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:

AWARDS

The 94th Oscar nominations include several book and play adaptations for 2022. The Power of the Dog, based on the novel by Thomas Savage, and Dune, based on the novel by Frank Herbert, led the nominations in several categories with 22 nods between them. Drive My Car, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami (from his collection, Men Without Women), was also nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay. Other literary adaptation honorees include Nightmare Alley, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham; The Lost Daughter, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante; The Tragedy of Macbeth, adapted from William Shakespeare's play; House of Gucci, based on the book by Sara Gay Forden; and Cyrano, adapted from the play by Edmond Rostand.

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

The creative team behind Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are producing the thriller, Escape, and have tapped James Watkins (The Ipcress File; The Woman in Black) to direct. The action-adventure pic is inspired by the true story of convicts Robert Greenhill and Alexander Pearce and their sensational journey of survival after escaping from prison, which scandalized the Victorian-era world. While the story has previously inspired songs, works of fiction and non-fiction, news articles, tall tales, art, illustrations and other printed materials, it has never before been adapted as a large-scale feature film. When the wrongly-accused Greenhill is shipped to the harshest Tasmanian penal colony in the 1820s, he quickly realizes his only chance of survival is to partner with the notorious murderer Pearce and five other hardened criminals in order to escape. Now on the run in the treacherous wilds, their epic adventure takes increasingly darker and more dangerous turns as Greenhill slowly realizes he may have allied with a force more evil than he suspected.

Actor Chris Pine is tackling his first turn as a director with the mystery-comedy, Pool, which will star Pine alongside Annette Being and Danny DeVito. Pine will play Darren Barrenman, a hapless dreamer and would-be philosopher who spends his days looking after the pool of the Tahitian Tiki apartment block in sunny Los Angeles and crashing city council meetings with his neighbors Jack and Diane (DeVito, Bening). When Barrenman uncovers the greatest water heist in LA history since Chinatown he makes uneasy alliances with a beautiful and connected femme fatale while following every lead he can with corrupt city officials, burned out Hollywood types, and mysterious benefactors – all in the name of protecting his precious Los Angeles.

Gerard Butler is eyeing the starring role in the heist thriller, Just Watch Me, which Derek Kolstand (John Wick) is set to adapt from the novel by Jeff Lindsay (Dexter). Just Watch Me, the first in the Riley Wolfe book series, follows Wolfe, a master thief and expert in disguise who targets the wealthiest one percent. The likeable bad guy teams up with a master forger named Monique and a team of expert thieves on a job that will make history.

Tom Welling (Smallville; Lucifer) has signed on to star in Deep Six, an action-thriller from writer-director Scott Windhauser (Death in Texas). Welling plays Terry, who is released early from prison only to be forced into an undercover unit of six men tackling the mobster enterprise, Cosa Nostra—and on his first day the other five men in his unit are all killed. Now he must go face-to-face with the targets who he was tasked to spy on, not knowing if they realize he's working for the police. Cam Gigandet, Sidhartha Mallya, Brahman Naman, Cher Cosenza, Al Linea, and Alessia Alciati will also star.

Abbey Lee and Christopher Abbott are attached to headline Fear is the Rider, a chase thriller from BAFTA-nominated director, John Michael McDonagh. The project is based on Kenneth Cook’s acclaimed novel of the same name and tells the story of John Shaw (Abbott), a photojournalist who arrives in Australia trying to recover from his experiences reporting on the Vietnam War. After meeting a young woman (Lee) in a small-town bar, he decides to detour into the Outback to photograph cave paintings. But the brutal heat isn't the most hazardous thing in the bush, and Shaw and his mysterious companion soon find themselves caught up in an unrelenting fight for survival.

Harvey Keitel and Peter Stormare will lead the cast of Hard Matter, an action thriller being directed, written, and produced by Justin Price. The film is set in a new America divided by quadrants, in which a power-hungry corporation has taken over the conventional prison system and replaced it with a system of deadly paramilitary watches. Criminals are the new law enforcers who carry out all forms of capital punishment in order to regain their place in society. Franzi Schissler is also in the cast.

Oliver Trevena has signed on to star alongside Aaron Eckhart and Nina Dobrev in the action-thriller, The Bricklayer, based on the novel by Noah Boyd, which is heading into production in Europe next month. In the film, directed by Renny Harlin, someone is blackmailing the CIA by assassinating foreign journalists and making it look like the agency is responsible. As the world begins to unite against the U.S., the CIA must lure its most brilliant – and rebellious – operative out of retirement, forcing him to confront his checkered past while unraveling an international conspiracy.

