted by Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden that focuses on crime and mystery fiction. In the first episode, they interviewed authors Megan Abbott, Lou Berney, and Steph Post, looked at some of the best books from 2016 and coming up in 2017, and had a live reading of the short story "Whoops" by Nick Kolakowski. Beetner and Lauden explained their plans for the podcast over at the Do Some Damage blog.

The Story Blender podcast snagged author Andrew Gross to discuss his new historical thriller, The One Man, which is set in Auschwitz in 1944.

THEATER

The Cleveland Play House will present Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery from Jan. 21 through Feb. 12 in Playhouse Square’s Allen Theatre. Rafael Untalan takes on the role of Sherlock Holmes and Jacob James plays Doctor Watson, with three actors "playing everyone else in England."

Quote of the Week

FFB: Shroud of Canvas

Isobel Mary Lambot (1926-2001) was from a family of readers in Birmingham, England, but she didn't turn to writing until 1960. She served first in the Women's Royal Air Force then as a teacher before marrying in 1959 a Belgian engineer whose work took him to Third World countries. That was the launching point for Lambot's travels around the world, experiences that would later turn up in her writing—including her Russian-exile Commissaire Orloff who appeared in two novels and was inspired from a period spent in France. In fact, Lambot's very first crime novel was written in Jamaica, and although never published, it connected her with her literary agent.

In all, she published some 20 crime novels, including police procedurals, political thrillers and standalone detective stories based in such locations as Ceylon and the Congo, translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish under the Lambot name or the pseudonyms Daniel Ingham and Mary Turner. She also had a nonfiction book, How to Write Crime Novels, published in 1992, taught creative writing, lectured to writers' groups and presented "Whodunit" evenings.

She was definitely of her time and the social mores of the day, once saying, "My aim is to entertain, not to preach, but certain moral values underlie my work all the same. I prefer old-fashioned virtues, such as Crime Does Not Pay, while obviously in real life it does! I don't like the permissive society, and make sure my heroines get decently married at the end. If any of my characters leap into bed with each other, it is essential to the plot, and they usually regret it." But she also understood the writing process well, adding that "People write because they want to. It is an inner compulsion. Crime writers write to entertain, to give a little relaxation in a world of stress. It is very hard work." 

Sadly, late in life as a widow she had rapid onset of Alzheimer's disease and after being moved to a nursing home, left one day and was last seen walking into the countryside. As a family member noted, the author's final mystery was like her novels, as a massive search operation was set up with police and volunteers until her body was found against a tree in Yeld Wood. But she probably would have appreciated the funeral—as the hearse drove from the Church in Kington to the Crematorium in Hereford, a lone buzzard flew over the coffin and screeched.

Her novels, such as the 1967 Shroud of Canvas, use a plain straightforward style to good effect, weaving character sketches and interpersonal relationships to help build suspense. The main POV protagonist in "Canvas"  is Rosalind, a young widow with a daughter, who had cut all ties with her family during her first disastrous marriage and has recently married a man she's only known for six months, Geoffrey Lennard, founder of a plastics company.

When Rosalind receives a telephone call from Geoffrey's former fiancée whom Rosalind knew nothing about, it sets in motion a series of mysteries and deaths beginning with the murder of the ex-fiancée in the Lennard garden. As evidence and suspicion begins to mount against Geoffrey, Rosalind's newfound happiness is in jeopardy even as she unwaveringly believes in the innocence of her husband. With the help of a surprising ally, Detective Sergeant Barry Thornley, and his boss, Superintendent Longton, Rosaline pursues the truth, dodging the whispers and doubts from the local community admidst a backdrop of industrial espionage and power struggles.

And yet...Rosalind does wonder, as this excerpt indicates, although it also shows Lambot's effective sparse style and how she creates conflict:

There was a nightmare sense of repetition. Was she doomed to sit at the breakfast table each morning waiting for an explanation that never came?...She had wandered round the silent house all evening, waiting for the sound of Geoffrey's car, wishing one moment that Sally was not away for the night, glad at another that she was not there to witness her mother's anxiety.

