B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 107

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

After starring together in the upcoming film, The Suicide Squad, Idris Elba and John Cena are re-teaming for the drama, Heads of State, from Amazon Studios. Specifics are being kept under wraps, but the project is said to be a "’90s style two-hander, a high-octane premise that has a bit of Air Force One meets Hobbs and Shaw, bringing together an odd couple in a high stakes situation."

A film chronicling the tumultuous making of the landmark 1972 movie, The Godfather, has found its stars in Oscar Isaac and Jake Gyllenhaal. The pair have signed on to play director Francis Ford Coppola and former Paramount Pictures executive Robert Evans in the indie drama, Francis and The Godfather. Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) has been tapped to helm the project. According to Hollywood lore, the making of The Godfather was chaotic, mostly due to the epic behind-the-scenes battles between Coppola and the studio on everything from shooting locations to casting.

Aisling Walsh (Maudie) will direct Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins and rising Brit actor Johnny Flynn (Emma) in the feature film, One Life, scripted by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake. The project tells the story of Sir Nicholas Winton, whose unheralded endeavors on the eve of World War II saved the lives of more than 600 European refugee children who otherwise would have perished in the Nazi death camps. His actions were relatively unknown for nearly fifty years until, aged 88, he found himself driven to publicly reveal the past—with which he had never fully reconciled—in order to remind the world of the need for tolerance and humanity.

The musical-chairs scheduling and rescheduling of movie premieres continues at a frantic pace. The latest victims are the James Bond movie, No Time to Die, now slotted for Easter Weekend in April 2021. That, in turn, prompted the latest Fast and the Furious franchise installment, F9, to move to May 28, 2021, which is Memorial Day weekend. As Deadline reported, this is proving problematic for a certain cinema chain.





TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Acorn TV is set to adapt Julie Wassmer’s Whitstable Pearl Mystery novels into a six-part series. Kerry Godliman stars as big-hearted local restaurant owner, Pearl Nolan, who sets up a local detective agency after undergoing police training in an earlier career. She is soon embroiled in her first case when she discovers the body of close friend, Vinnie. Pearl forms an unlikely partnership with DCI Mike McGuire, a new local police chief who has transferred from London to escape his past. And when a second body shows up, Pearl finds herself pulled into the dark underbelly of the picturesque town she calls home.

Heyday Television is adapting Peter McLean’s fantasy crime novel, Priest of Bones, for the small screen. The book, described as "Peaky Blinders with swords," revolves around Tomas Piety, a nefarious crime lord turned priest. After being away at war for many years, Tomas comes back to find that his city of Ellinburg has changed: his people have lost their wealth, and the town is overrun by a foreign power. With his gang of Pious Men, Tomas embroils himself in cutthroat politics and epic barroom brawls to win back the city that once was his.

Netflix has ordered Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a limited series about the real-life serial killer, from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Richard Jenkins will co-star on the show as Dahmer’s father, Lionel, a chemist, who showed him how to bleach and preserve animal bones as a child. The roles of Dahmer himself and Glenda Cleveland, a neighbor who tried to warn police about Dahmer’s behavior, have yet to be filled. The project will consist of 10 episodes and span the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s and end with Dahmer’s arrest in the early ’90s, with a focus primarily on the victims.

NBC’s Law & Order: Organized Crime, featuring Chris Meloni’s return as Elliot Stabler, is no longer part of NBC’s fall schedule, due to the departure of showrunner Matt Olmstead. The newest Law & Order series was supposed to air Thursday nights at 10 p.m. following the 22nd season of SVU at 9 p.m. It was NBC’s only new show slotted for this fall, and is still expected to debut at some point during the 2020-2021 TV season.

Nearly four months after Cops was canceled by Paramount Network amid the nationwide protests against police brutality, the show has quietly resumed production in Spokane County, Washington. The episodes will not air in the U.S. but are being produced to fulfill international contractual commitments.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

Debbi Mack interviewed journalist and crime writer, Tom Vater, who's based in Bangkok, on the Crime Cafe podcast.

