In Reference to Murder

Quote of the Week

FFB: Death of an Old Girl

Elizabeth Wharton Lemarchand (1906-2000) was born in Barnstaple, England, and spent most of her life as a headmistress. When she was forced to retire early due to an illness, she turned her hand to short stories, with some success. By this time, she was in her 60s, but long a fan of the Golden Age authors of detective fiction, she decided to give novels a try herself, creating the investigative team of Superintendent Tom Pollard and Sergeant Gregory Toye.

The author once remarked that "I employ only settings of which I have some personal knowledge," which is why it was a no-brainer for her first novel in 1967, Death of an Old Girl, to be set at a boarding school for girls. She may have taken some inspiration, too, from one her Golden Age idols, Agatha Christie, who had penned her own boarding-school mystery, Cat Among the Pigeons, a few years earlier in 1959.

In this inaugural Pollard and Toye story, the detective pair are called in to investigate when an "old girl" (alumna) of the Meldon School for Girls is found murdered in a puppet theater at the end of the annual Old Girls' Reunion weekend. The old girl in question, Beatrice Baynes, had criticized the new administration, the new teaching staff and the new curriculum, but that hardly appears motive for murder. But soon the suspects begin piling up, headed by the victim's lazy nephew George and timid god-daughter Madge who both stand to inherit a tidy sum of money, as well as the school's cast of characters, including the headmistress, art teacher and groundskeeper. As Pollard meticulously pieces together every second of the victim's last moments alive, he begins to learn he's going to have to identify the killer first in order to uncover the motive, with a little help from Pollard's perceptive wife, Jane.

As with most third-person omniscient narratives, Lemarchand's characters aren't fully fleshed out, but it's not surprising there is a great deal of attention to setting; the author once wrote an essay for City and Shore: the Function of Setting in the British Mystery, in which she said:

"I wonder why my books are so WHERE dominated...I think the most likely explanation is that I first came to detective fiction in the Golden Age of the 20s and 30s and have ever since been under the spell of the master craftsmen of the period such as Dorothy L Sayers and Freeman Wills Croft. It was their vivid portrayal of the settings in which their impeccable plots unfolded that made the whodunits of this time to absorbing to me. The action was intimately associated with and conditioned by the milieu in which it took place, and this gave it conviction."

Fans of today's faster-paced crime fiction novels may find this book a bit tedious and difficult to wade into, with a heavy emphasis on timetables and a lot of static discussions, but if you stick with it, it's an entertaining nod to the Golden Age complete with the stereotypical small English village, a closed set of characters, rules of fair play and a who-dunnit puzzle. FYI, the BBC Afternoon Plays (1984 - 2002) dramatized Death of an Old Girl, which premiered on television on December 23, 1973. 

You should be able to find a copy of the book fairly easily since Startup publisher Sapere released all seventeen of Marchand's novels as part of its launch in 2018.

Mystery Melange

Twenty-eight writers have made the Dead Good Reader Awards shortlists, following a record number of nominations. The awards, a mainstay of the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival, are now in their fifth year with six new categories including best amateur detective, best revenge thriller, and most recommended read. After being voted on by the community of crime fans in the UK, the winners will be announced on Friday July 19 at the Harrogate festival. Here's the link for readers to vote for their favorite shortlisted authors and books.

St Hilda's College Crime Fiction Weekend announced a special prize to be awarded at the event, which takes place August 16-18. For the past few years the PD James dinner at the Crime Fiction Weekend has featured a specially written after-dinner play, challenging guests to figure out "whodunnit." This year the amateur sleuth to crack the mystery crafted by author Natasha Cooper (a Crime Weekend’s Emeritus Fellow) will win a subscription to Blackwell’s Crime Fiction Gift Club.

The Center for Fiction in New York City has a couple of crime fiction events coming up in July as part of the "Crime Fiction Masters" series. On July 10, authors Alison Gaylin and Alifair Burke will explore the themes of misunderstood women and dark family secrets, and on July 12, Harlan Coben and John Sandford will talk about the inspiration for their most recent books, their writing process, and answer audience questions.

In honor of June being LGBT Pride Month to commemorate the Stonewall riots, History took a look back at the 1940s, '50s and '60s when police arrested LGBTQ people based on an informal "three-article" rule.

Writing for the Washington Post, crime author Laura Lippman addressed the topic of white authors writing black characters.