In desperation, she had phoned the office but there was no reply. Not that it meant anything. Geoffrey could have told the switchboard not to leave him connected with an outside line, so that he could get on with his work in peace...

But the previous evening he had gone to meet Anne...

Shroud of Canvas may date from the late 60s, but it follows true British Golden Age tradition, filled with skillfully placed clues and red herrings alike and ending with a closed circle of suspects gathered together to hear the revelation of the murderer's identity. And of course, in the end, Crime Does Not Pay.

Mystery Melange

The Crime Writers' Association (CWA) announced that Ann Cleeves is to receive the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honor in British crime writing, which recognizes authors whose crime writing careers have been marked by sustained excellence.  Ann Cleeves is internationally renowned as the author of the series on which the TV series Vera and Shetland are based, and she is also the author of other crime novels and short stories and is a tireless advocate for libraries.

The Mystery Writers of America announced this year's Edgar Award nominations. The Best Novel category includes The Ex by Alafair Burke; Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman; Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye; What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin; and Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. You can read all the nominees in the various categories via the MWA website, including a Best Paperback Original nod to fellow blogger and Friday's Forgotten Books originator, Patti Abbott (for Shot in Detroit).

The Deutscher Krimi Preis, which purports to be the oldest German mystery-book prize, announced the winners (and the two runners-up) in two categories. The best German mystery category was won by Die Mauer (The Wall), by Max Annas, while the international mystery category was won by a translation from the English, The Heavenly Table, by Donald Ray Pollock. Books by Liza Cody and Garry Disher came in second and third.

Thursday, January 26, is International Mystery Night at the Mystery Readers NorCal Literary Salon in Berkeley, California. Featured authors scheduled to appear include Jeff Siger (Greece), Cara Black (Paris), and Lisa Alber (Ireland). The event is open to all, but you must RSVP to attend, and space is limited.

A £20,000 literary prize is being launched by Amazon for new work by authors releasing their work on Kindle’s self-publishing platform in the UK. The Kindle Storyteller award is open to authors writing in English across any genre, fiction or non-fiction, for books launched on Kindle Direct Publishing between February 20 and May 19, 2017.

An eclectic batch of items from spy novelist Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) is being sold by an auction house in Alexandria, Virginia. Clancy was actually a native of Maryland, and when he died in 2013 at the age of 66, he was still living at his 80-acre estate on the Chesapeake Bay in southern Maryland, from which most of the auction items originate. The auction will take place January 31, but bidding is already underway online.

The Arthur Conan Doyle estate has debuted a new website with texts, correspondence, photos, memorabilia, and films about the creator of Sherlock Holmes and his many roles, including author, physician, advocate, and spiritualist. One interesting account is his less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward the knighthood offered to him in 1902. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) is considered one of the classic writers of the so-called "Golden Age" mysteries, perhaps best known for his locked-room tales. But his output is more than just that, and the Classic Mystery Blog lists ten books to get you started.

Interested in diving into some chilly noir but don't know where to start? Here's a list of "10 Scandinavian Crime Novels to Read While Getting Your 'Hygge' On." For those who don't know, "hygge" has been in the news lately after it made the Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 word of the year shortlist and went viral. Pronounced hoo-guh, it's a Danish term loosely defined as "a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being." (Doesn't seem particularly well-suited for crime fiction, but there you go.)

For fans of legal thrillers, the ABA Journal asked ten lawyer-authors to choose the top 10 law novels in the past 10 years, with Alifair Burke starting off the list.

It appears that there are even astrophysical whodunnits on a galactic scale:  across the universe, galaxies are being killed and the question scientists want answered is, what’s killing them?

The featured poem at the 5-2 this week is "Never See Morning" by Jennifer Lagier.

In the Q&A roundup, the Mystery People chatted with Melissa Lenhardt about her new book The Fisher King, as well as nostalgia vs. progress in a small Texas Town; the MP also sat down with Terry Shames to discuss the latest installment in her Samuel Craddock series.