Writer Types host, Eric Beetner, welcomed four authors with three books for a discussion of their new releases, including co-authors Smith Henderson and Jon Marc Smith (Make The Cry); Heather Young (The Distant Dead); and debut author, Micah Nemerever.

Meet the Thriller Author chatted with Paul Levine, who worked as a newspaper reporter, a law professor, and a trial lawyer before becoming a full-time novelist. They discussed his latest book, Cheater's Game, an Amazon bestseller based on the college admissions scandal that is sending Aunt Becky from Full House to jail.

David Housewright joined host John Hoda of the My Favorite Detectives Stories podcast. David is a past President of the Private Eye Writers of America, an Edgar Award winner, and author of the Rushmore McKenzie and Holland Taylor private eye novels.

Wrong Place, Write Crime host, Frank Zafiro, spoke with Chris Mooney about his new book, Blood World.

Historical mysteries were the focus of the latest podcast from It Was a Dark and Story Book Club.

Greg Herren stopped by The Gay Mystery Podcast. His novel, Murder in the Rue Chartres, won a Lambda Literary Award, and he's also won several other awards, including an Anthony. He is currently the Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America.

The Tartan Noir Show featured bestselling author, Max Brooks, talking about World War Z and zombies.





On the latest Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine podcast, Barb Goffman read her tale "Dear Emily Etiquette" from the current September/October 2020 issue. Barb has won the Agatha, Macavity, and Silver Falchion awards for her short fiction.

           Related StoriesMedia Murder for Monday 

Quote of the Week

            

FFB: Detective Fiction

Charles J. Rzepka's Detective Fiction (Cultural History of Literature) is an interesting read, and not just for its quasi-intended audience, college students. Author Rzepka teaches English at Boston University, but one of his specialties is also detective fiction. In addition to this book, he's published several articles on subjects from Elmore Leonard to Charlie Chan, and most of his works-in-progress are related to detective fiction, including a biographical essay on Earl Derr Biggers (creator of Charlie Chan); an essay on the theme of "nostos" in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; another on the detective fiction of Todd Downing (part-Choctaw writer, editor, and translator; and two book length studies: of the coterminous rise of formal detective fiction and the development of the lyric from Romanticism to Modernism (working title Lyrical Forensics), and the origins of ethnic and multicultural detective literature in the interwar period, 1920-1940, titled Two-Faced.

Yes, this is more of a scholarly look at the history of detective fiction—focusing primarily on the UK and America up to the latter part of the 20th century—but it's also entertaining. Thomas Paul (Modernism/Modernity) even went so far as to call it "cool, savvy, and utterly compelling." What is most interesting to me is the premise, i.e., he cultural context in which Rzepka places both authors and readers as the genre and society evolve together. As Rzepka points out, it's not surprising that the publication in 1841 of what is considered the first modern detective story, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morge" coincided with the growing tension between religion and the physical sciences, where path-breaking discoveries were giving rise ultimately to modern forensics.

Another cause-and-effect in the genre's history took place in England where English sympathizers with the American Revolution were beginning to agitate for reforms in the "old corruption" of rule and law enforcement by the landed classes. One such sympathizer, William Godwin (1756-1836) went on to write the book Caleb Williams (1794, a Forgotten Book in its own right), considered one of the first English detective novels, which featured a murder, cover-up, and framing and execution of two innocent people by a wealthy landowner.  Rzepka adds, "Godwin intended to show how, given the current political situation, absolute power corrupts turning the former into outright bullies or conscience-tormented hypocrites and the latter into obsequious toadies or celebrity-obsessed curiosity-seekers." (Sound familiar? Some things never change.) Caleb Williams was a portent of things to come in other ways: "the terror and mystery of crime; the obsessive nature of suspicion; the paranoid thrills of flight, pursuit, arrest, and escape; and the daring use of incognito and disguise."

