In Reference to Murder

FFB: The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla

At one time, Stuart Palmer (1905-1968) was considered one of the best authors in the mystery genre, writing dozens of stories, books and screenplays. No less than John Dickson Carr, Anthony Boucher and Fred Dannay (one-half of the writing duo Ellery Queen), rated Palmer right up there with the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and Georges Simenon.  

The heart of Palmer's success revolved around his most popular creation, the spinster schoolteacher and amateur sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers, said to be an American version of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, if Miss Marple were more comedic and caustic. She was aided and abetted by Inspector Oscar Piper, a gruff police detective in Manhattan, during the early years of the Great Depression. The first book featuring Withers was 1931's The Penguin Pool Murder, and of her genesis, the author once said:

The origins of Miss Withers are nebulous. When I started Penguin Pool Murder, I worked without an outline, and without much plan. But I decided to ring in a spinster schoolma’am as a minor character, for comedy relief. Believe it or not, I found her taking over. She had more meat on her bones than the cardboard characters who were supposed to carry the story...She was based to some extent on Fern Hackett, an English teacher in Baraboo High School who made my life miserable for two years...Fern was a horse-faced old girl, preposterously old-fashioned, fine old New England family run to seed, hipped on Thoreau and Emerson."

The Penguin Pool Murder was made into a film in 1932 starring Edna May Oliver as Hildegarde and James Gleason as Oscar. The movie was successful enough to spawn six more (only three with Oliver). Palmer moved to Hollywood and collaborated on scripts for movie sleuths like Bulldog Drummond, the Falcon, and the Lone Wolf, and during World War Two he served as a liaison chief for official U.S. Army film production.

The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla is one of Palmer's rarer non-NYC settings, as Inspector Oscar Piper sets off on a junket to Mexico City on a train, where a customs inspector sniffs a bottle of cheap perfume and promptly drops dead. When Oscar telegraphs Hildegarde in Manhattan about the mystery, she packs her bags and heads south of the border. Everyone assumes the real intended victim is a self-made rich American woman whose husband was spotted giving cash to a pretty young redhead.

Other suspects include two Americans who figured to get rich buying all the gasoline-powered generators in Mexico on the eve of a strike by utility workers—especially after one of their shady associates becomes the second victim when a blue banderilla (used to slow bulls down during bullfights) is driven through his back. The main mystery in Blue Banderilla is more of a "howdunit," as Withers and Piper have to try to figure out the exact murder method, with Miss Withers re-creating a stunt from a Sherlock Holmes story and earning the respect and help of a tough Mexican cop.

Anthony Boucher called Miss Hildegarde Withers "one of the first and still one of the best spinster sleuths." Mike Grost over at GA Detction noted that the collaboration of an amateur sleuth and the New York Police recalls the work of the Van Dine school of the 1930's and that "Palmer had a special skill of sheer storytelling, in which he could spin the actions of his characters into a continually unrolling plot. He does a good job of making some characters constantly at the center of suspicious looking mysteries."

Palmer also wrote a few detective novels featuring ex-newspaperman Howie Rook and collaborated on stories and novels with the also equally-famous-at-the-time author Ms. Craig Rice, whose sleuth was the hard-living, hard-drinking John J. Malone. Palmer served for a year as president of the Mystery Writers of America during 1954-55.

Mystery Melange

The Library of Congress Festival of the Book won't be held in person this year, but the online version will connect with audiences across the country for an interactive celebration of "American Ingenuity" for the festival’s 20th year, featuring new books by more than 120 of the nation’s most-renowned writers, poets and artists. The Fiction "stage" will include Colson Whitehead, Ishmael Beah, Sandra Cisneros, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Kate DiCamillo, John Grisham, Marlon James, James McBride, Mazaa Mengiste, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie, Emily St. John Mandel, Amy Tan, Téa Obreht, and Jeff VanderMeer. The Genre "stage" will feature Walter Mosley, Tomi Adeyemi, Leigh Bardugo, N.K. Jemisin, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

The Capital Crime festival is launching a monthly subscription service, to begin on September 1. Each month, subscribers will receive carefully curated books from the crime and thriller genre; access to exclusive online author interviews with the opportunity to submit your questions in advance; a back catalog of festival content and interviews; and also be among the first to hear about the latest news and competitions in the crime and thriller community.