The PBA Galleries is auctioning off a roster of "Fine Literature with Mystery & Detective Fiction" today, in 519 lots. One of the pricier items is a first edition, signed, of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, estimated at $3,000–5,000. Some of the crime fiction titles up for bidding include three wrapper-bound first editions of Raymond Chandler mysteries; a first edition of Ian Fleming's James Bond novel, Dr. No; a first edition of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock; several works by the "laureate of American lowlife," Charles Bukowski, and much more.

Publishers Weekly profiled Minotaur Books, the mystery imprint of St. Martin's Press that is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

Summer means travel, and travel for many means beach reads and those beaches are often in Florida. Writing for Bookriot, Matt Coleman is touring the country by way of its best crime fiction, beginning with the Sunshine State.

Rapid DNA machines roughly the size of an office printer have helped solve rape cases in Kentucky, identified California wildfire victims, and verified family connections of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Now a state board in Texas has asked a growing government provider of the DNA equipment used in those high-profile projects to halt work amid concerns of potentially jeopardized criminal cases.

Fans of David Baldacci's thrillers, take note: you can enter for your chance to win the complete "Memory Man" series signed by Baldacci. The promotion ends July 7th.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "First Degree Murder" by Roseanne Fahey.

In the Q&A roundup, Writer's Digest interviewed Karin Slaughter, who talked about what led to her Save the Libraries nonprofit, social media for authors, and what the future holds for her beloved characters; The National Writers Series, a year-round book festival in Traverse City, welcomed authors Steve Hamilton, Bryan Gruley and Daniel H. Pink to the City Opera House stage, and the three participated in a Q&A online; Sisters in Crime Australia chatted with Joanne Baker about her latest book, The Slipping Place, a murder mystery about mystery.

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Paramount Pictures has acquired the screen rights to Adrian McKinty’s novel, The Chain. The Chain tells the story of Rachel, who learns that her 11-year-old daughter has been kidnapped, and the only way to get her back is to kidnap another child. Her daughter will be released only when that next victim’s parents kidnap another child. If Rachel doesn’t kidnap another child, or if that child’s parents don’t kidnap a child, her daughter will be murdered. She is now part of The Chain, a terrifying and meticulous chain letter-like kidnapping scheme that turns parents from victims into criminals.

Lionsgate has acquired global film rights to Gerard de Villiers’ best-selling action-spy series, S.A.S. The project will be titled Malko and is a project for Michael Fassbender to star in and produce, with Oscar-nominated screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (American Hustle) writing the screenplay. With the deal, Lionsgate has secured the full rights to de Villier’s catalogue of best selling espionage thrillers, serialized through 200 books that have been translated into multiple languages and sold north of 120M copies worldwide. Fassbender will play the super spy-for-hire, Malko Linge, an Austrian nobleman and freelance CIA operative who spent his formative years in a special Nazi work camp for captured spies.

The Spanish box office hit, The Body (El Cuerpo), is set to get an English-language remake with Isaac Ezban directing. The thriller centers on a detective searching for the body of a femme fatale which has gone missing from a morgue.

Sean Penn's next directorial venture, Flag Day, is heading into production as it rounds out its cast; Penn will be joined onscreen by his daughter and son, Dylan and Hopper, along with Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Norbert Leo Butz, Dale Dickey, Eddie Marsan, Bailey Noble, and Katheryn Winnick. Tony-winning playwright Jez Butterworth (behind Broadway’s The Ferryman) penned the screenplay, which is based on Jennifer Vogel’s 2005 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life. The book tells the story of a daughter coming to terms with her perceptions of her criminal father, a bank robber and career counterfeiter who evaded arrest for six months.

Cary Elwes has joined the cast of Black Christmas, the Blumhouse Productions remake of the 1974 slasher cult classic for Universal Pictures. Elwes will play a main part in the film, but details of the role were not disclosed. The updated version of Black Christmas is set at Hawthorne College over the holidays when, one by one, sorority girls on campus are being killed by an unknown stalker. But the killer is about to discover that this generation’s young women aren’t willing to become hapless victims as they mount a fight to the finish.

Ice Cube is negotiating to team with Dave Bautista in The Killer’s Game, the Simon Kinberg and Rand Ravich-scripted adaptation of the Jay Bonansinga novel. Bautista plays an elite hitman named Joe Flood who learns he has a terminal disease. A devout Catholic, he won’t kill himself, and instead takes out a contract on himself and makes sure the woman he has fallen in love with is financially set. When Flood gets word he was misdiagnosed and is fine, his new mission is to protect his lover and try to call off the hit even though several assassins are now vying for the bounty, with Ice Cube playing the best of those assassins.

