Welcome to a new Monday and a new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN
Lawrence Kasdan (of Star Wars fame) is turning his attention next to the JFK assassination, acquiring the film rights to November Road, the new novel from Edgar Award-winning author Lou Berney. The story follows Frank Guidry, who is connected to the president's murder, and when other loose ends begin dying all around him, Frank knows he’s next. Hunted by a ruthless hitman hired by his ex-boss, Frank heads across the desert where he meets Charlotte Roy, who is running away from her small-town life and abusive alcoholic husband with two young daughters and an epileptic dog in tow. Guidry sees this instant family scenario as the perfect cover, and Charlotte sees him as her best chance at a new life—if they can escape before his past catches up to them.
Liam Neeson and Kate Walsh are set to star in Honest Thief, a film to be directed by Mark Williams, who co-created the hit Netflix series Ozark. Neeson plays a career bank robber who meets the love his life in Annie (Walsh), a clerk at a storage facility where he hid $7 million in stolen loot. They fall head over heels, and he resolves to wipe the slate clean by turning himself in. When the case is turned over to a crooked FBI agent, everything becomes far more dangerous and difficult.
Emmy winner Sarah Paulson (American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson) has been tapped as the lead in the Lionsgate thriller, Run, which will reunite the team behind the Sundance award-winning film, Searching, with its helmer Aneesh Chaganty attached to direct. The story follows a teenaged girl, raised in total isolation by her mother (Paulson), whose life begins to unravel as she discovers her mother’s sinister secret.
Freya Tingley (Hemlock Grove) and Paul Rae (True Grit) will star in the indie thriller Year Of The Detectives, which goes into production this month in LA. Tingley will play Nic O’Connell who inherits her grandfathers’ long-running private detective agency in the heart of Chinatown. She and her co-inheritor must put aside their differences to solve the final mystery of their grandparents’ deaths, with Rae playing the detective who reluctantly joins their effort as the bodies pile up.
Golden Globe winner Rachel Brosnahan is set to co-star with Benedict Cumberbatch in the Cold War drama, Ironbark. Dominic Cooke is on board to direct the feature from a screenplay by The Hitman’s Bodyguard scribe Tom O’Connor. The project is based on the true story of Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch), a British businessman who helped the CIA penetrate the Soviet nuclear program during the Cold War. Wynne and his Russian source, Oleg Penkovsky, provided the crucial intelligence that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brosnahan will play Emily Donovan, the brilliant, determined CIA agent who runs Wynne and Penkovsky’s espionage operation.
Matthew McConaughey is joining writer/director Guy Ritchie in a return to British crime dramas via Toff Guys. McConaughey will star alongside Kate Beckinsale and Crazy Rich Asians breakout star Henry Golding in the story that explores the collision between old money in Europe and the modern marijuana industrial complex with new gang entrants swarming.
The mystery drama Knives Out keeps filling out its all-star roster. Following the producers' announcement Daniel Craig and Chris Evans were set to co-star, comes news that Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water, The Little Drummer Girl) will also be joining the project, the plot of which is, well, mysterious thus far, but is described "as a modern-day murder mystery in the classic Agatha Christie whodunit style."
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
Netflix has picked up The Laundromat, the Steven Soderbergh-directed drama about the Panama Papers scandal. David Schwimmer has just joined an all-star cast led by Oscar-winning Darkest Hour star Gary Oldman, The Post's Meryl Streep and Life Itself's Antonio Banderas. The film has a script by Scott Z. Burns, based on the Jake Bernstein book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite.
Writer-director Leslye Headland will adapt and direct the movie thriller Tell Me Everything for Netflix, which preemptively swooped on screen rights to the project earlier this year. It’s based on Cambria Brockman’s debut novel, which Ballantine acquired at auction for a June 2019 street date. Set at an elite college in small-town New England, it follows the shifting alliances and romantic entanglements of six tight-knit students — until one of them is murdered.
Fox has given a script commitment plus penalty to Saturday Night Special, a police drama from Black List writer Robert Specland. Saturday Night Special is a grounded police soap exploring a tight-knit group of Washington D.C. cops with focus on "the wildest, most dangerous shift of the week, giving us an in-depth look at the police force from the top down, Lieutenant to rookies, and how a job like this affects each of their lives, and their lives affect the job."
Rob Lowe is set to star in the six-part British crime drama Wild Bill for ITV, playing the high-flying US cop, Bill Hixon, who is appointed Chief Constable of the East Lincolnshire Police Force. The story follows follow Lowe’s Hixon as he lands in Lincolnshire with his 14 year-old daughter Kelsey, hoping to flee their recent painful past. Whip-smart, acerbic and unstoppable, Bill is very good at what he does but from the outset Bill isn’t about making friends—until he soon discovers the people of Boston are just as smart-mouthed, cynical and difficult to impress as he is.