Rzepka has studies on Holmes, the Golden Age of Detection, and the rise of hard-boiled fiction in America, all tightly woven into the fabric of their particular time and place in history. The book isn't exactly "light" reading, but having read it once, I look forward to revisiting it again in the not-too-distant future and hopefully absorb more of the details I missed the first time around. Such nonfiction books are often quite neglected in general (although personally I enjoy them), but this particular nonfiction title is definitely recommended.

            

Author R&R with Nancy Burke

NANCY BURKE is author of From the Abuelas’ Window (2006), If I Could Paint the Moon Black (2014) and her new suspense novel, Only the Women are Burning (Apprentice House Press). Her short story, "At the Pool" is a finalist in the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. Her short fiction "He Briefly Thought of Tadpoles" appeared in Meat for Tea and "The Last Day" appeared in Pilgrim: A Journal of Catholic Experience. She completed her MFA in her fifties in Creative Writing from Rutgers University after studying anthropology as an undergrad—a subject that features prominently in her new novel.

In Nancy's Only the Women are Burning, three women are killed by flames in a single morning, one at a commuter train, one at a school, one while walking her dog in the woods. The authorities decide the burning women are members of a cult, but when Cassandra learns her former best friend died in the fiery phenomenon she refuses to accept that explanation. A mom and former anthropologist, Cassandra finds herself wrapped up in the mystery of these fiery deaths, searching for a solution. As she delves into this strange episode in her once-safe suburban New Jersey town, she must also face some buried truths of her own.

 

Nancy stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching the novel:

 

My book, Only the Women are Burning, brings you Cassandra, a suburban mom in relentless pursuit of answers to unanswerable questions when the women in her town begin to spontaneously burst into flame and disappear leaving only their clothes behind. She stepped off her youthful path of insatiable intellectual curiosity a long time ago. You’ll have to read the book to find out why she did that. Only in the aftermath of the women’s deaths does she recover her investigative powers, putting two and two together, and some other unlikely pairings, in her hunt for the truth.

Ever since my summer days on a shady lounge chair near my backyard pool, swapping Nancy Drew mysteries with my sister, I’ve loved the role of sleuth.  Maybe because I’m a Nancy too the role of amateur detective lodged deep in my brain. My synapses flare when I am challenged with ‘what if’ questions. I suppose that is what makes me a fiction writer! This emerged in my central character, Cassandra, a lapsed anthropologist and geo-archaeologist stuck in suburban New Jersey, raising her kids and missing her forever absent husband.

In researching and writing this book, I uncovered all sorts of fascinating facts to work with, building the series of clues Cassandra pieces together to show the authorities in her town that she knows what she’s talking about. But, not everything in OTWAB was discovered through deliberate research. Some of the elements of the book were lodged in memory already. I taught art, history and mythology of Egypt, ancient Greece, China, and the native tribes of Africa and North America to visiting school groups at the Newark Museum, and so does Cassandra. For a short time I was a mission commander at a Challenger Learning Center where I led simulated missions to the space station for groups of middle school children. I taught about life on the international space station, the exploration of Mars and deep space. I studied NASA websites and replenished my lessons with arcane scientific facts. As I developed OTWAB an archive of information rose up from memory and demanded to be included in this quasi-scientific, fabulist novel. I listened. I consulted National Geographic magazine and countless websites to understand how energy travels through space to reach us, and about the energies deep within our earth. I visited Stonehenge with my daughter and pondered the question Cassandra once tried to answer, “Why did they build it on precisely this spot?” There’s more, but again, you’ll have to read the book. No spoilers here.

Writers often tell us how their characters whisper to them, surprising them with their sudden choices and odd behavior. It’s the writer’s job to listen and get it on the page. In OTWAB that happened, but the physical world spoke to me too and whispered solutions to my big question of “How can women burst into flame and die in the middle of their daily routines, leaving their clothes behind?”