Sebastian de Souza, Eddie Marsan, and Rich Sommer have boarded the finance thriller, Fair Play, which also stars Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich and will be written and directed by Chloe Domont. Full plot details or what roles the actors will play haven't been released just yet.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Amazon has renewed Reacher for a second season, an announcement that comes only three days after the streamer launched the first season of the Lee Child adaptation. From writer Nick Santora, the series follows Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson), a veteran military police investigator who has just recently entered civilian life. Reacher is a drifter, carrying no phone and the barest of essentials as he travels the country and explores the nation he once served. When Reacher arrives in the small town of Margrave, Georgia, he finds a community grappling with its first homicide in 20 years. The cops immediately arrest him, and eyewitnesses claim to place Reacher at the scene of the crime. While he works to prove his innocence, a deep-seated conspiracy begins to emerge, one that will require Reacher’s keen mind and hard-hitting fists to deal with.

Peacock has given a straight-to-series order to Apples Never Fall, a limited series based on Liane Moriarty’s (Big Little Lies; Nine Perfect Strangers) bestselling novel. Melanie Marnich will pen the adaptation for the series, which centers on the Delaneys, who appear to be an enviably contented family. Former tennis coaches Joy and Stan are parents to four adult children, and after fifty years of marriage, they have finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. But after Joy disappears, her children are forced to re-examine their parents’ marriage and their family history with fresh eyes.

FX has set the cast of its new murder mystery series, Retreat, which has Emma Corrin set in the lead role. Retreat is described as a "radical conceptualization" of the whodunit with a new kind of detective at the helm. Corrin plays a Gen Z amateur sleuth named Darby Hart who, along with 11 other guests, is invited by a reclusive billionaire to participate in a retreat at a "remote and dazzling" location. But when one of the other guests turns up dead, Darby must fight to prove it was a murder before the killer strikes again. Joining Corrin in the limited series will be Clive Owen, Harris Dickinson, Brit Marling, Alice Braga, Jermaine Fowler, Joan Chen, Edoardo Ballerini, Raúl Esparza, Pegah Ferydoni, Ryan J. Haddad, and Javed Khan. 

CBS has ordered the pilot East New York, a cop drama from Law & Order and NYPD Blue exec producer, William Finkelstein, and Big Sky co-exec producer, Mike Flynn. The series follows Regina Haywood, the newly promoted police captain of East New York, an impoverished, working class neighborhood at the eastern edge of Brooklyn. She leads a diverse group of officers and detectives, some of whom are reluctant to deploy her creative methods of serving and protecting during the midst of social upheaval and the early seeds of gentrification.

Netflix has picked up the female-led action adventure series, Palomino, with filming set to get underway later this year in Barcelona. Palomino will follow Erin Collantes, a British teacher in Spain who finds herself caught up in a supermarket robbery. When one of the robbers claims to recognize her, her life threatens to unravel. In Palomino, a town of secrets, she must fight to clear her name and protect her family.

Catherine Zeta-Jones has signed on as a co-lead opposite Lisette Alexis in National Treasure, Disney Branded Television’s TV series for Disney+ produced by ABC Signature. The project is an expansion of the National Treasure movie franchise told from the point of view of young heroine Jess (Alexis) — a DREAMer in search of answers about her family — who embarks on the adventure of a lifetime to uncover the truth about the past and save a lost Pan-American treasure. Oscar winner Zeta-Jones will play Billie, a badass billionaire, black-market antiquities expert, and treasure hunter who lives by her own code. In addition to Alexis, Zeta-Jones joins fellow series regulars Lyndon Smith, Zuri Reed, Jake Austin Walker, Antonio Cipriano and Jordan Rodrigues.

ABC is exploring a spinoff of its popular police procedural, The Rookie, starring Nathan Fillion, with a different lead, Niecy Nash, and a new setting, the FBI. The planned spinoff follows the premise of The Rookie, which stars Fillion as John Nolan, the oldest rookie in the LAPD. Nash will guest star as Simone Clark, a force of nature, the living embodiment of a dream deferred – and the oldest rookie in the FBI Academy.

After pausing production in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, Tokyo Vice will land at HBO Max this spring, premiering with three episodes on Thursday, April 7, followed by two episodes airing every Thursday until the season finale on April 28. The series hails from creator and writer J.T. Rogers and stars Ken Watanabe and Ansel Elgort, with the pilot directed by Michael Mann. Tokyo Vice is loosely inspired by American journalist Jake Adelstein’s nonfiction firsthand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police beat and captures Adelstein’s (Elgort) daily descent into the neon-soaked underbelly of Tokyo in the late '90s, where nothing and no one is truly what or who they seem. Watanabe will play Hiroto Katagiri, a detective in the organized crime division of the Tokyo Police Department who is also a father-figure to Jake throughout the series as he helps guide him along the thin and often precarious line between the cops and the world of organized crime.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast episode is up featuring the first chapter of Checked Out For Murder by Allison Brook aka Marilyn Levinson, as read by actor Julie Lucido.