Media Murder for Monday

Here's the latest wrap-up of crime drama news to start off the new week:

AWARDS

In the annual People's Choice Awards, The Girl on the Train was declared Favorite Thriller Movie; Priyanka Chopra won for Favorite Dramatic TV Actress (Quantico); the Favorite TV Crime Drama went to Criminal Minds, while Mark Harmon won for Favorite Male Actor in a TV Crime Drama (NCIS) and Jennifer Lopez for Favorite Female Actor in a TV Crime Drama (Shades of Blue); and The Favorite Premium TV Series nod went to Orange is the New Black.

Meanwhile, the Oscar Nominations are scheduled to be announced tomorrow - too late for today's blog, but I'll cover it next week. You can catch the updates via the official Oscars.org website as they happen.

MOVIES

After launching three franchises between Barbershop, Fantastic Four, and Ride Along, director Tim Story is set to tackle a fourth by signing on to helm New Line’s reboot of Shaft. Richard Roundtree starred in Gordon Parks’ original 1971 movie as John Shaft, a smooth-talking detective hired by a drug lord to find his kidnapped daughter, while Samuel L. Jackson picked up the mantle as Shaft’s nephew in John Singleton's 2000 remake.

Adam Brody and Sophie Nelisse (The Book Thief) are set to star in Evan Morgan’s The Kid Detective from Brightlight Pictures and Myriad Pictures. Written and directed by Morgan, the feature is described as "a darkly satirical murder mystery based on the demoralization of a wholesome American icon." A once-celebrated kid detective (Brody), now 29, continues to solve the same trivial mysteries between hangovers and bouts of self-pity until a naïve client (Nelisse) brings him his first "adult" case – to find out who brutally murdered her boyfriend.

Orange Is the New Black actor Pablo Schreiber has signed to star opposite Gerard Butler in STX's heist thriller Den of Thieves. Christian Gudegast is set to direct from the original screenplay he co-wrote with Paul Sheuring, which focuses on $120 million that is taken out of circulation on a daily basis by the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Reserve and a notorious crew of robbers that plan the ultimate heist right under the noses of the city's best cops. Butler will play the head of a team of agents looking to stop the heist, while Schreiber will play the leader of the bank robbers. Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson and O'Shea Jackson are also in the cast.

The growing list of characters introduced into the Ocean's Eight ensemble cast has expanded further with the addition of British actor Richard Armitage (The Hobbit, Alice Through The Looking Glass), although details of his character are being kept under wraps.

A trailer was released for the indie thriller City of Tiny Lights, written by Patrick Neate and based on his own 2005 novel of same name. Riz Ahmed plays Londoner Tommy Akhtar, a private eye who gets caught up in a dangerous case surrounding a high-class prostitute.

A new trailer was released for the upcoming John Wick sequel with Keanu Reeves returning as legendary hitman John Wick, who is forced back out of retirement when a former associate plots to seize control of a shadowy international assassins' guild.

TELEVISION

Stephen Susco, the writer behind hit thrillers The Grudge and The Grudge 2, has been set to adapt Fiona Cummins’ upcoming debut novel Rattle for television as a six-part series. The story centers on a sinister bone collector who has a macabre obsession with his museum of medical oddities and when the time comes for a fresh harvest, it’s down to Detective Etta Fitzroy to hunt down the psychopath before he can add to his collection.  

ABC has given a new pilot order to the prolific and successful Shondaland Productions. The untitled legal drama will be set in the Southern District of New York Federal Court (a/k/a "The Mother Court") and follow brand-new lawyers working for both the defense and the prosecution as they handle the most high profile and high stakes cases in the country – all as their personal lives intersect.

ABC has given pilot orders to two more drama projects, including Deception, an FBI crime drama procedural from Chuck co-creator Chris Fedak, magician David Kwong, Blindspot creator Martin Gero, and Berlanti TV. The drama centers on superstar magician Cameron Black, who has only one place to turn to practice his art of deception, illusion, and influence after his career is ruined—the FBI. He’ll become the world’s first consulting illusionist, helping the government solve crimes that defy explanation, and trap criminals and spies by using deception.