I incorporated what I learned through early experiences in my own motherhood into the story as well. When I left a successful career in business to stay home to care for my own children, I stepped into a world of precarious self-doubt, at a time when women were increasing their presence in the workforce, determined to stay in it while raising children. I was choosing against the popular rhetoric of the time. That women could do and have it all – a career and motherhood – was something of a self-righteous insistence for my generation. Many women did sacrifice mom time in favor of the workplace and financial/economic participation. I banded together with other women who chose the traditional at-home role. We found ourselves circling the wagons in defense of our choices. Some would call what we did privilege. But, at the time, we felt a loss of self, an abdication of our own dreams of success, as though we were letting down our own generation and ourselves. This book is an exploration of what that does to us, what society does to women with its expectations and its conflicting demands.

Compiling disparate elements of physical science, visible and invisible environmental threats, into a sequence of discoveries, and blending the scientific elements with the psychological frame of mind of the character was my first challenge. The second challenge was making it all believable. Charles Dickens used spontaneous human combustion to kill off his character, Mr. Krooks, in Bleak House. In defense of his choice he said, “Nobody has proved that it can’t happen.”

I found books on the subject. I read newspaper articles about deaths by fires of unknown origin. Either the police failed or science failed to sufficiently solve those deaths. The FBI does not recognize it as a cause of death, but in England cases have been closed with precisely that listed.

I feared this book would be an eye roll for agents and publishers during my query process. I only discovered one other writer to use the element of SHC in a contemporary novel. Reading Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, where a set of twins burst into spontaneous flame when they feel agitated, encouraged me. My book was already written, but it hadn’t been accepted for publication. This was my third challenge: to find a press who would see the fabulist elements as intriguing, not just as para-normal lunatic fringe. I found Apprentice House Press, who saw the metaphorical value of the burnings in the context of a suburban landscape inhabited by women with potential and no means to express it.

Central to this book is the idea of women’s struggles often being of the silent variety. What we don’t express, but perhaps experience within the roles we assume in our lives, can fester. I’ve heard stories of women who develop illnesses because of deeply buried anger and rage that ultimately is turned inward. I contemplated this sort of unintentional self-destruction and how it manifests itself in lives as I developed this story. It takes many forms. I expect OTWAB to generate highly charged discussions of such themes among women’s book groups. I expect women to find elements of themselves inside the story. And while my readers may speculate endlessly about the phenomenon of bursting into flame and vigorously debate whether it could really happen, I know many will acknowledge they’ve felt the feeling at times in their lives of wishing they could just burst into flame and disappear and start a whole new life all over again. My answer is, of course you can start all over again, but we all know you don’t need flame to make it happen.

 

 

You can learn more about Nancy Burke and her books via her website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Only the Women are Burning is on sale today and now available from all major online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Nancy will celebrate the launch of the book with a virtual event ("In Conversation with Jenny Milchman"), hosted by Watchung Booksellers, on Wednesday, October 7th at 7:30 pm ET. 

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Mystery Melange

The winners of the 2020 Davitt Awards, organized annually by Sisters in Crime Australia, were announced this past weekend. The awards, meant to "provide some much-needed—and overdue—recognition for Australian women crime writers," included several categories including Best Adult Crime Novel: The Trespassers, by Meg Mundell; Best Young Adult Crime Novel: Four Dead Queens, by Astrid Scholte; Best Children’s Crime Novel: The Girl in the Mirror, by Jenny Blackford; Best Non-fiction Crime Book: Banking Bad: Whistleblowers. Corporate Cover-ups. One Journalist’s Fight for the Truth, by Adele Ferguson; Best Debut Crime Book: Eight Lives, by Susan Hurley; and the Readers' Choice Award (tie), Emma Viskic for Darkness for Light and Dervla McTiernan for The Scholar. You can check out both the longlisted titles and shorts here.

CrimeCon is partnering with Bonnier Books UK to launch its first true crime weekend in London next summer, featuring Lynda La Plante, Christopher Berry-Dee, Wensley Clarkson and Carl Chinn. The event, also partnered with true crime TV channel Crime + Investigation, will run from June 12th to 13th. London's CrimeCon will see criminologists, pathologists, leading law enforcement representatives, documentary makers, investigative journalists and crime podcasters creating over 50 hours of content through live shows, panels, and immersive experiences.