Eiza Gonzalez (Baby Driver) is joining I Care A Lot, the Black Bear Pictures thriller starring Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage. J Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) is directing from his own original screenplay. Oscar-nominee Pike will play Marla Grayson, a highly successful legal guardian with a knack for using the law to her benefit and her elderly clients’ detriment, living a life of luxury at their expense. But when her seemingly innocent next victim turns out to have dangerous secrets, Marla must use every ounce of her wit and cunning to stay alive.

Morena Baccarin is the latest to join the cast of the Tim Kirkby-directed action thriller, Waldo, starring Mel Gibson and Charlie Hunnam. The project is based on the novel, Last Looks, by Howard Michael Gould, and centers around a disgraced LAPD detective (Hunnam), who’s spent the past three years living off the grid. He’s reluctantly pulled back into his old life by a former lover in order to solve the murder of an eccentric celebrity’s wife. 

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

The Television Critics Association’s 35th Annual TCA Awards nominations were announced last Wednesday. Up for Best Drama Series are the crime dramas Better Call Saul (AMC); The Good Fight (CBS All Access); and Killing Eve (BBC America). Best Movie or Miniseries also includes Escape at Dannemora (Showtime); Sharp Objects (HBO); and When They See Us (Netflix). Among the Best Achievement in a Drama Series nominees are Amy Adams for Sharp Objects (HBO); Patricia Arquette for Escape at Dannemora (Showtime); Christine Baranski for The Good Fight (CBS All Access); and Jodie Comer for Killing Eve (BBC America).

BET Networks has put into development Black Mambas, a one-hour drama from Rebel creator Amani Walker. Black Mambas follows the journey of four powerful women who are bikers. After growing tired of the violent crimes and injustice in their hometown of New Orleans, they decide to take justice into their own hands.

The Killing’s Michelle Forbes has signed on to USA Network’s CIA drama, Treadstone, joining Jeremy Irvine, Brian J. Smith, Patrick Fugit, Michael Gaston, Tess Haubrich, and Shruti Haasan in the cast. The drama hails from Heroes creator Tim Kring and Ben Smith (a producer of the "Bourne" franchise) and explores the origin story and present-day actions of a CIA black ops program known as Operation Treadstone — a covert program that uses behavior-modification protocol to turn recruits into nearly superhuman assassins. The first season follows sleeper agents across the globe as they’re mysteriously "awakened" to resume their deadly missions.

HBO has scheduled Monday, August 12 for the premiere of the ten-part limited series, Our Boys. The project is set in the summer of 2014, when three Jewish teenagers are kidnapped and murdered by Hamas militants. Two days later, the burned body of a Palestinian teenager from eastern Jerusalem is found in a forest on the western outskirts of the city. In the ensuing days, an agent from the internal terror division of Shin Bet investigates the murder, while the parents of the slain teenager begin their long and anguished journey toward justice and consolation.

The Hallmark Channel posted a trailer for its newest Mystery 101 movie, Playing Dead, where crime fiction professor Amy (Jill Wagner) and Detective Travis (Kristoffer Polaha) team up to solve the latest murder in their small town.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean Horner and Rincey Abraham talked about mysteries by Australian authors, along with some news about Linda Fairstein, women writing in the mystery genre, and more.

Speaking of Mysteries welcomed Cara Black to discuss Murder in Bel-Air, the 19th installment in Black’s Paris-set series featuring private eye, Aimée Leduc.

Spybrary's latest episode featured a guest panel discussing the works of James Bond continuation author, John Gardner.

On this week's Writer's Detective Bureau, host Adam Richardson, a veteran police detective, took on topics including "Character Arc, Detective Sergeant Demotion, and Sex Offenders."

Quote of the Week

FFB: Through a Glass Darkly

Helen McCloy (1904-1994) was the pseudonym of American Golden Age author Helen Clarkson, born in New York City. Her mother was writer Helen Worrell McCloy and her father, William McCloy, longtime managing editor of the New York Evening Sun. She was educated at a Quaker school before heading off to France in 1923 to study at the Sorbonne, then finally working in journalism for Hearst's Universal News Service and as a freelancer and art critic.

