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
Following a highly competitive auction, Amazon Studios has acquired a star vehicle that will have Emily Blunt playing Kate Warne, the first woman to become a detective at the Pinkerton Agency. Based on a script by Gustin Nash, the movie is a propulsive action adventure built around Warne, a real-life female Sherlock Holmes in a male-dominated industry whose singular sleuthing skills paved the way for future women in law enforcement and forever changed how detective work was done.
John Lithgow has joined the cast of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple Studios. Lithgow will play the role of Prosecutor Leaward and joins the previously announced ensemble cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Louis Cancelmi, William Belleu, Tatanka Means, Michael Abbott Jr., Pat Healy, and Scott Shepherd. Killers of the Flower Moon is based on David Grann’s novel and is set in 1920s Oklahoma depicting the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror.
Jalyn Hall has signed on to play Emmett Till in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till. The 14-year-old actor will appear in the film alongside previously announced cast members Danielle Deadwyler and Whoopi Goldberg. Till tells the story of Mamie Till-Mobley (Deadwyler), whose pursuit of justice for her 14-year-old son Emmett Louis Till became a galvanizing moment that helped lead to the creation of the civil rights movement.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman) has signed on to star in the dystopian crime thriller, By All, with Steve Caple Jr. attached to direct. Being positioned as a potential franchise starter, the story kicks off in the aftermath of a tragic event and follows Donte, a man struggling to make ends meet, who is forced to go on the run in a world without police where justice is crowd-sourced.
Amazon Studios has acquired Coyote Blue from John Wick writer, Derek Kolstad. Sterling K. Brown is attached to star with Hanelle M. Culpepper making her feature directorial debut. The action film stars Brown as an everyman who’s hunted by a ruthless criminal syndicate for his mysterious cargo and now must navigate the treacherous terrain of Route 66 while unleashing his lethal set of skills in a fight for survival.
Lionsgate has closed a deal for Clancy Brown to star opposite Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rina Sawayama, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, and Ian McShane in John Wick: Chapter 4. The latest "John Wick" installment is written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch, with production already underway in France, Germany, and Japan.
Jake T. Austin, Paulo Costanzo, Iman Karram, and Ka’ramuu Kush have joined the cast of Daft State, the psychological thriller from Chad Bishoff. The four actors will appear alongside previously announced leads Christopher Backus and Skye P. Marshall. The film charts the mysterious psychological destruction of Easton (Backus), who is driven to the edge of sanity, and possible self-harm, by those that love him most—his wife (Marshall) and daughter. Will Easton succumb to their increasingly traumatizing pressure, or will he conquer the dark forces at play in his addled psyche?
RLJE Films has unveiled the first trailer for Prisoners of the Ghostland, which it will release in theaters, on digital, and VOD September 17. The crime thriller from director Sion Sono is set in the treacherous frontier city of Samurai Town where a ruthless bank robber (Nicholas Cage) is sprung from jail by wealthy warlord The Governor (Bill Moseley), whose adopted granddaughter, Bernice, has gone missing. The Governor offers the prisoner his freedom in exchange for retrieving the runaway. Strapped into a leather suit that will self-destruct within three days, the bandit sets off on a journey to find the young woman and his own path to redemption.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICE
Apple has handed out a ten-episode order to the crime drama, Bad Monkey, adapted from the 2013 novel by Carl Hiaasen. Vince Vaughn will play Andrew Yancy, a one-time detective demoted to restaurant inspector in Southern Florida. A severed arm found by a tourist pulls Yancy into the world of greed and corruption that devastates the land and environment in both Florida and the Bahamas.
ITV has set the cast for its upcoming adaptation of Sara Collins’s period drama, The Confessions of Frannie Langton. Karla-Simone Spence, who starred in the Paramount Pictures feature, Blue Story, as well as BBC series Wannabe and Gold Digger, leads the cast as Langton. The story follows a servant and former slave accused of murdering her employer and his wife in a thriller that moves from a Jamaican sugar plantation to the fetid streets of Georgian London.
In a competitive situation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carol Leonnig’s bestselling book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, will be adapted as a television series. Zero Fail portrays the steely resolve and sacrifices of many Secret Service agents who have committed their lives to protecting the nation’s security, while also revealing other senior agents’ arrogant misconduct and salacious scandals that the service sought to cover up—from the drunken outing the night before the Kennedy assassination to the agents’ own tortured roles in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.