Join four veteran mystery writers as they discuss their new works and all that goes into writing a mystery series in the "Stone Cold Mystery Writers Panel." Archer Mayor (the Joe Gunther series), Paula Munier (the Mercy Carr series), Sarah Stewart Taylor (the Sweeney St. George mystery series), and ​Julia Spencer-Fleming (the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series) will be online in the virtual panel on Oct 7 at 7pm, Eastern Time.

The winners of the annual Writers Police Academy Golden Donut Awards were recently announced. The rules were simple—write a story about a provided photograph using exactly 200 words including the title, with the image being the main subject of the story. You can check out the first through tenth place winners here, as judged Linda Landrigan, editor-in-chief of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

CrimeReads took note of "Ten Golden Age Detective Novelists Who Deserve to Be Better Known," as the unsung maestros of British mystery fiction, and also profiled "Ten American Masterpieces That Are Actually Crime Fiction."

CrimeReads also tackled the topic of the sexist books in contemporary crime fiction, putting together a panel for the first of a two-part discussion featuring Robyn Harding (The Swap), Alex Segura (Pete Fernandez series), P.J. Vernon (When You Find Me), Kelly J. Ford (Cottonmouths), Layne Fargo (Temper), and Laura Lippman (Sunburn).

Marketplace studied the Agatha Christie effect, pointing out that a century after her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, appeared in print, the Agatha Christie industry is still going strong, earning $33 million in royalties in the latest year it reported.

Robert Dugoni, author of the Tracy Crosswhite police series as well as the Charles Jenkins espionage series and the David Sloane legal thriller series, applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Last Agent.





The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Shot Three Times" by Terry Dawley.

In the Q&A roundup, Lisa Unger stopped by the Just Katherine blog to discuss her latest psychological thriller, Confessions on the 7:45; Crime Fiction Lover chatted with Seraphina Nova Glass about her debut crime novel, Someone's Listening; Indie Crime Scene featured an interview with Daniella Bernett, author of Old Sins Never Die; and Ruth Ware sat down with CrimeReads to discuss locked room mysteries, ski chalets, and the evolution of voyeurism.

           Related StoriesMystery Melange 

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

Jeremy Walters and Tommy Reid, the writer and producer behind the true-life mobster drama, Kill the Irishman, are partnering again for the independent feature, Bitter Sweet. The film follows an unassuming ex-cop who is mistaken for an infamous mob hitman and becomes entangled in a mystery in order to hunt the men who brutally murdered his wife. Walters will direct off a screenplay he wrote, with casting still underway.

Vertical Entertainment and Noriva are teaming for the US distribution of the FBI spy thriller, The Informer, starring Joel Kinnaman. The feature will be available November 6 via Comcast, ATT, DIRECTV, Dish, Spectrum, Verizon, Frontier, Amazon, FandangoNow, Vudu, Microsoft, Sony, and Redbox On Demand. Italian actor-turned-filmmaker Andrea Di Stefano directed and co-wrote with Matt Cook and Rowan Joffé. The project follows Pete Koslow (Kinnaman), who is a former special operations soldier working as an informant for the FBI to help dismantle the Polish mafia’s drug trade in New York. But when the FBI’s operation goes wrong, resulting in the death of an undercover NYPD cop, Pete is coerced into returning to the prison where he previously served time for manslaughter in order to take down the cartel from the inside.

Netflix has landed Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Jurnee Smollett to star in Spiderhead, the Joseph Kosinski-directed adaptation of the George Saunders short story. Spiderhead is set in the near future, when convicts are offered the chance to volunteer as medical subjects in hopes of shortening their sentences. The focus is on two prisoners who become the test patients for emotion-altering drugs that force the prisoners to grapple with their pasts in a facility run by a brilliant visionary who supervises the program.