Jessica Biel will star in and executive produce a new anthology series titled The Sinner for USA Network that's based on Petra Hammesfahr’s book of the same name. The first season/installment of the close-ended series follows a young mother (Biel) who, when overcome by an inexplicable fit of rage, commits a startling act of violence and to her horror has no idea why. The event draws in an investigator (Bill Pullman) who finds himself obsessed with uncovering the woman’s buried motive. Together they travel a harrowing journey into the depths of her psyche and the violent secrets hidden in her past.

Jharrel Jerome (Moonlight) has joined the cast of David E. Kelley's Mr. Mercedes series, the adaptation of Stephen King's 2014 novel of the same name. The drama follows a demented killer (Penny Dreadful's Harry Treadaway) who taunts a retired police detective (Brendan Gleeson) 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 is able to strike again. Jerome will play Jerome Robinson, a high school student who does yard work for the detective and helps with technical support.

Cold Case Files’ True Crime Series is getting a reboot on the A&E Network, which will premiere the 10-episode series beginning February 27, with Danny Glover as narrator.

TNT has given a sixth-season pickup to its popular crime-drama Major Crimes, although the order is for 13 episodes, down from recent years. The drama centers on a special squad within the LAPD that deals with high-profile or particularly sensitive crimes, led by Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell).

NBC will broadcast a preview of Dick Wolf’s Chicago Justice, the newest installment of the producer’s successful Chicago franchise, on Wednesday, March 1. The preview will immediately follow a crossover event between Chicago Fire at 8 p.m. and Chicago P.D. at 9 p.m. that is set to introduce a storyline that seamlessly flows into Chicago Justice.

For those Blacklist fans who are wondering how the spinoff show is going to work since one of the series' main characters, Tom Keen, will be making the transition between The Blacklist and The Blacklist: Redemption, worry no more. On February 23, NBC is giving the two shows a two-hour block so that one show will sign off and the next one will sign on afterward, and Tom Keen will simply walk from one episode into the next. The show also confirmed there are plans to keep Ryan Eggold's character Tom Keen on the flagship series, so even if The Blacklist: Redemption doesn't work out over the long haul, he will still be around.

The ratings for ABC's FBI series Quantico have been falling, and showrunner Joshua Safran has revealed the show is making a big change to cater to its viewers: Quantico is getting rid of its flashbacks because viewers weren't huge fans of the device during Season 1.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Thriller author Rebecca Forster was one of the latest to join in the Female Crime Fiction Writers Month celebration at Authors on the Air.

The Two Crime Writers And A Microphone podcast discussed Mark Billingham's forthcoming new Thorne novel, Martyn Waites's return to his usual name, and the crime genre. This week's special guest is debut novelist Joseph Knox.

THEATER

Murder, Margaret and Me is set to open at Norwich theatre in the UK with a run through January 28. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between crime writer Agatha Christie and actress Margaret Rutherford during the filming of the first Miss Marple film. "The play is about the process of creating and the conflicts of artistic creation. A question of ownership of character," said Phillip Meeks, the play’s writer. "But the play also pays homage to Margaret Rutherford. It’s half a biographical play."

Casting has been announced for the world premiere stage adaptation at Manchester's HOME theater of Paul Auster's City of Glass, marking the first time Auster's 1985 novel about a crime writer has been adapted for the stage. Mark Edel-Hunt and Chris New will play writer Daniel Quinn, who receives a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night. He is later hired by a strange woman called Virginia to protect her and her husband from her sociopath father-in-law. City of Glass will run from March 9-18 at HOME then move to Lyric Hammersmith from April 26 to 13 May.

Your Sunday Music Treat

The output of John Philip Sousa, the American "March King," wasn't just "Stars and Stripes Forever." He also wrote works like "Hands Across the Sea," which the composer said was "addressed to no particular nation, but to all of America's friends abroad." Here it is performed by the Boston Pops Orchestra as conducted by John Williams: 

Quote of the Week

FFB: A Night at the Cemetery

A doctor by trade, although better known for his classic plays like The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov actually began his literary career writing stories, many of which were in the psychological suspense vein. They were published in a wide variety of periodicals and literary publications, many under the pseudonym of Antosha Chekhonte and mostly written to pay the bills to help put him through medical school. It's not a big a leap as many would suspect—Chekhov worked for a time with police assisting with autopsies in criminal investigations.

