In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

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

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

David Leitch (Deadpool 2; Hobbs & Shaw) has signed on to direct the thriller, Bullet Train, with another action-thriller veteran, Antoine Fuqua (director of the Equalizer movies starring Denzel Washington), on board as producer. Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese manga, centers on a group of assassins with conflicting motives on a train in Tokyo. The film is a contained thriller, which means it can be shot on a contained set and thus fall in line easier under health restrictions than a more sprawling action movie with actual locations.

Vertical Entertainment has picked up North American rights to the mystery-thriller, Viscous, starring Mena Suvari (American Beauty). The film, from debut writer-director Braden R. Duemmler, follows a socially awkward teenager who is blindsided when her mother introduces her new fiancée. At first, his charm, intelligence, and beauty seem too good to be true, and after a series of strange occurrences the teenage daughter realizes that this new member of their family is not exactly who he seems.

Gerard Butler is set to star in the action film, Kandahar, with Ric Roman Waugh directing. (Butler and Waugh also teamed up last year on the hit action pic Angel Has Fallen). Waugh will direct from a screenplay he wrote with former military intelligence officer Mitchell LaFortune. In the film, Butler will play Tom Harris, an undercover CIA operative working in the Middle East. An intelligence leak dangerously exposes his classified mission and reveals his covert identity. Stuck in the heart of hostile territory, Harris and his translator must fight their way out of the desert to an extraction point in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while eluding the elite special forces hunting them.

The Mickey Rourke, Sean Stone, and Eric Roberts crime drama, Night Walk, has secured North American distribution. Directed and produced by Moroccan-born filmmaker Aziz Tazi, Night Walk follows Frank (played by Oliver Stone’s son, Sean Stone), a Western traveler visiting the Middle East, where his girlfriend Sarah lives. After a tragic incident leading to Sarah’s death, Frank is wrongfully imprisoned by corrupt police, and under the guidance of the prison’s top shot-caller (Mickey Rourke) and the protection of his Muslim cellmate, he unravels political corruption at the top seats of government in his quest for justice.

Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk) has been cast opposite Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike) in the thriller, Hunters In The Dark, with veteran theater director, Simon Evans, making his feature filmmaking debut. The project tells the story of 28-year-old English school teacher, Robert Grieve (Pettyfer), who unexpectedly wins a bag full of cash. Adrift in Cambodia and eager for a way out of his life of quiet desperation, he decides to take a journey deeper into the wilder aspects of the country, coming up against a scheming American, a crooked police officer, and a darker side of Cambodia.

Saban Films has bought North American and UK rights to Jared Cohn’s Reactor starring Bruce Willis as the leader of a gang of mercenaries holding a nuclear power plant hostage. Casting is underway for the lead role, a former soldier who takes down Willis and his crew. Cohn wrote the script with Cam Cannon and Stephen Cyrus Sepher.

The estate of Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is suing Netflix, Legendary Films, and author Nancy Springer over copyright and trademark issues associated with the upcoming film, Enola Homes. The suit claims that, despite most of the original pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes tales having been judged to be in the public domain, the author’s last 10 stories about the character — published between 1923 and 1927 — are not. The movie stars Millie Bobby Brown as the much-younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, who proves to be a highly capable detective in her own right. Henry Cavill, Helena Bonham Carter, Sam Claflin, Fiona Shaw, and Adeel Akhtar also star in the film that is set to stream on Netflix.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Langdon, the NBC series based on Dan Brown’s novel, The Lost Symbol, has added to its cast. Sumalee Montano (Star Trek: Picard), Arrow alum Rick Gonzalez, and Beau Knapp (The Good Lord Bird) are set as series regulars opposite Ashley Zukerman. Written by Dan Dworkin and Jay Beattie, Langdon follows the early adventures of famed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Zukerman), who must solve a series of deadly puzzles to save his kidnapped mentor and thwart a chilling global conspiracy. The project, which hails from Imagine Television, CBS TV Studios and Universal Television, is among five 2020 pilots which NBC has committed to filming later this year, once production can safely begin amid coronavirus restrictions.

ViacomCBS International Studios and Miramax will co-produce The Turkish Detective, a crime series set in modern-day Istanbul based on the 21 inspector Cetin Ikmen novels by Barbara Nadel. Each episode "follows Ikmen and his partner Mehmet Suleyman as they solve a series of crimes, with the stories heavily rooted in the rich culture and history of Istanbul."

AMC will air the British drama, Gangs of London, in the U.S. after HBO’s Cinemax exited the project, which has been renewed for a second season. The ten-part show was a big hit for Sky in the UK, becoming its biggest premiere streaming series this year and the biggest original drama launch on Sky Atlantic in the past five years.