Netflix also acquired the thriller, I Care a Lot, from the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. The movie stars Rosamund Pike as Marla, who sets herself up as the legal guardian of elderly people in order to take advantage of them. But she makes a big mistake when she takes on the wrong elderly client. Eiza González, Peter Dinklage, Chris Messina, and Dianne Wiest also star in the film written and directed by J Blakeson.

Apple Original Films has acquired the rights to Cherry, a heist film directed by Avengers filmmakers, Joe and Anthony Russo, to be released in 2021. The project stars Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo and is based on a novel by Nico Walker that tells the story of a former Army medic who returned from Iraq with extreme undiagnosed PTSD, fell into opioid addiction, and began robbing banks.

Open Road Films’s action-thriller, Honest Thief, starring Liam Neeson, is set to go wide on October 16 at 2,000 theaters, which is a week later and in a lot more theaters than originally planned. The movie is from Ozark co-creator and producer Mark Williams and stars Neeson as a bank robber who tries to turn himself in after falling for a woman (Kate Walsh) who works at the storage facility where he’s stashed his money. Complications ensue when his case is turned over to a corrupt FBI agent (Jai Courtney) and he must go underground to save both himself and the woman he loves.

Screen Media has acquired U.S. rights to the thriller, Girl, written and directed by Chad Foust and starring Bella Thorne and Mickey Rourke. The deal came ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere later this week at Fantastic Fest, with a November release date in the works. Thorne plays a woman (she’s only known as Girl) who returns to her small hometown to exact revenge on her abusive father, only to discover someone murdered him the day before. As she searches for answers, she soon finds herself prey to a sinister sheriff (Rourke) and uncovers a disturbing family legacy more disturbing than she’d imagined.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

HBO Max is developing a television drama inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic, Rashomon. The project has been in the works for about two years after the television arm of Steven Spielberg’s company announced that it had secured the rights to create a new series inspired by the film. The series will not be an adaptation but will retain the key plot device of the Kurosawa film – a drama centering on a grisly sexual assault and murder and the unraveling mystery seen through multiple characters’ competing narratives.

Peacock has acquired the David E. Kelley crime-thriller drama series, Mr. Mercedes, which is based on Stephen King’s bestselling Bill Hodges trilogy. The first two seasons will premiere exclusively on the NBCUniversal streaming service on Thursday, October 15, with a premiere date for Season 3 TBD. The fate of the series, which previously aired on AT&T Audience Network, had been in limbo since Audience announced in the spring that it was ceasing operations. Mr. Mercedes follows a retired detective who is tormented by a serial killer through a series of letters and e-mails, causing him to set out on a dangerous and potentially felonious crusade to protect his loved ones and himself.

ABC released a teaser trailer for Big Sky based on The Highway, the first book in C.J. Box's Cassie Dewell novel series. In the straight-to-series drama, written and executive produced by David E. Kelley, private detective Cassie Dewell (Kylie Bunbury) partners with ex-cop Jenny Hoyt (Katheryn Winnick) on a search for two sisters who have been kidnapped by a truck driver on a remote highway in Montana.

Nicole Ari Parker (Empire) is joining NBC’s Chicago P.D. for a major recurring role on the upcoming eighth season of the Dick Wolf drama series. She will play Deputy Superintendent Samatha Miller, an ardent proponent of police reform who will not tolerate breaches of the new police guidelines and protocols. She will be tasked with reining in Detective Sergeant Hank Voight, who's known for his violent methods with criminals.

Aggi O'Casey and Tom Varey are set to star in the new BBC thriller, Ridley Road, based on the novel by Jo Bloom. The project follows a young Jewish woman who joins her boyfriend in fighting against neo-Nazism in post-war Britain and infiltrates a neo-Nazi group, a move that ends up challenging her courage and loyalties.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

On September 30 at 6pm, Authors on the Air will present author and former cop, Bruce Robert Coffin, live in conversation with New York Times bestselling author, Craig Johnson. Johnson is best known for his Walt Longmire mystery series, which is the basis for the hit Netflix drama.