Crime and Detective Stories (CADS), is an in-print magazine with an emphasis on "classic" crime that's published on an irregular basis about every five months. Articles in the latest issue include a look at the nonfiction work of H.R.F. Keating and the "Life and Work of Anthony Boucher." The publication considers itself on the "old-fashioned" side and doesn't have a website. But if you're interested in copies, you can contact editor/publisher, Geoff Bradley, at [email protected].

Berry Content Corporation, created by Mysti Berry in 2017 in order to create charity anthologies of short crime fiction to raise money for good causes, has released the anthology, Low Down Dirty Vote: Volume II, available in ebook and trade paperback formats. The book was created in the wake of BCC’s first release Lowdown Dirty Vote in 2018, which raised $5,000 for the ACLU. Volume II will again contribute 100% of its proceeds, this time to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Authors who contributed stories to the second anthology include Faye Snowden, Stephen Buehler, Sarah M. Chen, Bev Vincent, Gary Phillips, Travis Richardson, Tim O’Mara, and S.B. White. Bestselling literary author and lawyer Scott Turow provided the Foreword.

Writing for Criminal Element, Susanna Calkins wrote about the story of Chicago’s first policewoman, exemplifying how women, especially women of color, can be easily written out of history.

The New York Times compiled "The Essential Tana French" guide, if you want to brush up before her new novel arrives this fall.

The NYT also featured a "A Guide to Nordic Noir," for cold reads on hot summer days.

Think you're good at solving puzzles? In the middle of CIA headquarters sits a sculpture containing a secret code that has stumped top cryptologists for decades.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Heat" by Ankit Anand.

In the Q&A roundup, Cynthia Kuhn was interviewed by E. B. Davis for the Writers Who Kill blog, talking about The Study of Secrets, the fifth book in Kuhn's Lila Maclean Academic mystery series; Indie Crime Scene welcomed Phillip Jordan, whose first novel, Code of Silence, will debut this fall; and Crime Fiction Lover spoke with Australian screenwriter/author Gabriel Bergmoser about his first adult crime fiction title, The Hunted, a tense and bloody pursuit through wasteland in a place that could easily be called The Middle of Nowhere, Australia.

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

The movie adaptation of Delia Owens's bestseller, Where the Crawdads Sing, has found its director in Olivia Newman. Oscar nominee Lucy Alibar is writing the screenplay, with Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine and Elizabeth Gabler’s 3000 Pictures producing. Equal parts haunting crime thriller and moving coming-of-age tale, the story is set against the backdrop of the mid-20th century South where a young woman named Kya is abandoned by her family and raises herself all alone in the marshes outside of her small town. However, when her former boyfriend is found dead, Kya is thrust into the spotlight, instantly branded by the local townspeople and law enforcement as the prime suspect for his murder.

Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts have signed on to star in the family drama, Leave the World Behind, which is based on the upcoming Rumaan Alam novel. Netflix has landed feature film rights to the work, and Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) is attached to direct from his own adapted script. Leave the World Behind is a story about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

PBS’s Masterpiece is set to co-produce and broadcast the murder mystery, Magpie Murders, a six-part drama series based on the novel by Foyle’s War creator, Anthony Horowitz. Adapted by Horowitz for the small screen, Magpie Murders revolves around the character Susan Ryeland, an editor who is given an unfinished manuscript of author Alan Conway’s latest novel, but has little idea it will change her life. 