Peter Sekirin, who works at the Center for Russian Studies at the University of Toronto, collected 42 of these stories and compiled them into "A Night in the Cemetery," published in 2008. As Otto Penzler pointed out for the New York Sun, these are not mystery stories as you may think of them, containing "A lot of drunken behavior, frequently resulting in forgetfulness, which leads to a kind of 'mystery,' as in: What happened? There are occasional policemen, and they invariably leap to erroneous conclusions. Apparent crimes have other, frequently humorous, explanations. Terrors brought on by seemingly supernatural occurrences derive from comical misunderstandings."

Present throughout the collection, even among these early works, are Chekhov's penetrating psychological insight and microscopic views into the absurdity of human nature. His characters here, as in his mature works, are more often than not passive, weak and irrational, although they yearn to make things better or find ways to justify their existence.

In "The Swedish Match," which pokes fun at deductive reasoning, a pair of bumbling detectives find their suspect list growing as they investigate a bizarre murder case after finding "evidence" that the victim was strangled and carried out the window, then later stabbed in the garden to finish him off. The trail leads to the police superintendent's young wife, although not everything is at it seems; in the comically macabre tale, "A Night of Horror," a man finds a pink-glazed coffin in his apartment. His distress only increases as he runs to one friend and then another to find more coffins appearing in apartments.

Other offerings include "A Crime: A Double Murder Case," which is short, but interesting as an early example of noir;  "Thieves," a simple-minded doctor's assistant falls among a temptress and robbers which leads to a personal meltdown as "He realized that it was only due to his lack of opportunity that he had not become a thief or a cheat."; and "The Drama at the Hunt," one of the longest stories in the collection, which revolves around three men who love the same woman, ultimately leading to betrayal, humiliation and murder.

As with all translations, I find it frustrating not to be multilingual so I can read them in the original language (I once tried to teach myself Cyrillic, with less-than-steller results), wondering about all the subtleties and authorial voice I'm missing. These stories generally show signs of a young writer coming into his own, but even a young Chekhov in translation creates characters who will stay with you.

Mystery Melange

This year's list of nominees for the Left Coast Conference's Lefty Awards have been announced, including the Lefty for Best Humorous Novel honorees: Donna Andrews, Die Like an Eagle;  Ellen Byron, Body on the Bayou; Timothy Hallinan, Fields Where They Lay; Heather Haven, The CEO Came DOA; Johnny Shaw, Floodgate; and Diane Vallere, A Disguise To Die For. For all the categories and finalists, check out the Mystery Fanfare site.  The 27th annual Left Coast Crime Convention will take place in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 16–19, where Faye Kellerman and Jonathan Kellerman will be honored with Left Coast Crime Lifetime Achievement Awards.

The Center for Fiction in New York City's next CFA Master Class will be with Scottish crime author Ian Rankin on Tuesday February 7, 2017. Rankin's Inspector Rebus series turns 30 this year, and he will delve into his decades of experience writing the series and crime fiction in general as part of the class.

Fans of the historical mystery TV series Miss Fisher should take note:  a new convention, Miss Fisher Con, is headed to Las Vegas' Vdara Hotel from May 4-7, 2017. Events will include discussion sessions, a costume contest, scavenger hunt, and more. (HT to Mystery Fanfare.)

Miss Fischer fans (of the TV series or the original book series by Kerry Greenwood) may also be interested to hear that Tin Man Games plans to release the graphic novel Miss Fisher and the Deathly Maze later this year.

Congrats to the new chairman of the Crime Writers' Association in the UK, Martin Edwards, in what also happens to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of his joining the CWA. The organization hosts several events each year, as well as advocating for authors and sponsoring the prestigious Dagger Awards. Edwards is the first person to hold that position and the presidency of The Detection Club (founded in 1930 by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and others) simultaneously.

Author and editor Paul Brazill announced that A Twist of Noir is back and seeking stories of 1000 words or less in any genre as long as there is a crime and noir theme. Meanwhile, the new website is up with some stories to tide you over. (HT to Sandra Seamans.)