NPR's Fresh Air took at look at a reissue that is helping revive Joseph Hansen's series about a tough, gay detective.

Read or Dead's Katie and Nusrah chatted about cozy mysteries to cuddle up with this Valentine’s Day.

Spybrary hosts Shane Whaley and David Craggs found out more about Damascus Station with spy writer, author, and former CIA analyst, David McCloskey

On Wrong Place, Write Crime, David Putnam talked about his Bruno Johnson series and his law enforcement career.

Bruce Coffin was the featured guest on My Favorite Detective Stories. Coffin is the award-winning author of the bestselling Detective Byron mystery series and a former detective sergeant with more than twenty-seven years in law enforcement.

On the All About Agatha podcast, Sophie Hannah was interviewed about her Hercule Poirot continuation novels, the discussion of character versus plot in contemporary crime fiction, and Sophie’s "shocking" takedown of American English.

In GAD [Golden Age of Detection] We Trust noted that there is a Golden Age of detective fiction going on at the very moment, but because most of what’s being written is aimed at 8-to-12 year-olds, it gets overlooked by adults. To help correct that oversight, the podcast welcomed M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, authors of the excellent Adventures on Trains series.

On Crime Time FM, Irish authors, Brian McGilloway (Blood Ties) and Catherine Ryan Howard (56 Days), discussed what it is about Ireland that lends itself so well to crime.

Sunday Music Treat

Since Valentine's Day is tomorrow, I thought it would be fitting to feature the popular Liebestraum (Dreams of Love) No. 3 by Franz Liszt. Here's a performance by Lang Lang:

Quote of the Week

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder

Although Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was best known for her psychological thrillers, with some two dozen film adaptations (Strangers on a Train, for one), she also wrote many short stories. One of her most unusual outings is The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, first published in Britain in 1975 and later released in the U.S. in 1986. Each story revolves around an abused animal who gets revenge in one way or another, or as one reviewer put it, the "anti-Marley & Me."

Highsmith may have been a misanthropist (or even a misogynist, a la another satirical collection, Little Tales of Misogyny), but she was a little more sympathetic toward animals. Beastly Murder builds on a Kafka-esque premise of anthropormophic animals, and in some cases, the effect is poignant, as in the case of a lonely circus elephant who bonds with a sympathetic handler for thirty years and then has to deal with his cruel replacement.

But these aren't sentimental tales, with the likes of Djemal, the camel, getting back at a cruel driver; a Capuchin monkey, annoyed at the petty thief who employs him; and chickens on an automated farm (which Kirkus called "nauseating but interesting"), all getting their due in ways that are often grisly and filled with black—and bleak—humor. Some are written from the animal's POV, some from the human's, and some of them, like "The Bravest Rat In Venice" are downright horrific. (Maybe appropriate, then, that Terry Castle wrote how Highsmith once commented that creepy ideas came to her as "frequently as a rat has orgasms").

Publishers Weekly said of the collection that it's "Grisly and atmospheric…[these] stories feature small worlds of animal amorality in which the sweet taste of revenge leaves no aftertaste of guilt." 

CONTENTS

Chorus Girl’s Absolutely Final Performance
Djemal’s Revenge
There I Was, Stuck with Bubsy
Ming’s Biggest Prey
In the Dead of Truffle Season
The Bravest Rat in Venice
Engine Horse
The Day of Reckoning
Notes from a Respectable Cockroach
Eddie and the Monkey Robberies
Hamsters vs. Websters
Harry: A Ferret
Goat Ride

Mystery Melange - Early Valentine's Day Edition

 

CJ Sansom has been announced as the recipient of the highest honor in British crime writing, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger. He combined both history and law in his debut novel, Dissolution, a darkly fascinating novel of monastic murder and politics. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reign of Henry VIII and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. Sansom joins icons of the genre who have been recognized with the accolade, including Ruth Rendell, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin, PD James, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, Lindsey Davis, Peter Lovesey, John Le Carré and Martina Cole.

Saima Mir was announced as the first recipient of the Crimefest bursary for a crime fiction author of colour. Saima Mir’s debut novel, The Khan, was a Times and Sunday Times Crime Novel of the Year in 2021 and has been longlisted for The Portico Prize. This year, three runners-up were also chosen to receive complementary passes to this year’s convention: Elizabeth Chakrabarty, Amita Murray, and Stella Oni. Hosted in Bristol, Crimefest is one of the biggest crime fiction events in Europe, and one of the most popular dates in the international crime fiction calendar, with 60 panel events and 150 authors over four days.