Magpie Murders is also part of The BBC and ITV’s joint-venture streamer BritBox, which revealed more of its first slate of UK drama originals. The new additions include an adaption of the 1938 novel, The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake (the nom de plume of poet Cecil Day-Lewis, father of Daniel Day-Lewis). The story follows a grieving mother who infiltrates the life of the man she believes killed her son and stars Jared Harris, Cush Jumbo, Billy Howle, and Nathaniel Parker. Also on the BritBox slate is Crime, the first TV adaptation by Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh, which is based on his own book. The six-part series will star Mission: Impossible 2 actor Dougray Scott as Detective Inspector Ray Lennox, who is investigating the disappearance of a schoolgirl while battling cocaine addiction and a mental breakdown.

Perry Mason is coming back for a second season at HBO after becoming the network's most-watched series premiere in nearly two years. A reboot of the long-running CBS drama, the series follows Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys), a low-rent private investigator who is living check-to-check and is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage. John Lithgow stars as Elias Birchard "E.B." Jonathan, a struggling attorney and a semi-regular employer of Mason; Juliet Rylance plays Della Street, E.B. Jonathan’s creative and driven legal secretary; Tatiana Maslany plays Sister Alice McKeegan, the leader of the Radiant Assembly of God, preaching to a hungry congregation and a radio audience across the country; Chris Chalk is Paul Drake, a beat cop with a knack for detective work; and Shea Whigham stars as Pete Strickland, who is hired by Mason as an extra set of eyes on his various investigations.

Netflix has begun production on O2, a French survival thriller to be directed by Alexandre Aja and to star Melanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, and Malik Zidi. O2 tells the story of a young woman who wakes up in a medical cryo unit. She doesn’t remember who she is or how she ended up sequestered in a box no larger than a coffin. As she’s running out of oxygen, she must rebuild her memory to find a way out of her nightmare.

Paramount is finalizing a deal to move its adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse to Amazon Studios. The film stars Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Smith-Turner, and Jamie Bell with Stefano Sollima directing from a Taylor Sheridan-penned script. The film would mark the second Clancy property to find a home at Amazon, with the John Krasinski TV series, Jack Ryan, featured on Amazon Prime.

Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid's Tale) will star in the Apple TV+ thriller series, Shining Girls, an adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s 2013 novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio set to executive produce. The Shining Girls book centers on a Depression-era drifter who must murder the "shining girls" in order to continue his travels. Moss will star as a Chicago reporter who survived a brutal assault only to find her reality shifting as she hunts down her attacker.

The Canadian legal drama series, Burden of Truth and Diggstown will both be back for another season. Set in Manitoba and starring Kristin Kreuk, Burden of Truth follows Joanna Chang, a ruthless, big-city lawyer who returns to her small hometown in Millwood for a case that will change her life forever. Diggstown follows legal aid lawyer Marcie Diggs (Vinessa Antoine), who continues her exploration of a system fraying at the edges as she and her band of tireless colleagues fight to protect society’s most vulnerable from a capricious justice system. 

Amazon Prime Video has commissioned a second season of La Jauría, the Spanish-language thriller from Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín’s Fabula productions, which made the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman. The renewal comes just weeks after Season 1 debuted on Amazon on July 10 across Latin America and Spain. The eight-part series tells the story of the disappearance of a young girl, who becomes the center of a police investigation into an online game that grooms men into assaulting women.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

The latest episode of the Mysteryrats Maze podcast featured the mystery short story, "Crime of Passion," written by mystery author Guy Belleranti and read by actor Kelly Ventura.

Speaking of Mysteries welcomed Cathi Stoler to talk about Bar None, the first installment in her “Murder on the Rocks” series, featuring New York bar owner Jude Dillane.

Suspense Radio's Beyond the Cover spoke with author Riley Sager about his latest thriller, Home Before Dark, about a house with long-buried secrets and a woman's quest to uncover them.

Meet the Thriller Author chatted with Michael Elias about his latest psychological thriller, You Can Go Home Now, featuring a female cop on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own.

My Favorite Detective Stories was joined by D.P. Lyle, author of 17 books, both non-fiction and fiction, including the Samantha Cody, Dub Walker, and Jake Longly thriller series and the Royal Pains media tie-in novel.