The new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast featured the first chapter of the mystery novel, Revenge On Route 66, by Kris Neri as read by actor Jasmine Swalef.

The Two Crime Writers and a Microphone podcast was joined by Stuart Neville, who discussed his new collection of short stories, The Traveller, as well as pancake recipes, nice tools, and class issues.

Rachel Howzell was the special guest on Speaking of Mysteries, discussing her latest thriller, And Now She's Gone.

Suspense Magazine's Beyond the Cover chatted with Shannon Kirk, whose dark novel, Method 15/33, was released to critical acclaim. Shannon is back with the sequel to that book, Viebury Grove.

The latest Criminal Mischief discussed author Gayle Lynds's “10 Rules For Writing A Best-selling Thriller.”

The latest episode of Wrong Place, Write Crime, welcomed author Lee Matthew Goldberg to talk about his new book, The Ancestor.

Writer's Detective Bureau host, veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, talked about returning to old crime scenes, how police can track the cellphone of a missing person, investigating a child death, and reform.

Brad Parks stopped by It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club to discuss his latest novel, Interference, a mystery set in the world of quantum physics.

The latest guest on The Gay Mystery Podcast was Garrick Jones, a former opera singer turned author of The Cricketer's Arms: A Clyde Smith Mystery and more.

The featured guest on the latest Tartan Noir Show was Ann Cleeves, author of more than 30 novels and creator of the series characters Jimmy Perez (played by Douglas Henshall in the hit TV show, Shetland) and Vera Stanhope (played by Brenda Blethyn in TV’s Vera). Ann also chatted about her support for libraries, her love for Shetland and Fair Isle - even without amenities - and why, when she starts to write a novel, she never knows what will happen at the end.

Nikki Dolson, author of Love and Other Criminal Behavior, was interviewed by Robert Justice on the Crime Writers of Color podcast. Dolson is a writer primarily of short fiction, which has been published in places like Shotgun Honey, Tough, Thuglit, and Bartleby Snopes. She’s also written the quasi-novel, All Things Violent, in addition to her short story collection, Love, and Other Criminal Behavior.

           Related StoriesMedia Murder for Monday 

Quote of the Week

           Related StoriesQuote of the Week 

FFB: Gideon's Fire

John Creasey's prolific literary output of writing 10,000 words a day — in longhand — with 600 books published in his lifetime inspired both amazement and skepticism from other authors as well as critics, but when it came down to the readers, they voted with their wallets. By the time of Creasey's death in 1973, over 80 million copies of his books (written under 28 different pseudonyms) in 5,000 different editions in 28 languages had been sold around the world. It wasn't even as if the man sat chained to a desk all day — he also managed to establish the Crime Writers’ Association, create his very own mystery magazine, and still had time left over to found a political party in his native England. (One note about persistence: Creasey supposedly received 743 rejection slips before he sold his first book.)

When I was a youngster, I was introduced to Creasey's work through his series featuring The Honourable Richard Rollison (a/k/a The Toff), a nobleman and amateur crime solver aided by his manservant, Jolly. Creasey's most critically-acclaimed work, however, came via his police procedurals with protagonist Commander George Gideon of London's Scotland Yard, penned under the name J. J. Marric. According to an apocryphal story, one of Creasey's neighbors, a London police inspector, challenged the author with the words "Why don't you show us as we are?" and the next year Creasey published his first Inspector West police procedural book (the first of forty such novels), the success of which led to Gideon in the 1950s.

In 1955, writing for the New York Times Book Review, Anthony Boucher thought Creasey/Marric's Gideon's Day was the author's best book ever, saying,

''Nobody could make a regular career of presenting in some 75,000 words a half dozen or more plots, plus a technical study of Scotland Yard procedure, plus a realistic analysis of the characters of policemen and criminals. However, the incredible Mr. Creasey has calmly gone on presenting us with a Gideon novel each year, all of high quality." 