To celebrate the opening of Lee Child's Archive at the University of East Anglia and twenty-five years since the publication of the first Jack Reacher novel, the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing and the British Archive for Contemporary Writing are hosting two landmark events on March 31 to explore Child's legacy and the evolution of the crime thriller. You can find out more about the events and get your tickets via this link. (HT to Shots Magazine.)

Iceland Noir 2022, which will take place in person in Reykjavik November 16-19, has opened up a limited number of Early Bird tickets that are on sale now. Event organizers also announced the first two headliners, Richard Osman, the internationally bestselling author of the Thursday Murder Club books, and veteran crime writer, Mark Billingham. Iceland's Prime Minister, Katrin Jakobsdóttir and Iceland's First Lady, Eliza Reid, will also be participating in two of the headline events.

The Upper Hudson Chapter of Sisters in Crime, The Mavens of Mayhem, are presenting the online event, Murderous March, on Friday, March 4. Catriona McPherson and Hank Phillippi Ryan will serve as the Guests of Honor for the one-day crime writing festival. Other panelists include Tina deBellegarde, Alexia Gordon, Terrie Farley Moran, Ovidia Yu, Carol Pouliot, Connie Berry, Jessica Ellicott, Marni Graff, Clara McKenna, Frankie Bailey, Bruce Coffin, Mary Keliikoa, Bob Knightly, Gabriel Valjan, L.A. Chandlar, Erica Ruth Neubauer, Kelly Oliver, Lori Rader-Day, Eleanor Kuhns, Mally Becker, Tori Eldridge, Leanna Renee Hieber, and Alex Segura.

Over at the Mystery Fanfare blog, Janet Rudolph has updated her Valentine's Day Crime Fiction list with novels that take place on or around Valentine's Day.

Over at CrimeReads, Molly Odintz featured "Bad Love, Good Sex: The Best Thirst Traps in Crime Fiction," or an anti-Valentine's Day round-up of the sexiest mysteries to read with your "friends with benefits."

The authors over at Mystery Lovers Kitchen have offered up many Valentine's recipes through the years, including Cleo Coyle’s Pretty in Pink Coffeehouse Cookies; Ellie Alexander's Valentine’s Day Chocolate Heart Cookies; and Valentine’s Chocolate Cake – two ways, via Mary Jane Maffini.

The Guardian urged us to "Forget Wordle!" and take a hand at cracking the Dickens Code, as apparently an IT worker from California just did. Although you might not want to chuck Wordle just yet, as it apparently helped save an 80-year-old woman from a home invasion.

What's not to love about a story like this: An 8-year-old surreptitiously slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.

Some clever folks have created little book covers to use as wrappers for Hershey's miniature candies, which you can check out here and here. If you'd something a little larger for your literary Valentine, this company has you covered.


Here's a tool from Clive Thompson that is goofy, enjoyable, and can suck you down a rabbit hole pretty quickly: the Weird Old Book Finder. Thompson explains how to use it here. (HT to Jane Friedman) When I typed in "Valentine," it turned up first Valentines in America: 1644-1874 by T.W. Valentine. The second was Valentine's Manual of the City of New York for 1916-1917 edited by Henry Collins Brown. The third was a little more on the mark for the holiday, namely, Kemmish's Annual and Universal Valentine Writer; or, The Lover's Instructor, and Whole Art of Courtship for 1805. (It has a much longer title than that, but it's too hysterically and accidentally NSFW.) As for the poetry? Well, it's pretty much what you'd expect, but fun.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Dark Sparrow Winter" by John D. Nesbitt.

In the Q&A roundup, Deborah Kalb spoke with Brendan Slocumb, a musician and author of the debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy; Kalb also pinned down Wendy Corsi Staub, author of the Lily Dale Mystery series, to discuss her latest novel, The Other Family; Gregg Hurwitz, author of the Orphan X series, chatted with Criminal Element about his inspiration for Orphan X, his research, his latest book, Dark Horse, and more; Writers Who Kill's Grace Topping chatted with Ellen Byerrum about her Crime of Fashion mystery series; and William McGinnis stopped by Lisa Haselton's blog to chat about his newest action-adventure novel, Slay the Dragon: An Adam Weldon Thriller.

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

Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. rights to the dramatic thriller, 892. The film stars John Boyega and the late Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire) and marks the feature directorial debut of Abi Damaris Corbin. The film recently made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast. Based on a true story, it picks up with former U.S. Marine Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) as his disability check from Veterans Affairs fails to materialize, leaving him on the brink of poverty. Desperate and with no other options, he walks into a Wells Fargo Bank and says he has a bomb. "What ensues is an edge-of-your-seat narrative that reminds us of the social responsibility we have to our soldiers, our colleagues, our families as well as to strangers."

Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, Yellowstone star Cole Hauser, and Blindspot actress Jaimie Alexander are set to star in the thriller, The Minute You Wake Up Dead, currently filming in Mississippi. The film follows a stockbroker (Hauser) in a small southern town who gets embroiled in an insurance scam with a next-door neighbor (Alexander) that leads to multiple murders when a host of other people want in on the plot. Sheriff Thurmond Fowler (Freeman), the by-the-book town sheriff for over four decades, works earnestly to try to unravel the town’s mystery and winds up getting more than he bargained for.

Jamie Dornan is set to join Gal Gadot in the international spy thriller, Heart of Stone, from Netflix and Skydance. Plot details are being kept under wraps, although it's said it's possibly being set up as an action franchise in the vein of the Mission: Impossible series. The Old Guard writer, Greg Rucka, penned the screenplay with Allison Schroeder. Tom Harper, known for The Aeronauts and Wild Rose, is set to direct.

Actor-producer Noree Victoria (Queen Sugar; American Crime Story) is making her feature directorial debut with An Arrangement, a psychological thriller marking the first produced film from TV writer, Helen Shang (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings Of Power; Hannibal). The indie, currently shooting in Northern California, follows a politician’s wife whose drug addiction threatens to derail her husband’s gubernatorial campaign. Tensions rise when she is forced to secretly undergo rehab at the couple’s secluded summer home, and her husband’s interest in their unconventional nurse puts the couple’s marriage—and all of their lives—on the line.

Ryan Phillippe, Kat Graham, and Jim Gaffigan are starring in the thriller, Collide. The film, written and directed by Mukunda Michael Dewil (Retribution) is billed as is "an edge-of-your-seat, noirish thriller" where three interlocking stories hurtle towards an explosive end. It follows an ensemble of characters whose paths intersect over the course of a single evening inside an L.A. restaurant. Rounding out the cast are David Cade, Dylan Flashner, Drea de Matteo, Aisha Dee, David James Elliot, and Paul Ben-Victor.

Quintessa Swindell has been tapped to lead the cast of Paul Schrader’s next film, Master Gardener, alongside the previously announced Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton. Also joining the cast of Schrader’s crime thriller is Esai Morales. The film, being shot in Louisiana, stars Edgerton as Narvel Roth, the master gardener of an American estate who is forced to confront his dark past when he meets Maya (played by Swindell). Morales will star as Roth’s witness protection officer.

Nina Dobrev has joined Aaron Eckhart in the action-thriller, The Bricklayer, which will start production next month in Europe. Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 filmmaker, Renny Harlin, is directing the movie, which The Expendables outfit Millennium Media is producing with Gerard Butler after both teamed up with Eckhart on the lucrative Has Fallen franchise. The plot is set in motion when someone blackmails the CIA by assassinating foreign journalists and making it look like the agency is responsible. As the world begins to unite against the U.S., the CIA must lure its most brilliant—and rebellious—operative out of retirement, forcing him to confront his checkered past while unraveling an international conspiracy.

Boies Schiller Entertainment snagged film rights to the real-life story of Abdullahi Tumburkai, a farmer in Nigeria who was in a desperate race to save the lives of his two brothers and successfully negotiated their freedom from kidnappers. Kidnapping has become a cottage industry in regions of Nigeria amid poverty and the inability to make a living in the farming region of Kaduna. After getting his brothers back—he'd sold his farm and paid around $13,000 to free them after 33 days—he became the neighborhood go-to guy for others desperate to recover kidnapped love ones.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Scott Turow’s best-selling novel, Presumed Innocent, is becoming a limited series on Apple TV+. Veteran writer David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) will serve as showrunner and executive producer alongside Dustin Thomason, J.J. Abrams, and Ben Stephenson. Presumed Innocent is described as "the story of a horrific murder that upends the Chicago Prosecuting Attorneys’ office when one of its own is suspected of the crime." The novel was previously made into a hit film in 1990 with Harrison Ford in the lead role. There was also a 1992 TV miniseries spinoff, The Burden of Proof, and a TV movie sequel in 2011 titled Innocent. Kelley plans to reimagine Presumed Innocent to explore "obsession, sex, politics, and the power and limits of love, as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together."

ABC has given a cast-contingent pilot order to Will Trent, a crime drama based on Karin Slaughter’s bestselling book series. The books center on Special Agent Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, who was abandoned at birth and endured a harsh coming of age in Atlanta’s overwhelmed foster care system. But now, determined to use his unique point of view to make sure no one feels as abandoned as he was, Trent has the highest clearance rate in the GBI.