Writer's Detective Bureau host, veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, tackled the topics of finding digital evidence when the devices are missing, elicitation of detectives by a mole in the department, and where to believably take a statement from a Reporting Party.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club quizzed former Vegas security officer, Paul W. Papa, about the first book in his new series featuring Massimo "Max" Rossi, the son of Boston Rossi, a mob "fixer."

THEATRE

Theatre is very slowly staging a rolled-out comeback, at least outside the U.S. The UK's Berkshire Theatre will produce a new comedy version of The Hound of the Baskervilles to be staged in the outdoors. This new version of the mystery, devised by the Watermill company, will be performed by three actors on the back lawn of the rural Berkshire theatre. Socially distanced audiences will watch from an arrangement of 20 tables that each seat up to four people from one party only.

Quote of the Week

Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Finalists

Congratulations to all the just-announced finalists of the Killer Nashville conference's Silver Falchion Award. Although the in-person event has been cancelled, the winners will be announced in a virtual cermony on August 22, 2020.

BEST MYSTERY NOVEL

A Dream of Death by Connie Berry
The White Heron by Carl and Jane Bock
The Mammoth Murders by Iris Chacon
Blood Moon Rising by Richard Conrath
Fake by John DeDakis
Lovely Digits by Jeanine Englert
The Marsh Mallows by Henry Hack
Murder at the Candlelight Vigil by Karen McCarthy
Murder Creek by Jane Suen
The Deadliest Thief by June Trop

BEST THRILLER

Red Specter by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson
All Hollow by Simeon Courtie
Deadly Obsession by Shirley B. Garrett
The Gryphon Heist by James R. Hannibal
Low Country Blood by Sue Hinkin
Hyperion's Fracture by Thomas Kelso
Rise by Leslie McCauley
The Secret Child by Caroline Mitchell
The Silent Victim by Dana Perry
Downhill Fast by Dana J. Summers

BEST SUSPENSE

Fade to the Edge by Kathryn J. Bain
Below the Fold by R.G. Belsky
Murder on the Third Try by K.P. Gresham
Queen’s Gambit by Bradley Harper
The Strange Disappearance of Rose Stone by J.E. Irvin
Revenge in Barcelona by Kathryn Lane
The Daughter of Death by Dianne McCartney
VIPER, A Jessica James Mystery by Kelly Oliver
Downhill Fast by Dana J. Summers
The Scions of Atlantis by Claudia Turner

BEST ACTION OR ADVENTURE

Westfarrow Island by Paul A. Barra
The Measure of Ella by Toni Bird Jones
Dangerous Conditions by Jenna Kerna
The Best Lousy Choice by Jim Nesbitt
Angel in the Fog by Tj Turner

BEST COZY

Two Bites Too Many by Debra H. Goldstein
A Sip Before Dying by Gemma Halliday
Bad Pick by Linda Lovely
The Fog Ladies by Susan McCormick
Twisted Plots by Bonita McCoy

BEST PROCEDURAL OR PI

Russian Mojito by Carmen Amato
Apprehension by Mark Bergin
The Things That Are Different by Peter W.J. Hayes
Paid in Spades by Richard Helms
The Dead of Summer by Jean Rabe

BEST JUVENILE OR YA

Daughter Undisclosed by Susan K. Flach
Speak No Evil by Liana Gardner
The Clockwork Dragon by James R. Hannibal
Kassy O'Roarke, Cub Reporter by Kelly Oliver
This Dark and Bloody Ground by Lori Roberts

BEST SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGY OR COLLECTION

Couch Detective by James Glass
Words on Water by Harpeth River Writers
A Midnight Clear by Lindy Ryan
Last Call by Manning Wolf & Laura Oles
The Muse of Wallace Rose by Bill Woods

BEST SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY OR HORROR

The Line Between by Tosca Lee
A Single Light by Tosca Lee
To the Bones by Valerie Nieman
Moon Deeds by Palmer Pickering
Dreamed It by Maggie Toussaint

Theakston Crime Novel of the Year

Congratulations to Adrian McKinty, who has won the 2020 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for his novel, The Chain, which sees parents forced to abduct children to save the lives of their own. The news was revealed in a virtual awards ceremony on what would have been the opening night of Harrogate’s legendary Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which was cancelled due to the pandemic.