Turner networks TNT and TBS have put four projects in development including The Fall and Liar's Club. The Fall is a paranoid thriller about a woman whose dark secrets start to unravel her seemingly perfect life and is inspired by the Albert Camus tale of the same name. Liar's Club is described as "part comedy, part pulp thriller" or "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel meets Breaking Bad." it follows a woman leading two very different lives, one adorned in the trappings of Connecticut country clubs, and the other drenched in the murkiness of the underground gambling circuit in NYC.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up featuring the mystery short story "Vengeance in Cadmium Blue" by Margaret Mendel as read by actor Ariel Linn.

Writer Types host, Eric Beetner, talked with authors Michael Elias (You Can Go Home Now); Jennifer Chow (Mimi Lee Gets A Clue); and Richard Prosch (the Dan Spalding series).

Michael Elias was also the guest on Speaking of Mysteries to discuss You Can Go Home Now, a psychological thriller where a woman cop is on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own.

Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Marc Cameron, author of the New York Times bestselling Jericho Quinn Thriller series.

Writer's Detective Bureau host, veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, discussed the role SWAT plays in an investigation after they’ve busted the suspect; what a witness or visitor to an FBI Office might see; and what the cocaine production process looks like.

Casey Cep, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was the guest on It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club, chatting about her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, an instant New York Times bestseller.

THEATRE

Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, is being adapted for the theatre for the first time, and is set to premiere on April 3, 2021 at the Churchill theatre in Bromley, London, under the direction of Luke Sheppard. The stageplay, which involves the murder of the Louvre’s curator and the race to solve a series of baffling codes left beside his body, is being written by the same team who adapted The Girl on the Train for the stage, Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel.

FFB: Troublemaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Famous Shamus

This news just in, a little late for Mystery Melange earlier this morning, but the Private Eye Writers of America announced the Shamus Award winners today:

Best PI Hardcover

WINNER:  Lost Tomorrows by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)

Also nominated:

The Tower of Songs by Casey Barrett (Kensington)
The Shallows by Matt Goldman (Forge)
Below the Line by Michael Gould (Dutton)
The Cold Way Home by Julia Keller (Minotaur)

Best Original Private Eye Paperback

WINNER:  Behind the Wall of Sleep by James DF Hannah 

Also nominated:

The Skin Game by JD Allen (Midnight Ink)
Paid in Spades by Richard Helms (Clay Stafford Books)
Ration of Lies by M. Ruth Myers (author)
The Bird Boys by Lisa Sandlin (Cinco Puntos Press)

Best Private Eye Short Story

WINNER:  "Sac-A-Lait Man" by O'Neil De Noux (Sept/Oct EQMM)

Also nominated:

"The Smoking Bandit of Lakeside Terrace" by Chad Baker (May/June EQMM)
"The Dunes of Saulkrasti" by William Burton McCormick (Sept/Oct EQMM)
"The Fourteenth Floor" by Adam Meyer (Crime Travel)
"Weathering the Storm" by Michael Pool (The Eyes of Texas)

Mystery Melange

Even though the Bloody Scotland conference is among the many conferences cancelled this year due to Covid-19, organizers have announced finalists vying for two honors that would have been celebrated at the live event, the McIlvanney Prize for Crime Book of the Year Award and the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. Shortlisted debut books include Hold Your Tongue by Deborah Masson; The Crown Agent by Stephen O’Rourke; See Them Run by Marion Todd; and Pine by Francine Toon. You can read the longlist of twelve books nominated for the book of the year via this link. Finalists for the McIlvanney Prize will be revealed at the beginning of September and the winner of both prizes will be revealed on Friday 18 September. (HT to Shots Magazine)

The Scottish "Queen of Crime" author Val McDermid also unveiled the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival's "New Blood" authors for 2020, showcasing the year’s best breakout crime writing talent. Honorees include Deepa Anappara for Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line; Elizabeth Kay for Seven Lies; Jessica Moor for Keeper; and Trevor Wood for The Man on the Street.

Amazon announced its editorial choices for the Best Books of 2020 so far including in the Mystery & Thriller category. You can check out the nineteen featured titles via this link.

Once Upon a Crime bookstore and Astoria Bookshop are sponsoring Reading for Relief, an online event tonight and tomorrow night to raise funds for Minneapolis community non-profits. Join the participating fourteen talented Crime Writers of Color and hosts Jessica Lane and Angel Luis Colón beginning at 6pm CT/ 7pm ET each evening for readings and discussion.

A Virtual Noir at the Bar Toronto will also take place this evening, June 25, featuring readings by Ed Aymar, R. Daniel Lester, Tom Pitts, Eryk Pruitt, Peter Rozovsky, and Amy Stuart. Event hosts are Rob Bruner and Hope Thompson.

Coming up on Friday night it's the Queer Noir @ The Bar - Pride Month Edition. Featured authors that will join in the reading and conversation include Brenda Buchanan, John Copenhaver, Kelly J. Ford, Robyn Gigl, Cheryl Head, Greg Herren, Edwin Hill, Kristen Lepionka, Michael Nava, and J. M. Redmann. The event is raising money for Lambda Literary Foundation, an LGBT literary organization that aims to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual. and transgender literature through programs that encourage development of emerging writers

The latest Mystery Readers Journal is out with a focus on Italian mysteries. You can get a sneak peek with online articles by David Hewson ("Working in Italy"), James W. Ziskin ("Turn to Stone: Quarantined in Florence with Ellie Stone"), and Kate Derie ("Crime Seen: Guido and Salvo, the Two Commissari"). The issue is available in print or PDF versions.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Can a Virus Be Criminal" by J.H. Johns.