CBS has made its first order of the 2022 pilot season. The network has handed a pilot pickup to a mother-and-son legal drama from Scott Prendergast, who wrote on FX’s Wilfred and appeared in HBO’s Silicon Valley, and Dr. Phil McGraw. The untitled drama follows a talented-but-directionless P.I. who is the black sheep of his family. Despite their opposing personalities, he agrees to work as the in-house investigator for his overbearing mother, a successful attorney reeling from the recent dissolution of her marriage.

Paramount+ has given out more details of its upcoming spy series starring Kiefer Sutherland. The streamer revealed that the eight-part series is titled Rabbit Hole and centers on private espionage operative, James Weir (Sutherland), who finds himself in the midst of a battle over the preservation of democracy in a world at odds with misinformation, behavioral manipulation, the surveillance state, and the interests that control these extraordinary powers.

Marg Helgenberger is eyeing a possible return to the CSI franchise with a reprisal of her role as Catherine Willows. Helgenberg would appear in the upcoming second season of CSI: Vegas, the sequel to the groundbreaking 2000 series, in which Helgenberger starred for the first 12 seasons. Season 1 opened with an existential threat that could bring down the entire Crime Lab and release thousands of convicted killers back onto the neon-lit streets of Vegas. A brilliant new team of investigators led by Maxine Roby (Paula Newsome) enlisted the help of old friends, Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox), to investigate a case centered around former colleague, David Hodges (Wallace Langham).

AMC is moving forward with its series adaptation of Invitation to a Bonfire. Based on the novel by Adrienne Celt, Invitation to a Bonfire is a psychological thriller set in the 1930s at an all-girls boarding school in New Jersey. Inspired by Vladimir and Vera Nabokov’s co-dependent marriage, the series follows Zoya, a young Russian immigrant and groundskeeper, who is drawn into a lethal love triangle with the school’s newest faculty member—an enigmatic novelist—and his bewitching wife.

NBC has picked up two pilot projects including Dean Georgaris’s agent drama, The Blank Slate, and The Irrational (Arika Mittman’s adaptation of Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational). Blank Slate is a high-concept procedural about a government agent who may not be what he seems. Special Agent Alexander McCoy is a legend in law enforcement, the agent we all hope is out there, the agent we’d all like to be. The only issue is … he doesn’t actually exist. He’s a ghost, a phantom. So what happens when a man claiming to be Alexander McCoy walks through the door with all of his skills and knowledge, but with an agenda nobody will see coming? The other pilot pickup, The Irrational, is an investigative thriller that follows a world-renowned professor of behavioral science, who lends his expertise to an array of high-stakes cases involving governments, law enforcement, and corporations with his unique and unexpected approach to understanding human behavior.

Denis Leary is joining the Law & Order: Organized Crime family in a recurring role. The actor is set to play Frank Donnelly of the NYPD. His character will interact with Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), with Leary’s debut episode airing March 3. The Leary casting comes a little over a week after the news that Dylan McDermott is leaving Organized Crime (where he played baddie/mob boss Richard Wheatley) and heading to another Dick Wolf series, FBI: Most Wanted on CBS, as Julian McMahon exits that program March 17.

The David Boreanaz-led SEAL Team will be back for another go-round on Paramount+ after the streamer renewed the military drama series for a 10-episode sixth season. SEAL Team is a military drama that follows the professional and personal lives of the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they train, plan, and execute the most dangerous, high-stakes missions our country can ask of them.

ABC’s drama pilot, L.A. Law, a revival of the Steven Bochco legal drama, expanded its cast with the addition of John Harlan Kim. He joins original cast members Blair Underwood and Corbin Bernsen, who are reprising their respective roles as Johnathan Rollins and Arnie Becker. He also joins Toks Olagundoye, Hari Nef and Ian Duff, who will play new characters in the revival. In the pilot, written by Marc Guggenheim and Ubah Mohamed and to be directed by Anthony Hemingway, the venerable law firm of McKenzie Brackman—now named Becker Rollins—reinvents itself as a litigation firm specializing in only the most high-profile, boundary-pushing and incendiary cases. Kim joins L.A. Law as Chad Park, an up-and-coming attorney at the firm described as a "shark-in-training" whose ambition sometimes gets ahead of his ethical standards.

Athena Pictures, Starlings Television, and Propagate Content’s Ben Silverman will co-produce Shadowland, a female-driven wildlife crime thriller series based on real events. The series follow two wildlife crime operatives, both former U.S. special operations counter-terrorism specialists with decades of combined experience working in some of the most dangerous places in the world, now dedicated to uncovering the real drivers behind Africa’s wildlife crime crisis. The duo uncover a plot to ambush a rhino translocation caravan and expose a massive web of corruption, taking it apart piece by piece.