The other shortlisted books included:

• My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Worst Case Scenario by Helen FitzGerald
• The Lost Man by Jane Harper
• Joe Country by Mick Herron
• Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee
   
  
  

FFB: First Come, First Kill

Richard Lockridge was born in Missouri in 1898 and became a journalist and drama critic for the New York Sun. In 1922, he married his wife Frances, a reporter and music critic for the Kansas City Post, and the duo eventually developed two comedic characters from newspaper vignettes and radio comedy that they modeled on themselves—the amateur detectives Mr. and Mrs. North. That particular series was so popular, it ultimately inspired 40 books in the North series, a movie starring George Burns and Gracie Allen, a long-running play on Broadway, a radio drama and a TV show with Richard Demming and Barbara Britton.

The prolific husband-and-wife writing team also created another mystery series featuring the sleepy-eyed Captain Merton Heimrich of the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Identification. In 1962's First Come, First Kill, a shabby, elderly man is shot on the driveway of the house where Heimrich and his wife Susan live, managing to say only one word before he dies: "well." As Heimrich digs into the background of the victim, "Old Tom"—an eccentric but harmless itinerant gardener—it quickly becomes evident that the case of the murdered man is linked to an unsolved disappearance of a New York Supreme Court Justice who'd vanished years before. The trail leads even farther afield to London and Mexico, until Heimrich realizes the murderer is uncomfortably closer to home.
 
Of the Richard and Frances authorial collaboration, Richard once noted, "We had story conferences and wrote a summary. As we both insisted, the writing was entirely mine."  Frances was primarily a force in the plotting stage, which Richard would then turn into a 200-page manuscript. This was especially true with the Lt. Merton Heimrich books; the authors were billed as "Frances and Richard" for the North novels and "Richard and Frances" for the Heimrich series. In fact, after Frances died in 1963 (First Come, First Kill was their last book together), Richard continued the Heimlich line on his own with eight more books and penned several other series, as well.

A few trivia notes: The Lockridges served as co-presidents of the Mystery Writers of America in 1960 and received a special Edgar Award in 1962. Francis Richards was a pseudonym for the Richard & Francis Lockridge books used exclusively in the UK.

Mystery Melange

Shortlists have been released for the 2020 Davitt Awards, presented by Sisters in Crime to recognize the best crime books by Australian women. The winners in the six categories of adult novel, YA novel, children's novel, nonfiction book, debut, and Readers' Choice awards will be announced at a September awards ceremony live on Zoom. Check out the complete Davitt Award shortlists here.

Also from downunder comes the longlist for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for excellence in New Zealand crime fiction:

• Shadow of Doubt (S L Beaumont, Paperback Writers)
• Trust Me, I’m Dead (Sherryl Clark, Oldcastle Books)
• Whatever it Takes (Paul Cleave, Upstart Press)
• One Single Thing (Tina Clough, Lightpool Publishing)
• Girl from the Tree House (Gudrun Frerichs, self-published)
• Auē (Becky Manawatu, Makaro Press)
• The Nancys (R W R McDonald, A&U)
• Hide (S J Morgan, MidnightSun)
• The Great Divide (L J M Owen, Echo)
• In the Clearing (J P Pomare, Hachette)
• The Wild Card (Renée, Cuba Press)
• A Madness of Sunshine (Nalini Singh, Berkley)

Acknowledging excellence in the field of tie-in writing, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers also announced the winners of the 2020 Scribe Awards. Among special interest to the crime fiction community is the award for Best Original General Novel, which was given to The Bitterest Pill by Reed Farrel Coleman. (HT to Mystery Fanfare)

The virtual Harrogate Festival, "HIF Weekender" will be available for free this weekend. Events will include interviews with Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Mark Billingham; a panel celebrating debut authors; the live-streaming of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year Award, and much more.