Former HLN host Nancy Grace has launched a new crime news website called Crime Online, which bills itself as an "intersection of crime-reporting and crime-fighting." Grace’s new digital media venture includes a podcast and will allow readers to engage by providing their own input and theories.

Washington Post book reviewer Maureen Corrigan took exception to the recent spate of suspense books with "girl" in the title, adding that "When an old dame like Jessica Fletcher displays more sang-froid in confronting the psychopaths of Cabot Cove than most of these girls do in routinely opening their refrigerators, perhaps it’s time for less malady and more moxie in female suspense fiction."

One of the fictional stars of Spanish crime fiction, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s gourmand private eye Pepe Carvalh, is getting a new case in a novel by Carlos Zanón. Zanón takes up the story line of Carvalh thirteen years after the death of Montalbán with the blessing of the author's family and publishers.

As the Agatha Christie commemorations continue (from 2016) for her 125th anniversary and also the 100th anniversary of Poirot's debut, Emily Temple compiled a list for LitHub of "30 Essential Crime Reads Written by Women in the Last 100 Years" In honor of Dame Agatha.

If you'd like to explore the works of female crime writers even further, the Mystery People's Molly Odintz compiled a list of fifty such mystery novel titles.

The Strand Magazine put together a list of the "Top 8 Mysteries set in China," selected for historical and social interest.

If legal crime thrillers are more your thing, Peter Manus profiled the genre and picked his "favorite lawyers in crime fiction."

It's amazing what people had the time to do before television and the Internet. As an example, check out these "40 Hidden Artworks Painted on the Edges of Books."

The featured poem at the 5-2 this week is "You Tell Me" by David Spicer, and the latest story at Beat to a Pulp is "Creepy" by Alec Cizak.

In the Q&A roundup, the Mystery People welcomed Richard Newman, whose Graveyard Of The Gods made their list of the Top 5 Debut Crime Novels Of 2016, as well as author Tim Bryant (author of the P.I. Alvin "Dutch" Curridge series), and author Mette Ivie Harrison; and Jeffrey E. Seay stopped by Omnimystery News to talk about his latest thriller featuring NCIS Special Agent Ruben Carver.

Media Murder for Monday

AWARDS

The British Academy Film & Television Awards, or BAFTAs, announced lists of the best films of the year. There aren't many crime dramas in the running, but multiple nominations were handed out to both the neo-noir psychological thriller Nocturnal Animals and the science fiction mystery film Arrival, as well as leading Oscar contenders La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, and Nocturnal Animals.

The Directors Guild of America announced awards for film and TV excellence in direction. On the film side, the honorees reflected the BAFTAs and Golden Globes already announced, while on the TV side, the crime drama nods included Ryan Murphy and John Singleton, both nominated in the Drama Series categories for episodes from The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story; Raymond de Felitta for Madoff; and Steven Zaillan for The Night Of.

MOVIES

The cast of Ocean's 8 is welcoming late night talk show host James Corden to the cast, playing an insurance investigator who grows suspicious of the ladies’ plan to mount a large-scale act of thievery in New York City. The all-star cast includes Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina, and Helena Bonham Carter.

Warner Bros. has released the first official trailer for CHiPS, a feature length comedic adaptation of the 1970s-80s NBC TV drama about motorcycle cop partners in the California Highway Patrol based out of Los Angeles.

TELEVISION

AMC and the BBC are re-teaming with The Ink Factory for a limited adaptation of another John le Carré bestselling novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, with Oscar winner Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) set to write the adaptation. This is the first TV series treatment for the book, which was the basis for the 1965 Paramount feature film starring Richard Burton. Le Carré, who served as a writer along with Paul Dehn on the 1965 film, will also executive produce the TV project.

Marc Cherry, the creator of Desperate Housewives and Devious Maids, has landed ABC’s first pilot order of the season with an untitled project starring Reba McEntire. She'll play Ruby Adair, the sheriff of a colorful small Kentucky town, who finds her red state outlook challenged when a young FBI agent of Middle Eastern descent is sent to help her solve a horrific crime. Together they form an uneasy alliance as Ruby takes the agent behind the lace curtains of this Southern Gothic community to meet an assortment of bizarre characters, each with a secret of their own.