In the Q&A roundup, the Book People welcomed Steve Weddle and Nick Kolakowski, editors of Lockdown: Stories Of Crime, Terror, And Hope During A Pandemic, with proceeds going to BINC, which helps out independent booksellers; CrimeReads caught up with Leslie Klinger to discuss his "Sherlockian" approach to annotating Neil Gaiman's American Gods; and Writers Who Kill chatted with Nicole Leiren, who has been teaming up with author Elizabeth Ashby for the Danger Cove Mysteries, in the fourth of the Writers Who Kill series of interviews featuring authors who have taken a team approach. 

Author R&R with Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Shelley Blanton-Stroud grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. She co-directs Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging authors, and serves on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children. She teaches college writing in Northern California and has also served on the Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers’ Conference. She's had flash fiction and non-fiction in such journals as Brevity and Cleaver, and she recently published her first novel, Copy Boy.

Copy Boy, which one reviewer called "Raymond Chandler for feminists," is set in the 1930s depression era and centers on Jane Hopper, whose parents are trapped in a loveless marriage. When her mother threatens to leave her father for another man, he becomes violent towards her and Jane, and Jane strikes her father with a crowbar in defense. Leaving him for dead, Jane steals his truck and escapes to San Francisco to start a new life as a copy boy at the local newspaper, the Prospect. But copy boys are just that, boys, so Jane disguises herself as a man, even learning to smoke and swear. When she becomes obsessed with the mystery of a woman found unconscious after being assaulted with a crowbar—a woman who was photographed with Jane’s father—Jane’s old life threatens to come crashing down into her new life and expose her as a fraud.

Shelley stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about the book:

 

On July 18, it will be ten years since I got the call.

I was packing up to head out the door to my neighborhood Sacramento library to lead a book talk on Ann Tyler’s Digging to America. I’d been leading those talks for ten years but it still made me a little nervous, every time. I was last-minute-gathering the snacks, notes, discussion questions, the key card. Hunting a lost sandal. I was late.

When the phone rang, I didn’t expect to pick up—there was no time. But I looked at the handset in its cradle and the digital caller ID read, Monterey Bay Ambulance.

Which one is it?

My husband Andy and two college-age sons were on a scuba diving trip. Our oldest, Will, was a dive master. My husband and youngest, Henry, were getting certified, preparing for adventure.  This was the final step—getting tested in Monterey Bay.

Which one is it?

I picked up the phone and heard twenty-year old Will. “Everything’s okay Mom. But I’m in an ambulance with Dad. It looks like he’s had a heart attack.”

Treading in the Bay’s 56-degree water, Andy felt pressure, everything yellow, a buzzing in his ears. His arms and legs went weak. Will saw how white his face was. He called to the scuba guide, who was treading water over the spot where eighteen-year-old Henry had submerged. The guide told him to get Andy to shore. The guide stayed waiting for Henry to come up.

Will did swim Andy to shore, paddling with one arm, the other hooked around his father’s chest. On the beach, he found a doctor with a phone. At the hospital, they discovered he’d suffered heart failure. He’d had a previous heart attack we’d never even known about. As I was running to his hospital room, five hours later, I could hear Andy down the hall, laughing and joking with the doctor. Acting like himself. Will was pleased with the scrubs the nurse had given him to wear. Henry was shaken, but fine. We were going to be okay. For now.

Ten years later, Andy is fine, he’s great. So why do I share this with you now?

Because it was that weekend, ten years ago, when the two of us really saw how everything could end, just end, before we were finished being who we wanted to be, doing what we wanted to do. That’s when Andy and I agreed, we’d better start doing it now.

That’s when I began to write my novel, Copy Boy, though I didn’t know yet that’s what I was doing. I was just recording family stories in a journal, getting down whatever I could remember seeing, hearing, being told, as I grew up, about my family’s history as Depression-era, Dust Bowl Okies, migrating from Texas and Oklahoma to California’s Central Valley, where they would have to work and fight and hustle themselves into the lives they wanted. Just getting it down.

Then I starting researching the bigger picture, the history all around our family. So many books, so many field trips to the Central Valley, to San Francisco’s neighborhoods, bars from the thirties.

Then I started taking local writing workshops, where I met teachers and other writers—mostly women my age, fiftyish—who encouraged each other to develop a voice. To make syntactical choices, patterns of them, that would become a kind of thumbprint, making each of us recognizable in the print.  There were many such workshops.