Jennifer Beals is set to recur on NBC’s Law & Order: Organized Crime. She will play the wife of a new antagonist that was introduced on the NBC series this season, Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson), a drug kingpin in New York and the head of the Marcy Corporation. Seals is boarding the Dick Wolf series as another big-name recurring player, Dylan McDermott, will be wrapping his arc to take on the lead of another Wolf drama, FBI: Most Wanted. This marks Beals’s return to the Law & Order franchise; she did a guest-starring turn on the mothership series in 2007. Law & Order: Organized Crime brought SVU's Elliot Stabler character (played by Christopher Meloni) back to the fold as the head of the NYPD organized crime unit.

Almost a year after the Criminal Minds revival for Paramount+ was announced, six fan favorite cast members, Joe Mantegna, Kirsten Vangsness, Adam Rodriguez, A.J. Cook, Aisha Tyler, and Paget Brewster, have agreed to come back, subject to closing their deals and availability. Deadline also reported that a license agreement for a 10-episode new season of Criminal Minds has been reached between Paramount+ and the studios behind the crime drama, ABC Signature and CBS Studios.

The six-episode series, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, premieres Friday, March 11 on Apple TV+. The streamer unveiled a trailer for the series, which is based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, and follows the title character, a dementia-ridden 90-plus-year-old man who agrees to an experimental medical treatment to regain all his memories. But the effect is only temporary, and he’s now in a race against time to solve the murder of his nephew before his restored memory fades.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

The latest episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features Debbi Mack's interview with Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, screenwriter, author, speaker, and forensic specialist. Along with her crime fiction, she's published a book on forensics called Forensic Speak: How to Write Realistic Crime Dramas.

Wrong Place, Write Crime welcomed Scotti Andrews to talk about her mysteries, horror, and romance offerings.

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast episode is up featuring the mystery short story, "A Virtuous Thief," written by JR Lindermuth and read by actor Sean Hopper.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine podcast featured poet and author, Anna Scotti, who's been contributing a series to EQMM featuring a sleuth in the Witness Security program. Scotti reads her story “What the Morning Never Suspected,” the second in her WITSEC series, from the September/October 2020 issue.


My Favorite Detective Stories host, John Hoda, chatted with Sybil Johnson about her short crime fiction and Aurora Anderson Mystery Series.

The 200th episode of It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club featured snippets from some of the podcast's favorite interviews from the past.

Crime Time FM spoke with Tim Lucas, one of the pioneers of serious genre film criticism, now in his 50th year as a published writer. He’s an award-winning biographer, magazine founder/editor, and novelist (the cult classic Throat Sprockets).

The Red Hot Chili Writers chatted with Dean Koontz about his new novel, Quicksilver; discussed dogs in literature; found out what a dude ranch is; and host, Abir Mukherjee, took on Dean in a canine-inspired quiz.

Friday's "Forgotten" Book: The Notting Hill Mystery

The Notting Hill Mystery is an English-language detective novel published in 1863, which crime writer Julian Symons and others called "the first detective novel," preceding Wilkie Collilns's The Moonstone by several years. However, as fellow blogger John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books noted, historian Brian Stableford has taken exception to that claim, stating that Jean Diable by Paul Féval, published as a serial in 1862, was actually the first detective novel (featuring the Scotland Yard detective Gregory Temple). Another novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Trail of the Serpent, published in 1861, could also make a good case for being the "first," but so could other works of fiction that had detectives in them (e.g. Charles Dickens' Bleak House from 1852). 

As to the author? Notting Hill also started out as an eight-part serial, with illustrations by George du Maurier, that ran in Once a Week magazine, but the author was listed as "anonymous." Paul Collins, writing in the New York Times Book Review, believes the author was actually Charles Warren Adams (1833-1903), a lawyer, author and publisher who wrote novels under a pseudonym, including a crime novel titled Velvet Lawns from 1964. Collins also pointed out that Adams was also notably religious, which is why the novel has strong moral undertones.

The story is set in London, where the wife of a myterious and sinister Baron R dies after allegedly sleepwalking into her husband's laboratory and drinking from a bottle of acid. Insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, working on behalf of several companies, is called into investigate. At first, it seems the Baron had no part in his wife's death, and is referred to by many as a good-hearted man and a loving husband. But Henderson soon learns the husband had taken out at least five life insurance policies on his wife. Henderson eventually comes to the conclusion that Baron R has committed not one but three crimes, but he can’t prove it.

The narration is written in seven sections—memoranda to his corporate bosses—as a series of maps, medical and chemical analysis reports, illustrations, eyewitness interviews, family letters and diary entries, all features that were groundbreaking in style. Henderson details them all, because the evidence is "not only circumstantial but so delicate and complicated that the failure of a single link would render the remainder worthless." Ultimately, the disposition of that evidence is left up to the reader as to whether they are enough to convict Baron R beyond reasonable doubt.
  