Tobias Lindholm, one of the writers behind the Danish TV hit Borgen, is to turn the murder of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall into a six-part TV series – but the killer, the self-taught rocket engineer Peter Madsen, will not feature. The project will instead primarily focus on the police investigation of Wall's murder when she went missing in August 2017 after boarding Madsen’s homemade submarine for a profile she was writing about him. Her dismembered body was found floating in the Copenhagen harbor shortly afterward. Madsen maintains that Wall died in an accident on the submarine, and that he “buried her at sea,” but he was found guilty of her murder in April.
Paris-based company About Premium Content is on board to co-finance The Murders, a gritty eight-part Canadian police thriller series. Gotham's Jessica Lucas stars as Kate Jameson, a rookie homicide detective who searches for redemption in her investigative work after indirectly causing the death of a fellow officer. Jameson is partnered with detective Mike Huntley (Lochlyn Munroe) with whom she navigates the case of a mysterious serial killer who uses music for destructive ends.
A Star is Born's Rafi Gavron is set as a series regular opposite Forest Whitaker and Vincent D’Onofrio in Godfather of Harlem, Epix’s straight-to-series crime drama. Written and executive produced by Chris Brancato (Narcos) and Paul Eckstein, Godfather of Harlem is inspired by the true story of infamous crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Whitaker), who in the early 1960s returned from ten years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy must take on the Genovese crime family to regain control and forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X. Gavron plays Ernie Nunzi, a flashy young mobster with dreams of getting “made,” into the Genovese Family.
Katherine LaNasa (Imposters) has joined the cast of Are You Sleeping, the upcoming Apple thriller drama series starring Octavia Spencer and Lizzy Caplan, in a major recurring role. She'll play a new character that replaces the one previously played by Moon Bloodgood who was cast as a series regular on the show but exited after four of the eight Season 1 episodes were filmed. As part of the recasting, the role of Poppy’s right hand was re-conceived, and LaNasa will play Noa Havilland, Poppy’s (Spencer) producing partner. Are You Sleeping is based on the true-crime novel by Kathleen Barber and takes a look into America’s obsession with true-crime podcasts, challenging its viewers to consider the consequences when the pursuit of justice is placed on a public stage.
Ozark has been renewed for a third season of 10 episodes at Netflix. The crime drama stars Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner, Julia Garner, Jason Butler Harner, Peter Mullan, and Lisa Emery and focuses on the Byrde family, with patriarch Marty (Bateman) working as a financial adviser as well as a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel.
The first trailer for AMC’s upcoming miniseries Little Drummer Girl was released, and it features Alexander Skarsgard, Michael Shannon and Florence Pugh in an international game of espionage. The 1970s-set thriller is based on John le Carré’s novel of the same name, and tells the story of young actress Charlie (Pugh), who gets caught up in Israeli intelligence officer Becker’s complex and high-stakes plot orchestrated by Spymaster Kurtz (Shannon).
Bravo released a trailer for Dirty John, its upcoming series based on the true-crime podcast of the same name. It follows the twisted story of Debra Newell Stewart, a divorceé in Los Angeles who meets the too-good-to-be-true John Meehan on a dating site. They hit it off and things move at warp speed, but something is amiss from the start.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
Suspense Magazine's Story Blender podcast welcomed Karin Slaughter to discuss her passion for sharing empowering and honest stories of women including her latest novel, Pieces of Her.
The legendary Lawrence Block stopped by the Writer Types podcast. Hosts Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden also asked five questions with Stephen Jay Schwartz, and Karen Olson sat down for a chat. Plus this week's Unpanel featured award winners Meg Gardiner, Attica Locke, and Kristen Lepionka.
The latest Mysteryrat’s Maze Podcast Featuring the first Haunted Bookshop Mystery by Cleo Coyle, The Ghost and Mrs. McClure, with excerpts read by Max Debbas.
Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham talked about some casting news, other exciting podcasts, lots of Tana French mentions, plus some book recommendations for Hispanic Heritage Month.
Speaking of Mysteries spoke with Lou Berney and his new novel November Road, where cataclysmic events, chance encounters, and unintended consequences collide.
THEATER
The Metropolitan Opera will premiere Nico Muhly's Marnie on October 19. The production is a re-imagining of Winston Graham’s thriller novel set in the 1950s about a beautiful, mysterious young woman who assumes multiple identities. Director Michael Mayer and his creative team have devised a fast-moving, cinematic world for the twisty story of denial and deceit, which also inspired a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard sings the enigmatic Marnie, and baritone Christopher Maltman is the man who pursues her—with disastrous results
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