FX made it official that Studio 54: American Crime Story, the fourth installment of the series, has been put into development. The project will tell the story of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who in 1977 turned their Midtown Manhattan disco into an international mecca of nightlife for the rich and famous and commoners alike—renowned for its lavish parties, music, sex, and open drug use. With Rubell and Schrager’s rapid rise came their epic fall less than three years later when the impresarios were convicted of tax fraud.
Tony winner, Ali Stroker (Oklahoma!), Karen Robinson, and Rosanny Zayas are set as series regulars opposite Michelle Monaghan, Matt Bomer, and Daniel Sunjata in Echoes, Netflix’s psychological thriller limited series from 13 Reasons Why showrunner Brian Yorkey. Created and written by Vanessa Gazy, Echoes is a mystery thriller about identical twins Leni and Gina, both portrayed by Monaghan, who share a dangerous secret. Since they were children, Leni and Gina have swapped lives, culminating in a double life as adults: They share two homes, two husbands and a child, but everything in their perfectly choreographed world is thrown into disarray when one of the sisters goes missing.
Paapa Essiedu, Indira Varma, and Andy Nyman are joining the cast for the second season of the BBC One crime drama, The Capture. Holliday Grainger will return as the lead alongside Ron Perlman, Ben Miles, Lia Williams, Nigel Lindsay, Cavan Clerkin, and Ginny Holder. The second season will reveal "a Britain under siege: hacked news feeds, manipulated media, and interference in politics. Entrenched in the UK’s own ‘Correction’ unit, DCI Rachel Carey (Grainger) finds herself in the middle of a new conspiracy – with a new target. But how can she solve this case when she can’t even trust her closest colleagues?"
A trailer was released for the Swedish Agatha Christie series, Hjerson. Based on a fictional character penned by the fictional character, Ariadne Oliver, a mystery crime writer who appears in a number of Agatha Christie novels, the series is set to start in Sweden on August 16. Johan Rheborg will play Sven Hjerson and Hanna Alström will play his sidekick, Klara Sandberg, a former trash TV producer who successfully pitches a true-life crime show starring Hjerson, who will solve a real crime each week.
Hallmark unveiled the film lineup for its autumn Movie & Mysteries events. From Sunday, September 12 through Sunday, October 17, Hallmark will debut thrilling mysteries each week, including One Summer starring Sam Page, Amanda Schull, and Grey’s Anatomy alum Sarah Drew.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
Eric Beetner was joined by co-host, Naomi Hirahara (Clark and Division), and authors Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here), SF Kosa (The Night We Burned), and Claire Douglas (Then She Vanishes) on Writer Types.
The Queer Writers of Crime podcast chatted with John Copenhaver, whose historical crime novel, Dodging and Burning, won the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel and garnered Anthony, Strand Critics, Barry, and Lambda Literary Award nominations. His second novel, The Savage Kind, will be released in October of 2021.
Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Isabella Maldonado, the first Latina to attain the rank of captain in her police department, who retired as the Commander of Special Investigations and Forensics after two decades on the force. The Cipher, the first book in her new series featuring FBI Special Agent Nina Guerrera, was published in November 2020 and the sequel, A Different Dawn, will be published later this month.
Crimetime FM held a roundtable with publishing gurus Katherine Armstrong (Simon & Schuster), Miranda Jewess (Viper), and literary agent, David Headley (Goldsboro/Capital Crime), to discuss the latest trends and where the future lies.
Debbi Mack interviewed crime writer, Saralyn Richard, author of the Detective Oliver Parrott mysteries and other books, for the Crime Cafe podcast.
My Favorite Detective Stories spoke with J.C. Fields, author of award-winning suspense novels in the Sean Kruger Series.
On the Cozy Ink Podcast, Tara Lush (author of the Coffee Lover’s cozy mystery series) discussed how to draft your first cozy mystery.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club featured a paranormal mystery roundup.
Read or Dead discussed mysteries based on real-life happenings.
GAMES
Twelve Minutes, a new thriller video game from Annapurna Interactive, comes out Aug. 19 and has a star voice cast including Willem Dafoe, James McAvoy, and Daisy Ridley. Twelve Minutes is about a man (McAvoy) who’s sitting down for a nice dinner at home with his wife (Ridley) when an intruder (Dafoe) bursts in, accuses the wife of murdering someone, then beats the man to death. Taking a page from Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day movie, the game’s director, Luis Antonio, structured Twelve Minutes around a time loop that repeats in 12-minute intervals. The player’s job is to run through the scenario enough times to break out of the loop and solve the crime.
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