McCloy began to write mysteries in the 1930s, with her first novel, Dance of Death, published in 1938. In 1946 she married Davis Dresser, famous for his Mike Shayne novels written under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. The couple founded the Torquil Publishing Company and the literary agency Halliday and McCloy prior to their divorce in 1961. In 1950 she became the first woman to serve as president of Mystery Writers of America, and her contributions to the genre are recognized today by the annual Helen McCloy/MWA Scholarship for Mystery Writing.

Her most famous series character, Dr. Basil Willing debuted in Dance of Death and appeared in 12 novels and several short stories. Willing became interested in psychiatry upon seeing the shell-shocked soldiers during his World War I service, then studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, then in Paris and Vienna, where he acquired his knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis and his belief that "every criminal leaves psychic fingerprints, and he can't wear gloves to hide them."

Willing's actual literary debut was in the short story "Through a Glass Darkly," published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in September 1948 and later expanded into the 1950 novel by the same title. It's a quasi-locked-room a la John Dickson Carr, with a seemingly supernatural twist invovling a Doppelganger in which art teacher Faustina Crayle is fired from Brereton School for Girls mid-term but not given a reason why. Faustina's friend and fellow teacher, Gisela von Weber, also happens to be the fiancee of Basil Willing, who draws him into the case, fearing an injustice has been done.

Willing soon learns that students have seen Faustina appear in places she couldn't have been and when the drama catch has a fatal accident, Faustina is suspected—before Willing discovers that she was the only woman who could never have an alibi.

Author, editor and columnist Nicholas Fuller feels that Through a Glass Darkly, is among the top twenty best detective stories ever written, "both for the way in which its horror arises almost entirely from Jamesian understatement (suggestion and the incongruous presence of the normal create the feeling of something terribly wrong) and for the ambiguous solution."

McCloy spins the Doppleganger theme effectively through her characterizations and prose:

"You enter a room, a street, a country road. You see a figure ahead of you, solid, three-dimensional, brightly coloured. Moving and obeying all the laws of optics. Its clothing and posture is vaguely familiar. You hurry toward the figure for a closer view. It turns its head and - you are looking at yourself. Or rather a perfect mirror-image of yourself only - there is no mirror. So, you know it is your double. And that frightens you, for tradition tells you that he who sees his own double is about to die . . ."

In 1959, writer John Hopkins adapted the story into a teleplay as part of the Saturday Playhouse series that aired on the BBC from 1958 to 1961.

Mystery Melange

The Finalists for the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction have been announced, and readers will now have a chance to vote. The prize, which was authorized by the late Harper Lee, was established in 2011 by the University of Alabama Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law and the ABA Journal to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's given annually to a book-length work of fiction that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change. The books nominated for the ninth annual award are: The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey; Class Action, by Steven B. Frank; and The Boat People, by Sharon Bala.

The Maine Literary Awards were handed out at a ceremony held at the Bangor Public Library recently. This year's winner of the Book Award for Crime Fiction was Stowed Away by Barbara Ross.

Foreword Reviews announced the winners of the Foreword Indies Book Awards, celebrating the best from independent presses and authors. The winners in the Mystery category were:

Gold: One for the Rock by Kevin Major
Silver: A Gentleman's Murder by Christopher Huang
Bronze: Burning Ridge by Margaret Mizushima
Honorable Mention: Uncivil Liberties by Bernie Lambek

In the Thriller & Suspense category:

Gold: The Eighteenth Green by Webb Hubbell
Silver: Speed the Dawn by Philip Donlay
Bronze: The Astronaut's Son by Tom Seigel

Amazon announced its selections for the Best Books of the Year So Far, including those in the Mystery, Thriller & Suspense category. Check out the twenty books that made the list.

The Mystery Writers of America’s board of directors recently approved new procedures for selecting the Special Edgar Awards—including the Raven, the Ellery Queen, and the Grand Master awards. The new procedures are designed to make the process more open and transparent to the entire membership. They also encourage participation from all members of MWA, who are asked to submit nominations for all three awards by July 31.

A record $10,060 is up for grabs in Sisters in Crime Australia’s 26th Scarlet Stiletto Awards for best short crime and mystery stories by Australian women. For the first time there is an award that speaks directly to Australia’s criminal past – the Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival Award for the Best Bushranger Story. The closing date for the awards is August 31, 2019. The Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival is a brand-new biennial celebration of crime fiction, to be held between October 31 and November 5 in Tasmania’s Huon Valley.

