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.
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