Then, I started taking workshops about the science or architecture of story, especially the architecture of mystery. It was a revelation to learn the elements of it, getting under the hood of my own book. I attended the Book Passage Mystery Conference to learn such things and there I met writer friends who would become essential to my preparation. Some of us continue to talk twice a month by Zoom. It was also at this conference where a famous mystery writer told me the chapter I’d shown her was a mess. I had work to do.

So, I worked on it. Then, six months later, five years ago, I sent off a chapter to a couple literary workshops, hoping to get into one. Instead, miraculously, I was accepted by both the Napa Valley Writers Conference and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. (I got into this one off the Wait List.) In those places, I got more literary advice. I made terrific writer friends I’m in contact with now every day. I began to believe that maybe I could do this. At Squaw, a famous writer assigned to read my chapter, told me he was still hung over from the absinthe the night before, and that my kind of writing wasn’t really the kind of thing he liked to read. So that was bad. I was embarrassed. But when I told him one of my family stories, he said, Why don’t you put that in your first chapter? I did. He insulted me but I got over it. I used it.

The next year, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, again off the Wait List. (Did I mention I believe in wait lists?) There I heard brilliant talks on craft, watched authors perform their stories, had my first-ever chance to read one of my stories to an audience in the Blue Parlor. I cried up there as I read it. Some people in the audience cried too. I thought, maybe I belong here.

There were years of revising—I mean head-to-toe revising. The male protagonist turned into a female. The female became a cross-dresser. I moved from first person to third. From YA to adult literary historical mystery. I changed every inch of it. I spent three more years doing this, with feedback from so many freelance editors and critique groups, who made worlds of difference by giving me advice.

Once it got to the place where I was happy, I knew pretty quickly that I would sign with She Writes Press. That part was obvious. I liked the blend of support and control they offered. They’re a writer’s team. I like a team.

So, you’re probably thinking it’s odd that it took me ten years to make this book. But it also took me ten years of library book talks before that to develop a strong sense of what I just enjoy reading.

Ten years of book clubs. Ten years learning to make a book. You’d better believe I’m going to be making a new ten year plan next month.

 

You can read more about Shelley and her work on her website and also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Media Murder for Monday

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

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Director Joshua Caldwell, whose Bella Thorne crime feature Infamous recently debuted on VOD and drive-ins, has optioned Kyle Rutkin’s psychological thriller novel, She Died Famous, as his next feature. Described as akin to A Star Is Born crossed with Gone Girl, the story follows the death of iconic superstar, Kelly Trozzo, her suspected killer, and the author she commissioned to pen her shocking Hollywood memoir. Caldwell called it "a mind-bending trip into the world of tabloid, murder, and celebrity."

Elijah Wood is to star as Ted Bundy’s FBI analyst in the crime-thriller, No Man Of God. Set largely in a single interrogation room, the film is based on real life transcripts culled from conversations between FBI analyst, Bill Hagmaier (Wood), and serial killer Bundy that took place between 1984 and 1989. The film details the complicated relationship that formed between the two men during Bundy’s final years on death row.

Baby Driver director Edgar Wright will helm a big-screen adaptation of The Chain, based on Adrian McKinty’s 2019 novel. The story follows a mother who gets a call from a stranger that her 11-year-old daughter has been kidnapped, and the only way she can keep her child alive is by kidnapping another child within 24 hours as part of a sinister chain of abductions. Jane Goldman (Kingsman: The Golden Circle) will write the script based on McKinty’s book.

Another Baby Driver player, Lily James, is set to star in The Paris Trap, a thriller directed by Pablo Trapero. The Hitchcockian thriller revolves around a young American woman on a visit to Paris who becomes the victim of mistaken identity. Caught up in a secret international government operation, she must play the part to save her own life.

Neal McDonough (Yellowstone, Project Blue Book) has signed on to star in Red Stone, an indie thriller written and directed by Derek Presley. The story follows Motley (Dash Melrose), whose life spirals out of control as he’s forced to go on the run from southern crime lord, Jed Haywood (Michael Cudlitz). Boon (McDonough), Haywood’s best henchman and close friend, is tracking Motley, and over the course of one day, both Motley and Boon go on a spiritual journey as their fate brings them together for a showdown.

Antoine Fuqua has been hired to direct Will Smith in Emancipation, an action-thriller penned by Willam N. Collage about the harrowing escape of Peter, a runaway slave forced to outwit cold-blooded hunters and the unforgiving swamps of Louisiana on a tortuous journey north to join the Union Army. The thriller is based on a true story that solidified the cause of abolitionists and prompted many free blacks to also join the Union Army.

Oscar Isaac is set to star in and produce the next film from director Ben Stiller, titled London. Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, A Star Is Born) is adapting the screenplay for London based on "a new short story/high-concept thriller" from crime author Jo Nesbø, though details about the plot are being kept under wraps. 