Author Terrie Farley Moran, who penned the "Read 'Em and Eat" mystery series solo and co-authored the Scrapbooking Mystery Series with Laura Childs, announced on Facebook that she has been handed the baton by Jon Land to take over the Murder She Wrote tie-in novels. Land's latest book with Jessica Fletcher will be released in November and Moran's first book will be on shelves next spring.

The summer issue of Mystery Scene Magazine is out, with articles and interviews about Ivy Pochoda, Lawrence Block, Val McDermid, Small Town Detectives, Grand Dame Guignol, and much more.

Need some more reading to add to your TBR pile? Poisoned Pen press is giving away a bundle of books to help entertain you during Covid-19 quarantines.

Although this isn't technically related to crime fiction, I found this bit of news kind of fun. Due to the social distancing requirements of Covid-19, drive-in movies are popular once again, and some comedians and art galleries have even been experimenting with "drive in" events of one kind or another. The Appledore book festival in the UK this September is planning on its own drive-in event, where audience members will need to submit questions in advance, and flash their car lights to alert writers to their presence.


The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Quiet" by Mehnaz Sahibzada.

In the Q&A roundup, The Guardian interviewed Jasper Fforde, author of inventive and idiosyncratic books like The Eyre Affair and his recent The Constant Rabbit, about everything from rabbits to racism to writing fiction in order "to slightly improve a flawed world"; Writers Who Kill had an interview with Agatha winning author, Leslie Budewitz, about The Solace of Bay Leaves, the fifth book in her Spice Shop Mystery series; and Criminal Element welcomed John Glatt, author of The Perfect Father.

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

Netflix announced its most financially ambitious feature film so far, The Gray Man, based on the series of bestselling novels by Mark Greaney. Set to star Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, the project follows ex-CIA operative turned freelance assassin, Court Gentry (Gosling) as he is pursued by an old colleague, now nemesis, Lloyd Hansen (Evans). Joe and Anthony Russo, the brothers who helmed several critically and commercially successful Marvel Studios films with Evans (including 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier) will direct.

James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming up to revive the vintage crime fighter, The Shadow, in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen. Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown and Company will publish the original series, whose first installment is due out in the fall of 2021. The Shadow, an iconic New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles, and in 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.

Jon Hamm is set to star in and produce a feature film reboot of Fletch, the brazen investigative reporter from Gregory Mcdonald’s 1970s and 1980s Fletch mystery novels. The new film adaptation will specifically be based on the second book in the Mcdonald series, Confess, Fletch. In a mysterious chain of wild events, Fletch finds himself in the middle of multiple murders, one of which implicates him as a prime suspect. While on a quest to prove his innocence, Fletch is tasked with finding his fiancée’s stolen art collection, the only inheritance she’s acquired after her father goes missing and is presumed dead. Zev Borow, consulting producer of the Lethal Weapon TV series, will be penning the feature adaptation.

Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, creators of the hit BBC drama, The Salisbury Poisonings, have been attached to direct the feature film, Chasing Agent Freegard, a thriller starring James Norton. The movie is written by Captain Phillips co-producer Michael Bronner and is based on the gripping true story of con man Robert Hendy-Freegard (Norton), who masqueraded as an MI5 agent and manipulated and threatened multiple people into going underground for fear of assassination.

Tyler Posey (MTV’s Teen Wolf) has signed on to star opposite Lelia Symington in Brut Force, the first feature from writer-director Eve Symington. The film follows Sloane (Lelia Symington), a reporter who returns to her rural California hometown to investigate harassment of local vineyard workers, uncorking a tangled web of crime, corruption, and murder behind wine country’s shiny façade. Posey will play the love interest and "homme fatale." Vico Escorcia (History’s Texas Rising) will also co-star as the missing girl and catalyst to the neo-noir tale.