Crime author Linda Fairstein has been in the news lately after a rescinded Mystery Writers of America honor (hence the MWA rules change above) and the recent TV mini-series When They See Us that casts her in an unfavorable light as the prosecutor of the infamous Central Park Five rape case. The controversy has renewed cries of proseutorial injustice on Fairstein's behalf and has led to the author being dropped by her agent, publisher, and several boards on which she served. Sarah Weinman penned an article for The Washington Post, which offers up a more nuanced take on the case and Fairstein's role. Weinman concludes that "canceling Fairstein herself may be emotionally satisfying. But it doesn’t account for the very real change she helped bring about. And without concerted effort and work, it won’t prevent other prosecutors from making the same terrible decisions that inflicted such a dreadful cost on the Central Park Five and on Matias Reyes’s (the real rapist) other victims.

Peter Harrington, the UK’s largest rare bookseller, is celebrating its 50th anniversary by offering up for sale an exceptional collection of Ian Fleming material for £2.5m, which it will be exhibiting at this year’s Masterpiece London. It is the most significant Fleming Collection to ever appear on the market and contains inscribed first editions of every James Bond book published in the author’s lifetime. 

Is China about to witness a crime wave? CrimeReads notes that readers in China are showing an appetite for crime stories like never before, especially among younger audiences in China. Article writer Paul French adds that there was always an enthusiastic market for Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, but now Chinese fans are becoming more diversified in their crime tastes.

The Daily Mail reported on the real No. 1 Lady Detective, Maud West, a real-life female Sherlock Holmes who caught adulterers, blackmailers and thieves in early 20th century Edwardian London. Susannah Stapleton has a new book about the ground-breaking shamus, whose social circle is known to have included fellow crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

Jeff Pierce at the Rap Sheet has compiles his annual curated list of more than 400 books, all due to appear in stores (on both sides of the Atlantic) during the next three, warmer months⁠—just in time for beach-reading season.

The most controversial landmark in New York City may now be the Strand Bookstore.

The nation's capital of the U.S., Washington, D.C., may be known for its monuments and federal politics, but it's also the "City of Secrets": an estimated 10,000 people in DC are spies.


This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Nothing New Under the Sun" by Dan A. Cardoza.

In the Q&A roundup, crime writer Simon Kernick told the Daily Mail what book he'd take to a desert island; the Bath UK Magazine interviewed Mick Herron ahead of the publication of his latest spy thriller, Joe Country, about why he wouldn’t make a good spy, how he creates memorable characters and how writing feels like an addiction; Harlan Coben spoke to The Guardian about the book that explains why writers are "plain nuts," and the William Goldman novel that started him on his career path; Kate Atkinson also spoke with The Guardian about why she's enjoying writing more as she gets older – and the return of detective Jackson Brodie fter nearly 10 years in the novel, Big Sky; and Alexander McCall Smith, author of the From the beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, spoke with CrimeReads about his new pivot to Scandi-Noir with The Department of Sensitive Crimes, the first in McCall Smith’s new series, where we meet a Ulf Varg, a Swedish detective who investigates particularly strange crimes in the city of Malm.

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Bradley Cooper is in talks to star in Guillermo del Toro's retelling of William Lindsay Gresham's noir novel, Nightmare Alley. Cooper would replace Leonardo di Caprio after the actor couldn't come to an agreement with the film's producers. The 1947 adaptation starred Tyrone Power as an ambitious young con-man who teams up with a female psychiatrist who is even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the tables on him, out-manipulating the manipulator.

Entertainment One has set Jon Turteltaub to direct Insane, a film based on "Crazy" Eddie Antar, the late consumer electronics king who wound up serving six years in prison for perpetrating one of the greatest securities frauds in history.

Dominic Monaghan (Lost) and Clancy Brown (Brilliance; Emergence) are joining Mel Gibson and Charlie Hunnam in the upcoming action-thriller, Waldo, directed by Tim Kirby. Based on the novel by Howard Gould, the story centers around a disgraced LAPD detective (Hunnam), who’s spent the past three years living off the grid. He’s reluctantly pulled back into his old life by a former lover in order to solve the murder of an eccentric celebrity’s wife. There’s no information on who exactly Monaghan will be playing in the film, but Brown will play the role of plain clothes detective Big Jim Cuppy.