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Apple TV+ has come aboard the Israel-Iran espionage thriller, Tehran, taking the international rights to the series outside of Israel. The eight-part series features young Israeli actress Niv Sultan as Tamar Rabinyan, a Mossad computer hacker-agent undertaking her very first mission in Iran’s capital, which is also her place of birth. Tasked with disabling an Iranian nuclear reactor, her mission has implications not just for the Middle East, but for the rest of the world. But when the Mossad mission fails, Tamar goes rogue in Tehran as she rediscovers her Iranian roots and becomes romantically entwined with a pro-democracy activist.


NBC has cancelled more programs including Bluff City Law, which starred Jimmy Smits as a civil rights lawyer and ran for ten episodes. It's among the latest cancellations at NBC, which earlier this month also axed Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector, a series based on the crime novels of Jeffery Deaver.

Another legal drama suffered a happier fate, with ABC renewing its freshman series, For Life, for a second season. Created by Hank Steinberg and produced by Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, For Life is a fictional serialized legal and family drama about an imprisoned man, Aaron Wallace, who becomes a lawyer litigating cases for other inmates while fighting to overturn his own life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. It is inspired by the life of Isaac Wright Jr., who was wrongfully convicted as drug kingpin but got his conviction overturned while in prison and became a licensed attorney.

Alex Rider, Eleventh Hour Films’ TV adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s best-selling teen spy novels and starring Otto Farrant, is heading for a second season after the first season was picked up by Amazon in the UK. Producers have also said that the show, which was penned by Guy Burt (Bletchley Circle), is close to finding a home in the U.S., Australia, and China after the 12 books on which it is based sold more than 20M copies worldwide. Stephen Dillane and Vicky McClure also feature in the series as members of The Department, an underworld offshoot of MI6.

The CW has acquired four more series to debut this summer and has also nailed down the rest of its summer premiere dates. Among the new series is a whodunnit competition reality series, titled Killer Camp, which debuts July 16. The Investigative drama, Coroner, will also have its U.S. premiere on August 5.

NBC announced its fall schedule, lining up Christopher Meloni’s new Law & Order spinoff for a Thursday debut. Titled Law & Order: Organized Crime, the new drama will be led by Meloni reprising his role as Elliot Stabler and will air Thursday nights at 10 pm, following the 22nd season of SVU at 9. Many of the returning crime drama series will keep their previous year's slots, including the "Chicago trio" of series on Wednesdays.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone welcomed author Alex North, bestselling author of The Whisper Man, to talk about garden centres; social media; the Russo brothers optioning his book; "being two people," and more.

Writer Types host, Eric Beetner, chatted with Scottish author Peter May (Lockdown), mystery author Jill Orr (The Full Scoop), and SW Lauden (Good Girls Don't).

Read or Dead hosts, Katie McClean Horner and Rincey Abraham, discussed new award nominees that have been recently announced and picked out books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for Pride Month.

The latest guest on Speaking of Mysteries was Craig Robertson. He discussed his new novel, Watch Him Die, in which someone from Glasgow is watching someone else dying on a live video stream in Los Angeles, prompting police departments in both cities to find out where the victim is—and who is watching.

Beyond the Cover welcomed author Lori Radar-Day to talk about her latest book, The Lucky One.

Write Place, Wrong Crime had its Season 3 finale In which host Frank Zafiro and Colin Conway talked about their new book, Never the Crime (a Charlie-316 novel), the impending release of the rest of the books in that story arc by year's end, and also included a discussion about world-building and writing yourself into a corner.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club chatted with Montreal-based author Liz Freeland about An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen, the third in the Louise Faulk Mystery Series.

FFB: The Night the Gods Smiled

Eric Wright was born in London, England in 1929 to a poor working-class family, an experience he later detailed in his memoir, Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man. When he was 22, he immigrated to Canada and eventually became an English professor, chair of the English department, then Dean of Arts at Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto.

Wright penned dozens of stories, many of them crime fiction, and served as editor of Criminal Shorts: Mysteries by Canadian Crime Writers, published in 1992. He also created not one or two, but four different detective series including police officer Mel Pickett; Lucy Trimble Brenner, who inherits a Toronto private detective agency; and part-time community college English teacher named Joe Barley, who also works part-time as a private eye.

His most popular literary creation, however, is Charlie Salter, a Toronto cop suffering from middle-aged depression when he's first introduced in The Night the Gods Smiled, the author's debut novel in 1983. The book won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel, the Crime Writer's Association's John Creasey Award, and the City of Toronto Book Award.

At the start of the story, Salter's doldrums are compounded by police politics that have left him working what's essentially a desk job. When he's offered the first interesting case to come along in awhile, he jumps at the chance. David Summers, an English professor at a local college, has been murdered in a Montreal hotel room during a conference. Initially, the only clues are a lipstick-marked glass and a whisky bottle used to crush Summer's skull, but Salter soon realizes he has a long list of potential suspects, including a prostitute, mistresses, the victim's bitter wife, his squash partner, his stock-broker and assorted colleagues and students.

Salter is an engaging character, self-righteous, outspoken, and happily married, albeit with an undercurrent of cultural/class friction between his police officer status and his wife's wealthy family. His mid-life crisis sees him taking up squash after meeting the victim's playing partner, and developing a crush on Summer's favorite student, a free-spirited young woman named Molly.