Clerkenwell Films has optioned the TV rights for Rewind by Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard. Rewind is a psychological thriller that begins with a murder being captured on film, before jumping back in time to reveal the events leading up to the crime.

The Kourosh Ahari-directed psychological thriller, The Night, has landed a license for theatrical release in Iran. This is a historic benchmark for the country’s filmmaking community as it is the first U.S.-produced film to receive a license for theatrical release in Iran since the revolution.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

The Quinn Colson novels by Ace Atkins are being developed as a TV series at HBO. In the books, Colson is a former Army Ranger who returns to his home in rural northeast Mississippi only to discover it's been overrun with corruption, drugs, and violence. In addition to writing the Quinn Colson novel series, Atkins also took over Robert B. Parker’s Spenser character following Parker’s death in 2010, with one novel adapted into the Mark Wahlberg-Winston Duke film, Spenser Confidential.

Grantchester is coming back for a sixth season after British broadcaster ITV and PBS Masterpiece renewed the drama and announced it will start shooting in September (and could become one of the first big British scripted series to return). The show, set in the quaint but crime-ridden village of Grantchester, England, follows the investigations of an unlikely pairing: a detective (Robson Green) and a vicar (Tom Brittney, who took over from James Norton in the role).

Alejandro Amenábar, the Oscar-winning director behind The Others and The Sea Inside, is to make his first-ever television drama for AMC and Spain’s pay-TV broadcaster Movistar+, adapting Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral’s graphic novel, El Tesoro del Cisne Negro (The Treasure Of The Black Swan). The story centers on young diplomat Alex Ventura who teams with a combative public official and a brilliant American lawyer to recover treasure stolen by Frank Wild, who travels the world plundering historic items from the ocean.

Des, ITV’s drama starring David Tennant as British serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, has been acquired by a number of international broadcasters and streamers, including AMC Networks’ Sundance channel. Des follows Nilsen’s unraveling from the point of his arrest to his trial, and is based on the Brian Masters book, Killing For Company, which attempted to get inside the mind of the killer. Masters is a central character in ITV’s drama and is played by The Crown's Jason Watkins. Line Of Duty actor Daniel Mays also stars as Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay.


Author Chris Bohjalian's suspense novel, The Red Lotus, has been optioned to be developed into a drama series with Kate Brooke (A Discovery of Witches, Bancroft) attached to pen the adaptation and serve as the showrunner. The Red Lotus follows Alexis, a young ER doctor in New York whose boyfriend goes missing while on vacation in Vietnam. As a result, she uses her own deductive reasoning and expertise as an emergency room medical professional to embark on an international manhunt.

The Rosario Dawson-starring drama, Briarpatch, is not returning for a second season after the USA Network cancelled the show. Based on the Ross Thomas novel, Briarpatch follows Allegra Dill (Dawson), a dogged investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered. What begins as a search for a killer turns into an all-consuming fight to bring her corrupt hometown to its knees. The series also starred Jay R. Ferguson, Brian Geraghty, Edi Gathegi, Kim Dickens, Alan Cumming, and Ed Asner.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

Debbi Mack interviewed police reporter turned crime writer, Mark S. Bacon, on the Crime Cafe podcast.

Writer Types co-host, Halley Sutton (The Lady Upstairs), joined Eric Beetner to chat with SA Cosby (Blacktop Wasteland) and SC Perkins (Lineage Most Lethal).

Read or Dead hosts, Katie McClean Horner and Rincey Abraham, caught up on the news they missed, including lawsuits featuring Dan Brown and the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate, and read some locked room mysteries in honor of not leaving their homes.

Meet the Thriller Author welcomed former orthopedic surgeon John Bishop, who writes the Doc Brady Medical Thriller series.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club chatted with D.C. Alexander, a former federal agent whose debut novel, The Legend of Devil's Creek, was a #1 Amazon Kindle best seller.

Quote of the Week