Emile Hirsch is joining Mel Gibson in Force of Nature. Hirsch will play a cop who must protect the remaining residents of a building in the midst of a hurricane evacuation while violent criminals attempt to pull off a mysterious heist within the structure. Gibson plays a stubborn retired detective who refuses to evacuate and fights back when the thieves show up at his doorstep.

Chad Michael Murray, Shea Buckner, Tyler Olson, Lydia Hull, and Jessica Abrams are set to co-star opposite Bruce Willis in the action thriller, The Long Night. Directed by Matt Eskandari, the film follows two ruthless criminals who break into a disgraced doctor’s home to be given medical attention after one of them is shot during a robbery gone wrong. Knowing that he lacks the expertise to patch up the injured trespasser, the doctor must protect his family at all costs.

Crime Fiction Lover posted a list of "The top five crime films at Cannes 2019." The list doesn't include Martin Scorsese’s Jimmy Hoffa assassination film, The Irishman, since Cannes refused to allow Netflix a place in the main competition.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

BBC One, Victoria outfit Mammoth Screen and Agatha Christie Limited are teaming up on The Pale Horse, a TV drama adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel first published in 1961. Sarah Phelps (The Witness For The Prosecution) has scripted the two-part drama which has Amazon Prime Video on board as U.S. co-production partner. In the novel, a mysterious list of names is found in the shoe of a dead woman, and one of those named, Mark Easterbrook, begins an investigation into how and why his name came to be there. He is drawn to The Pale Horse, the home of a trio of rumored witches in the small village of Much Deeping. Word has it that the witches can do away with wealthy relatives using dark arts, but as the bodies mount up, Easterbrook is certain there has to be a rational explanation.

BBC One is also adapting Emma Healey’s novel, Elizabeth Is Missing, as a TV movie. Oscar winner Glenda Jackson is set to star as an elderly woman descending into dementia who embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared. Her search for the truth goes back decades with shattering consequences.

Amazon Studios will release the political thriller, The Report, in movie theaters on Sept. 27 and then drop the film on Amazon Prime Video on Oct. 11. The film, which stars Adam Driver, Annette Bening, and Jon Hamm, takes place in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as CIA agents begin using extreme interrogation tactics on people they think were behind it. The film follows one man’s pursuit of justice and chronicles not only the CIA’s secret torture program but also the struggle to release the report that tested the nation’s separation of powers and the rule of law.

Netflix has begun production on the ten-part UK-Spanish crime drama, White Lines, which is written by Money Heist creator Álex Pina. Laura Haddock leads the cast in the English-language series in which the body of a legendary Manchester DJ is discovered twenty years after his mysterious disappearance from Ibiza. When his sister returns to the beautiful Spanish island to find out what happened, her investigation leads her through a world of dance clubs, lies and cover-ups. Also starring are Marta Milans, Juan Diego Botto, Nuno Lopes, Daniel Mays, Laurence Fox, and Angela Griffin.

Cinemax is adapting Trackers, a thriller drama series based on the novel by bestselling South African author Deon Meyer. James Gracie, Rolanda Marais, and Ed Stoppard are set to star. The project interweaves three storylines set in Cape Town that center around a violent conspiracy involving organized crime, smuggled diamonds, state security, black rhinos, the CIA, and an international terrorist plot.

Spectrum Originals has ordered a second season of L.A.'s Finest, the streaming service's first original series. The project stars Gabrielle Union, who reprises her character from Bad Boys II, Syd Burnett, as she leaves life in Miami behind and becomes an LAPD detective, partnered with Nancy McKenna (Jessica Alba).

Jude Law is set to star in The Third Day, a six-part limited series from HBO and Sky. Law plays Sam, who after being drawn to a mysterious Island off the British Coast, is thrown into the unusual world of its secretive inhabitants. Isolated from the mainland, the rituals of the island begin to overwhelm him, and he is confronted by a trauma from his past. As the line between reality and fantasy blurs, Sam finds himself immersed in an emotional quest which puts him at odds with the islanders and begins to threaten their way of life.

DGA-Award winning director Dennie Gordon has been tapped to direct the Season 2 finale of Warrior, Cinemax’s Tong Wars drama series from Justin Lin and Banshee co-creator Jonathan Tropper. Warrior is a gritty, action-packed crime drama set in 19th century San Francisco during the time of Chinatown’s most powerful organized crime families, or tongs.