Wright is known for his "lucid and agreeably laconic style," as one reviewer put it, while Kirkus adds that "the balance between sleuthing and gentle character-comedy is maintained beautifully throughout—with superior dialogue, intriguing Canadian specifics, and not a single cliché in sight." There were eleven Salter books in all, first published in hardcover until the series was dropped by Signet. A few reprints are available, including an omnibus of the first three novels in the series, published by Dundurn.

Mystery Melange

The winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing from the International Association of Crime Writers is Bluff by Jane Stanton Hitchcock. Also nominated this year: The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer; Blood Relations by Jonathan Moore; The Murals by William Bayer; Norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan. The location of the presentation is to be determined at a later time.

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards announced this year's winners, including in the Mystery Category. The Gold winner was Below the Fold by R. G. Belsky; Silver winner was A Plain Vanilla Murder by Susan Wittig Albert; and Bronze winner was Moonscape by Julie Weston. In the Thriller Catetory, the Gold winner was The Nine by Jeanne Blasberg; the Silver winner was The Unrepentant by E.A. Aymar; and the Bronze winner was Green Valley by Louis Greenberg. The Guilt We Carry by Samuel W. Gailey was also a Thriller Honorable Mention.

The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers announced the nominees for the 2020 Scribe Awards. The winner in each category would have been announced at the San Diego ComicCon, but due to its cancellation, there will be an online ceremony on July 15. Particularly of interest is the Original Novel-General category which includes nods for The Bitterest Pill by Reed Farrel Coleman; Murder, My Love by Max Allan Collins; and Murder, She Wrote: A Taste For Murder by John Land.

The nominees for the Shirley Jackson Awards were also announced. The awards were established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic and include categories for best Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology. (HT to Shots Magazine)

Criminal Element is offering a chance to win eight summer thrillers: The Half Sister by Sandie Jones; The Safe Place by Anna Downes; One Last Lie by Paul Doiron; Outsider by Linda Castillo; Cut to the Bone by Ellison Cooper; Hard Cash Valley by Brian Panowich; Reasonable Doubt by Philip Margolin; and Into the Fire by Gregg Hurwitz. Entries are open through June 28 (U.S. only).

Aretha Phiri, with Rhodes University, interviewed fellow professor and author, Sam Naidu, for The Conversation about how African crime and detective fiction reshapes the genre.

The latest in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, is Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Erin E. MacDonald (who wrote the companion on Ed McBain/Evan Hunter). The volume delves into the life and works of Scottish novelist Rankin, the creator of Inspector John Rebus

Also via Elizabeth Foxwell's blog: The University of Minnesota Libraries have digitized the catalog from the 2007 exhibition "Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Enigmas," which featured re-creations of the sitting room at 221B Baker Street.

From necessity is the mother of invention department: The Story House in Rockville, Maryland is both a pop-up bookstore (with a location in the Dawson's Market) and a mobile bookstore in a converted tourist trolley. Owner Debbie Cohen began selling face masks, and the response has been tremendous. The masks, which she sews herself with the help of two seamstresses also now feature literary quotes. (HT to Shelf Awareness.)

Researchers at the University of Missouri and the University of Essex in the United Kingdom found boys' poor reading skills in adolescence, combined with the social attitudes about women attending college, can help explain why fewer men than women enroll in higher education or other types of post-high school education.These disparities continue into adulthood with women being more likely to read books than men. One way to combat this is to read to boys when they're young, and there are many mystery books that can help, including the Scholastic list, 10 Best Mystery Series for Boys. Scholastic also addressed how the suspense mature of whodunits makes them fun to read but are also great tools for skill-building.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Jury Rule" by Rena J. Worley.

In the Q&A roundup, the Songs of Spade blog welcomed John Ryder, the pen name of a British crimewriter who just came out with the first book in a new series of thrillers starring tough guy loner Grant Fletcher; Writers Who Kill's E.B. Davis interviewed Kaye George about the second book in her Vintage Sweets mystery series, Deadly Sweet Tooth; Davis also chatted with Annette Dashofy about Til Death, the author's tenth novel in the Zoe Chambers mystery series; Crime Fiction Lover spoke with Paul D. Brazill about his noir-ish detective novel, The Blues Don’t Care, set in Los Angeles in the midst of World War II; and the Murder is Everywhere blog held a freewheeling NOT CrimeFest Indie Alternative panel with Elizabeth Hill, James D Mortain, Caroline Goldsworthy, and Dawn Brookes, as moderated by Zoë Sharp.

Author R&R with Robert McCaw

Robert McCaw grew up in a military family traveling the world. After graduating from Georgetown University, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army before earning his law degree from the University of Virginia. After law school he spent a year as a judicial clerk for Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black. Thereafter, he was a partner in a major international law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City, representing clients in complex civil and criminal cases. For a number of years, McCaw maintained a home on the Big Island of Hawai'i, studying its history, culture, and people, which was the inspiration for his crime fiction series featuring Chief Detective Koa Kāne. Putting himself in the shoes of Kāne, he has walked the streets, courthouse corridors, and parks of Hawai'i’s Big Island. (You an read more about another title in the series we featured here.)