Lifetime has put in development the psychological thriller You, based on Caroline Kepnes’ best-selling novel of the same name. It is described as "a 21st century love story about an obsessive, yet brilliant twenty-something who uses the hyper connectivity of today’s technology to make the woman of his dreams fall in love with him."

Four days after TNT’s drama Good Behavior ended its 10-episode first-season run, the show has been picked up for a fall 2017 second season. The series, based on a series of books by Blake Crouch, tells the story of Letty Raines (Michelle Dockery), a thief and con artist whose life is always one wrong turn or one bad decision from implosion. Fresh out of prison, Letty tries to stay afloat but gets sucked back into the criminal world when she overhears a hitman being hired to kill a man’s wife and decides to derail the job, with the help of her parole officer (Terry Kinney).

Dakota Fanning is set as the female lead opposite Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans in TNT’s upcoming straight-to-series drama The Alienist, based on the international best-selling novel by Caleb Carr. The psychological thriller is set during the Gilded Age of New York City in 1896, where newly appointed police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt calls upon criminal psychologist (aka alienist) Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl)) and newspaper reporter John Moore (Evans) to conduct a secret investigation into a series of haunting, gruesome murders. Fanning will play a headstrong NYPD secretary named Sara Howard, who helps her colleagues investigate the murders.

Weeds alum Hunter Parrish has booked a major recurring role in ABC drama series Quantico, playing a political strategist forced to join forces with the CIA and FBI during the aftermath of the G20 hostage crisis.

Meredith Eaton (Boston Legal) has joined the cast of CBS’ MacGyver remake as a series regular, playing Matty Webber, the new director of operations at the Phoenix Foundation. Mac (Lucas Till) and the team, with the exception of Jack (George Eads), are excited to meet their new boss, who is known as a legend in Covert Ops.

Shots Fired, Fox’s 10-hour event series, will debut at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. The show, from executive producers Gina Prince-Bythewood, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Brian Grazer and Francie Calfo, examines the dangerous aftermath of two racially charged shootings in a small Southern town.

Showtime president and CEO David Nevins revealed at the Television Critics Association winter previews that David Lynch's reboot of Twin Peaks will premiere with a two-hour episode Sunday, May 21 on Showtime, while a new trailer for the series was also released. The project picks up twenty-five years after the original Twin Peaks when the inhabitants of a quaint northwestern town were stunned after their homecoming queen Laura Palmer was shockingly murdered.

20th Century Fox TV is circling a revival of the Emmy-winning 1980s NBC legal drama L.A. Law, with original series co-creator Steven Bochco conceiving the project as set in 2016 Los Angeles and revolving around new characters (young lawyers), while also featuring several characters from the original series as bosses.

The X-Files sequel is closer to becoming a reality, according to Fox entertainment president David Madden, although many details need to be worked out before it actually comes to fruition. Fox chairman Gary Newman also commented on the fate of Wayward Pines, noting that it wasn't dead yet, but won't be returning this summer.

One show not closer to reality is the proposed TV adaptation of the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction (starring Michael Douglas and Glen Close), which has been shot down due to "casting issues."

The first trailer was released for Snatch, Crackle’s upcoming original scripted series based loosely on the 2000 Guy Ritchie-directed crime/comedy film of the same name. Set to premiere on Crackle on March 16, the 10 episode series (supposedly inspired by a real-life heist), stars Harry Potter's Rupert Grint and follows a group of twenty-something hustlers who stumble upon a truck load of stolen gold bullion and are thrust into the high-stakes world of organized crime.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Screenwriter Nina Sadowsky joined Alex Dolan on Thrill Seekers to discuss her first novel, Just Fall, which is currently being adapted for a series on the Starz network.

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomed three more women authors in the "Nasty Women of January: Female Crime Fiction Writer" series: Danielle Girard, the author of nine novels, including Chasing Darkness and Savage Art, as well as The Rookie Club series; Elizabeth Heiter, who writes a series featuring FBI profiler Evelyn Baine; and organized-crime thriller writer Dina Santorelli.