Nicholas Pinnock (star of ABC’s forthcoming legal drama For Life), David Tennant (Doctor Who), and Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter) are to star in Netflix’s police interrogation drama, Criminal. The format bending series consists of 12 episodes of 45 minutes with three episodes each set across four countries – France, Spain, Germany and the UK. The drama takes place exclusively within the confines of a police interview suite, a stripped down, cat-and-mouse drama focusing on the intense mental conflict between the police officer and the suspect in question.

The Flash alum Matt Letscher is set to recur as newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst on TNT’s The Angel of Darkness, the network’s upcoming limited series sequel to The Alienist (based on Caleb Carr’s bestselling book). Brittany Batchelder, a guest star on The Alienist, has also been elevated to a recurring role for Season 2. The Alienist’s lead cast, including Evans, Daniel Brühl and Dakota Fanning, all return for the new storyline, which finds Fanning’s Sara Howard with her own private detective agency and enlisting the help of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl) to hunt down an elusive killer.

Former Iron Fist star Tom Pelphrey and Jessica Frances Dukes are set as new series regulars on the upcoming third season of Netflix’s Ozark. Season 2, starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, continued to follow Marty Byrde (Bateman) and his family as they navigate the murky waters of life within a dangerous drug cartel. Joseph Sikora and Felix Solis will recur in regular roles, while Lisa Emery and Janet McTeer have been promoted to series regulars for Season 3. 

Arliss Howard (Moneyball), Desmond Harrington (Dexter), Kelly Jenrette (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Ness Bautista (Sense8) are set as series regulars for season 2 of Spectrum Originals’s anthology series, Manhunt. They join previously announced Jack Huston, Cameron Britton, Carla Gugino, Judith Light, Gethin Anthony, and Jay O. Sanders. Season 2, Manhunt: Lone Wolf, will chronicle one of the largest and most complex manhunts on U.S. soil — the search for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Bomber, Eric Rudolph (Huston) — and the media firestorm that consumed the life of Richard Jewell (Britton) in its wake.

Paul Wesley, who co-starred in the first season of Tell Me a Story, will be back to star in the second season of the CBS All Access anthology series, playing a new character in the drama. Tell Me a Story, based on a Spanish format, takes the world’s most beloved fairy tales and re-imagines them as a dark and twisted psychological thriller. Season 2 will feature the tales of three iconic princesses – Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. (Season 1 weaved together dark stories based on The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel.)

The mystery/thriller/sci-fi series, Orphan Black, has been resurrected from the dead with audiobook and ebook forms, thanks to a partnership with digital fiction startup Serial Box. Tatiana Maslany has signed on to voice the cloned sisterhood in Orphan Black: The Next Chapter, which is set eight years in the future from where the series left off.

CBS has announced the premiere dates for its 2019-2020 fall season, including returning crime drama favorites such as the NCIS franchises, Hawaii Five-0, Blue Bloods, and Magnum, P.I.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Crime Fiction in Oxford is a series of podcasts offering two overviews - of detective fiction in general and of Oxford crime fiction in particular - as well as offering the opportunity of hearing celebrated crime writer Colin Dexter.

The latest Writer Types, hosted by Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden, is back with two of their favorite writers:  Blake Crouch, who's just released his new novel, Recursion, and Brian Panowich, who recently published the follow-up to his novel, Bull Mountain. Plus they interviewed Steve Lauden about his new novelette, That'll Be The Day.

A new episode of Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up with the first two chapters of A Baker Street Wedding by Michael Robertson, read by Kelly Ventura.

In the latest edition of Criminal Mischief: The Art & Science of Crime Fiction, host DP Lyle delved into the "Autopsy of a Thriller."

Wrong Place, Write Crime host Frank Zafiro chatted with Colin Conway, who discussed his new release, Charlie-316.

Writer's Detective Bureau host, veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, took on his latest topics of "Writer's Detective Bureau Female Suspects, Writing Research, and Police Cars."

Crime Writers On... featured an episode recorded before a live audience at PodX in Nashville, where the panel discussed the stylized, semi-serious Netflix documentary, The Legend of Cocaine Island, and the team played a few rounds of "Crime Writers Against Humanity."

THEATER

A production of Agatha Christie's classic, The Mousetrap, moves to Theatre Royal, Brighton, from Monday, July 1 through Saturday, July 6. The scene is set when a group of people gathered in a country house cut off by the snow discover, to their horror, that there's a murderer in their midst. 