Having killed his father's nemesis and gotten away with it, Hilo, Hawai'i Chief Detective Koa Kāne is not your ordinary cop. Estranged from his younger brother, who has been convicted of multiple crimes, he is not from a typical law enforcement family. Yet, Koa's secret demons fuel his unwavering drive to pursue justice. In Fire and Vengeance, never has Koa's motivation been greater than when he learns that an elementary school was placed atop a volcanic vent, which has now exploded.

The subsequent murders of the school's contractor and architect only add urgency to his search for the truth. As Koa's investigation heats up, his brother collapses in jail from a previously undiagnosed brain tumor. Using his connections, Koa devises a risky plan to win his brother's freedom. As Koa gradually unravels the obscure connections between multiple suspects, he uncovers a forty-year-old conspiracy. When he is about to apprehend the perpetrators, his investigation suddenly becomes entwined with his brother's future, forcing Koa to choose between justice for the victims and his brother's freedom.

Robert McCaw stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing Fire and Vengeance:

 

One need not look further than the current coronavirus pandemic to know that health issues often play a dramatic role in life. Yet, for those of us not trained as physicians, making sense of medical research is challenging. In Fire and Vengeance, the latest story in the Koa Kāne Hawaiian mystery series, medical issues play a critical role in one of the book’s pivotal threads. Koa’s incarcerated brother Ikaika blacks out and collapses in jail. Doctors diagnose him with a slowly growing, frontal lobe brain tumor he’s almost certainly had since childhood and recommend immediate surgery. Koa learns that frontal lobe brain injuries frequently affect behavior, making those affected more impulsive and less able to control themselves. He then embarks on a seemingly quixotic effort to win parole for Ikaika by establishing that his brother’s pre-surgery medical condition contributed to his criminal behavior.

After outlining this part of the plot, I had many questions. Was the scenario I envisioned credible? How should I describe the tumors? How would doctors establish that the tumors had been present since childhood? How often do such tumors occur? Exactly how do they affect behavior? How could the connection to behavior be proved? Where might one find knowledgeable doctors? What diagnostic tools would they use? How should I describe corrective surgery? What is the recovery time?

As a layperson, I could have spent months overwhelmed by the medical literature attempting to ferret out answers through a maze of unfamiliar medical terminology. I was willing to make the effort, but only if the plot was credible. So, I turned to my own physician, who had read the first books in the series, and he put me in touch with a specialist who validated the concept and pointed me in the right direction. I later had dinner with a psychiatrist friend who encouraged me to pursue the plot idea and offered suggestions.

Then began a journey of discovery. Through medical journals, I learned that such tumors are rare—about one in 4 million people—and picked up some useful medical jargon. More importantly, I discovered a growing body of literature discussing the behavioral problems of soldiers returning from the Afghan and Iraq wars with brain injuries. Many of these patients suffer from impulsive behavior like that behind Ikaika’s criminal acts. Those sources also led me to research the miraculous developments in real-time brain imaging, allowing physicians to “see” the actual electrochemical workings of the brain under various stimulations. This research offered the possibility of proof that Ikaika’s thinking processes post-surgery would differ from his previous inability to control his actions.

My review of case studies in medical journals and on the Internet suggested that children suffering from the early stages of such tumors might have absence seizures where they stare off into space and drop things. During the relevant period, doctors often prescribed the drug Depakote for such conditions. Based on this research, I imbued Ikaika with those childhood symptoms, had him treated with Depakote, and thus found a plausible way to tie his tumors back to his childhood.

My need to describe the surgery itself took my research into the world of robotic and image-assisted brain surgery, where I developed some understanding of the processes and timetables. Most relevant to the plot, these sources outlined the most likely outcomes and prospective recovery times for this type of medical procedure. I drew on this background in creating the dialog between the doctor and Koa, and subsequently between Koa and Ikaika.

My story needed a world-class neurosurgeon to consult with Koa about the medical issues, so I researched the country’s leading brain clinics, ultimately creating Dr. Kepler, a fictional specialist at the Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Brain Tumor Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. To add context to a meeting between Koa and Dr. Kepler at the Cochran Center, I make a virtual visit to the facility using Internet images and Google street view.

Perhaps as much as one-hundred-fifty hours of research went into about twenty pages or 6 percent of the final manuscript. Even then, I struggled to limit my use of medical terminology by having Koa insist that the doctors speak in plain English. You might be thinking it was a long run for a short slide, but it’s thorough research that informs the little details that make a story both captivating and believable.

 

You can read more about Robert McCaw and his books on his website and also follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Fire and Vengeance is available in ebook and audiobook formats from all major bookstores now, with the hardcover edition to follow in September.