The reception of Notting Hill, and its tale of poisoning, hypnotists, gypsies, and kidnappers, was positive when it was first published: the Guardian called it "very ingeniously put together", the Evening Herald said "the book in its own line stands alone", and the London Review described it as "a carefully prepared chaos, in which the reader, as in the game called solitaire, is compelled to pick out his own way to the elucidation of the proposed puzzle."

After long being out of print, the British Library issued a new edition for the book's 150th anniversary that includes the original illustrations by du Maurier (the grandfather of author Daphne du Maurier), as well as an introduction by Mike Ashley.

Mystery Melange

 

The Audio Publishers Association announced the finalists for its annual Audie Awards, with plans to name the winners in a virtual ceremony on March 4 at 9 p.m. ET / 14:00 GMT. The Best Audio Drama category included two crime dramas, The Coldest Case: A Black Book Audio Drama (written by James Patterson, Aaron Tracy, and Ryan Silbert) and Sherlock Holmes – The Seamstress of Peckham Rye (written by Jonathan Barnes). Best Mystery included The Bucket List by Peter Mohlin and Peter Nystrom; Later by Stephen King; Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March; The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie; and The Midnight Man by Caroline Mitchell. The Thriller and Suspense nominees include The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave; Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica; Never Far Away by Michael Koryta; Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell; and Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby

The Minnesota Book Award finalists were also announced, including those in the Genre Fiction category. Three crime fiction titles made that list, including Insurrection by Tom Combs; Lightning Strike: A Novel by William Kent Krueger; and The Stolen Hours by Allen Eskens. The winners in all categories will be announced on Tuesday, April 26 at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in Saint Paul.

Submissions are now open for Sisters in Crime's Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, an annual grant of $2,000 for an emerging writer of color. This grant is intended to support the recipient in crime fiction writing and career development activities. The grantee may choose to use the grant for activities that include workshops, seminars, conferences, and retreats, online courses, and research activities required for completion of the work. For more information about requirements and application materials, follow this link.

The Henri Peyre French Institute and the Ph.D. Program in French at The Graduate Center of CUNY are hosting the virtual roundtable, Eclectic Detective & Noir Fiction in French, on Friday February 11th from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Featured presentations include Antoine Dechêne, talking about "What’s Left of the Metaphysical Detective Story?"; Alice Jacquelin, "Country Noir: Transnational and Intermedial Circulation between France and the USA"; Ciara Gorman, "Gender and Genre: Representing the criminal woman in crime fiction, with particular reference to the work of Fred Vargas"; and Iziar De Miguel, "Metaphysical Noir Fiction: from the hard-boiled classics to the French roman noir."

Hilary Davidson will be leading a reading group at the Center for Fiction this spring, titled, "Agatha Christie’s Heirs: Modern Mysteries Inspired by the Queen of Crime Fiction." Discussions will include an eclectic, diverse array of authors and books, including The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji; The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey Sujata Massey; Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz; They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall; and The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. The sessions are via Zoom, and the first will be on Thursday, March 10th, from 7pm to 8:30pm EST. You can sign up via the Center's Facebook page.

The conference, Golden Age of Crime: A Reappraisal, will be held June 22-23 at Bournemouth University in the UK. As well as interrogating the staples of "Golden Age" crime (the work of Agatha Christie and/or Ellery Queen), this conference will look at under-explored elements of the publishing phenomenon. Keynotes will be given by Shedunnit creator, Caroline Crampton, and Alistair Rolls of the University of Newcastle. This is a hybrid event, taking place both at Bournemouth University and online. Conference organizers are inviting proposals for 20-minute papers or panel presentations of one hour. You can email your 200-word proposal and short biographical note to [email protected] no later than April 18.

Three mystery-themed exhibitions just opened at the Toronto Public Library: "Meddling Kids: A Children's Mystery Book Exhibit" that runs through April 16; "Cracking the Case: Sleuths in Speculative Fiction", which runs through April 2; and "A Study in Sherlock and His Creator: 50 Years of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection." (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at The Bunburyist blog.)

Don Blyly, owner of Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore in Minneapolis, which were burned in 2020 during the protests after George Floyd's murder, has found a new site for the stores. The new building is about two miles east of the old location and a short block and a half from Moon Palace Books. Blyly noted that "the Moon Palace people and I believe that having two bookstores with such different selections so close will do good things for both stores." Blyly sold the stores' destroyed old site and has some insurance money. In addition, the stores' GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $191,000. Blyly hopes to open for business in June. (HT to Shelf Awareness)


This is the Year of the Tiger, and to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Janet Rudolph put together a list of mysteries that take place during that annual event.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Santa Monica Scares" by Joel Bush.