The Hayes Theater in Sydney is presenting the Australian premiere of The Razorhurst, with book and lyrics by Kate Mulley and music by Andy Peterson. From the 1920s until the 1930s, two vice queens, Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, ruled the Darlinghurst underworld. Their rivalry was infamous, leading to a litany of violent crimes enacted by their razor gangs as each struggled to gain dominance in a world of sly grog (a/k/a bootleg liquor), narcotics, and prostitution.

The Idaho Shakespeare Festival is producing the classic Agatha Christie tale, Witness for the Prosecution, at the Idaho Shakespeare Amphitheater in Boise though July 28. The story revolves around a woman who hatches a desperate plan to save her husband from jail when he's accused of murder.

Quote of the Week

FFB: The Saint in Europe

I was browsing through the library a few years ago and came upon the Leslie Charteris (1907 - 1993) section and pulled out a collection of short stories featuring "The Saint."  David Cranmer once tackled a Charteris novel for Friday's Forgotten books, adding that he'd only read Charteris short stories and never a full-length novel. Since it's the reverse situation in my case, I brought the collection home.

Born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore, he was half-Chinese, half-English, which would later come to haunt him when he was excluded from permanent residency in the U.S. due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law prohibiting immigration for anyone with  "50 percent or greater" Oriental blood. Eventually, after his success in literature and in Hollywood, an act of Congress personally granted him and his daughter the right of permanent residence in the United States.

Charteris is, of course, one of the more colorful crime fiction authors in the genre. Before his literary succes, he worked variously on a freighter, as a bartender, prospecting for gold, fishing for pearls, working in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, toured England with a carnival and drove a bus. He also rode on the Hindenburg on its successful maiden voyage.

His success lies almost entirely upon his famous literary creation, Simon Templar, known as "The Saint," featured in over 50 novels, novellas and short-story collections, as well as several TV and movie incarnations, and a long-running comic strip.

As to the genesis for the character, Charteris once said,

"Who knows where an idea comes from? The Saint was just originally a character who came to life in my head not so long after I started writing, but he was not the first character I thought of. He was, as a matter of fact, the fifth...I looked back over the characters I had created so far and picked the Saint, liked him the best, and decided to go on with him."

The books and stories never disclose Simon Templar's origins, other than the the possibility he started his career as a criminal. He was suave, mysterious, a daredevil, a gentleman thief or, as often called, a "modern day Robin Hood." In the earlier novels he was more violent than in later outings, such as the various short stories.

The Saint in Europe collection was first published in 1953, the 29th book to feature the character, and it marked not only a resumption of the book series after a five-year hiatus, but the 25th anniversary of the the Templar series. All seven stories in the collection were used as plots for episodes of the 1962-69 TV series, The Saint, starring Roger Moore (later James Bond).

The theme that ties all these stories together, if you can call it that, is the Saint travelling to different parts of Europe where he has runs into trouble of one kind or another. Or as Templar says, he "seldom went anywhere with the intention of getting into trouble. But trouble had that disastrous propensity for getting into him."

The first story is set in Paris and titled "The Covetous Headsman," in which the body of a young, honest, hardworking Parisian shipping clerk is found murdered and decapitated. Templar steps in to help when a web of money and betrayal dating back to the resistance during WWII threatens to make the naive sister of the victim the murderer's next target.

"The Rhine Maiden" is probably the best of the lot, harkening back to the Templar of the earlier novels, where he was "judge and executioner." Templar gets drawn into the plight of a pitiable man and his daughter traveling with him on a train who have been swindled by the man's boss, also a passenger on the same train. The man, his daughter, and the boss remind Templar that

"the Saint has been something of a crook sometimes, even if that didn't hurt anybody but specimens like you. And since I reformed I've become rather sophisticaed. Maybe it's a pity. Once loses sight of some simple elemtentary things that were very good."

The stories have some of the same flair as in the novels, with Templar's wit and imperturbability shining through. They're a good introduction to the character and Charteris style, and a pleasant enough way to while away an hour or so (it's a fairly short book).

Saint fans should check out the Leslie Charteris fan club site that has news of CD releases of episodes from the old radio series of The Saint (starring Vincent Price and Barry Sullivan), as well as other goodies, and also visit the Saint Club Facebook page. Back in 2010, there were talks with Scottish actor Dougray Scott to play The Saint in a new TV series, although that project fell through. The latest incarnation may be a movie starring Chris Pratt, although time will tell if that production ever sees the light of day.