Media Murder for Monday

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

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Baby Driver star Lily James is set to headline director Phillip Noyce's film, Peggy Jo. James will play Peggy Jo Tallas, a real-life Texan who took to robbing banks while posing as a man. The story is "loosely based" on the true story account and was adapted for the screen by Appaloosa writer Robert Knott. The film project is described as a playful take on the films of the ’70s and ’80s and will specifically be filled with references to George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that the character Peggy Jo Tallas grew up admiring and inspired her to assume her famous alter-ego "Cowboy Bob" and begin robbing banks.

Olivia Munn is attached to star in the action feature, Replay, which will be introduced to buyers at this year's Cannes Virtual Marché, part of the "virtual" Cannes Film Festival that will take place instead of an on-site event due to Covid-19. Written and directed by Jimmy Loweree (Absence), Replay is the story of Erin Staffer, (Munn), whose husband is kidnapped and murdered. Now, armed only with illegal, bleeding-edge tech and a desperate plan, Erin must do everything in her power to change the past and save him.

Universal and Blumhouse are taking their Kevin Bacon-Amanda Seyfried psychological thriller, You Should Have Left, straight into homes on Friday, June 19 for a North American video-on-demand release. The pic was directed by Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible scribe David Koepp which he adapted from the German novel by Daniel Kehlmann. Bacon and Seyfried star as a couple seeking a restful vacation on an isolated edge of the world in the Welsh countryside. At first their vacation with their six-year-old daughter seems like a perfect retreat, but distorts into a perfect nightmare when Theo’s (Bacon) grasp on reality begins to unravel and he suspects that a sinister force within the house knows more than he or Susanna (Seyfried) have revealed, even to each other. You can check out the trailer via the above link.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

The U.K. production firm Castlefield has acquired the TV rights to Cara Hunter's bestselling crime novels featuring Detective Inspector Adam Fawley. Although the company has yet to find a home for the adaptation, it's planning the series around Hunter's four books, with each novel following DI Fawley as he investigates a domestic tragedy or crime that demands answers from the victim’s family and friends. In the first book, Close To Home, he looks into the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl from a family party.

The long-running docuseries, Cops, is ending its run on Paramount Network in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The show premiered on Fox in 1989 and aired for 25 seasons then was resurrected in 2013 when Spike TV (since rebranded as Paramount Network) ordered new episodes. Likewise, A&E on June 5 pulled episodes of its hit docuseries Live PD due to the civil protests and a report that the March 2019 death of Javier Ambler during a police stop was allegedly captured by the Live PD crew but the video was destroyed.

Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector will not be returning to NBC. The show, which launched in January, ran for 10 episodes and is based on Jeffrey Deaver’s Bone Collector book series. It starred Russell Hornsby as Lincoln Rhyme, a brilliant but hardheaded forensic criminologist who suffers near-fatal injuries while on the job, leaving him a tetraplegic. He nevertheless continues his work remotely, working with others to solve cases. It also starred Arielle Kebbel, Roslyn Ruff, Ramses Jimenez, Brooke Lyons, Tate Ellington, Brian F. O’Byrne, Courtney Grosbeck, and Michael Imperioli.

Also canceled was Hulu's femme fatale thriller, Reprisal, which won't return for a second season. Reprisal is a hyper-kinetic revenge tale following a relentless femme fatale (Abigail Spencer) who, after being left for dead, leads a vengeful campaign against a bombastic gang of gearheads. The show also starred Rodrigo Santoro, Mena Massoud, Madison Davenport, Rhys Wakefield, David Dastmalchian, W. Earl Brown, and Gilbert Owuor.

HBO has released the trailer for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, its six-part documentary series about the hunt for the Golden State Killer undertaken by crime writer Michelle McNamara. Episode 1 debuts June 28 at 10 PM and new episodes debut each subsequent Sunday.


PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Author Faye Snowden joined Eric Beetner for co hosting duties on Writer Types as they talked with writers Nikki Dolson (Love and other Criminal Behavior) and Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians). Plus the Book People bookstore in Austin, Texas, had some staff picks to share.

Beyond The Cover chatted with bestselling author C.J. Tudor as she discussed her latest book, The Other People. Tudor is also the author of The Chalk Man, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel and the Strand Magazine Award for Best Debut Novel.

Meet the Thriller Author spoke with T.R. Ragan (Theresa Ragan) about her writing process; the publishing industry; her Lizzy Gardner series; her new book in a new series, Don’t Make A Sound; and much more.

The latest Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast featured the first chapter of Death Over Easy by Maddie Day a/k/a Edith Maxwell, read by actor Julia Reimer

Wrong Place, Write Crime welcomed Tom Pitts to talk about his latest thriller, Coldwater.

My Favorite Detective Stories chatted with Michael Koryta, a former newspaper reporter and private investigator whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won or been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Quill Award, International Thriller Writers Award, and the Golden Dagger.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club welcomed Laurie R. King to talk about Riviera Gold, the 16th in her series featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.