Likewise, H. R. F. Keating, the crime books reviewer for the London Times for 15 years, chose Gideon's Week as one of his "100 Best Crime and Mystery Books [from 1845 to 1986]."

The book which finally won Creasey the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, however, was Gideon's Fire, in 1962. George Gideon, Commander of the C.I.D., is met at the office one morning with the beginnings of a very bad day: the news of a sex maniac who raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl, and an arson fire in an old tenement building which wiped out a family of seven. In a style which has since become commonplace for police procedurals, Creasey weaves these and other autonomous story lines throughout the book, including a case of stock fraud; a man who is suspected of killing two former mistresses; a bank robbery with the mastermind still at large, and an ugly family crisis building up in Gideon's own home, managing to tie up all plots by the end.

The book also exhibits the authentic earthy police procedural style Creasey used in this particular series, as well as his sympathetic treatment of many of his characters, culminating in the man Gideon, who feels a oneness with his city, London, and an abiding empathy with crime victims. Creasey once said,

"My characters live in my mind...I can see them and hear them much more clearly than most people whom I know in life...it never occurs to me that they don't exist."

Various Creasey novels inspired several adaptations, including the 1958 movie, Gideon of Scotland Yard starring Jack Hawkins in the title role, and the British TV series, Gideon C.I.D., which aired 26 episodes from 1964-66 with John Gregson as the lead.

            

Mystery Melange

During the online Bloody Scotland festival this past weekend, the winners of the 2020 Bloody Scotland prizes were announced in a virtual ceremony. They included the Debut Prize, won by Deborah Masson for her novel, Hold Your Tongue, while Francine Toon's novel, Pine, won the McIlvanney Prize for the best Scottish Crime book of the year. You can check out all of the shortlisted finalists for both prizes via this link.

HarperCollins Australia has named Dinuka McKenzie the winner of the 2020 Banjo Prize for her "gripping, pacy police procedural," Flood Debris. HarperCollins launched The Banjo Prize in 2018 in a quest to find Australia’s next great storyteller, offering the chance to win a publishing contract with HarperCollins with an advance of $15,000.

The Glass Key award is handed out annually to a crime novel by an author from the Nordic countries. The award, named after the novel The Glass Key by American crime writer Dashiell Hammett, is a real glass key given every year by the members of the Crime Writers of Scandinavia to a crime novel written by a Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, or Swedish author. This year's winner is Swedish writer Camilla Grebe for Skuggjägaren (The Shadow Hunter). This was Grebe’s second Glass Key win following her triumph with the psychological thriller, Diary of My Disappearance. The only two other authors to win the price twice are Stieg Larsson and Arnaldur Indriðason. (HT to The Rap Sheet)

The Library of Congress National Book Festival is going online this year for three days starting Friday, September 27th. You can sign up for free registration to watch the livestreams with Colson Whitehead and John Grisham on Saturday and Walter Mosley and David Ignatius on Sunday, and there are many other authors in various genres joining in, as well.

Banned Books Week, the annual event celebrating the freedom to read, will be held September 27 to October 3 with the theme "Censorship Is a Dead End." The American Libraries Association has created a list of 40 virtual program ideas for Banned Books Week, including story time or Q&A with a banned author, a partnership with a local LGBTQIA+ group to address why LGBTQIA+ stories are overwhelmingly censored, an online bingo based on banned book titles, and a partnership with an organization that centers on Black voices to discuss racism. The ALA's program ideas in part reflect titles on its most challenged books of 2019 where eight of the 10 titles were challenged or banned because of LGBTQIA+ content. (HT to Shelf Awareness)

The in-person Writers' Police Academy conference has offered hands-on training to authors for over ten years, but due to popular demand and the success of the Virtual MurderCon event in August, organizers have put together a new lineup of online courses that everyone can attend. The Writers’ Police Academy Online will officially open its virtual doors on October 24, 2020 with the first daylong seminar called "Mystery and Murder: Transforming Reality into Fantastic Fiction." This first session will be live and interactive, meaning that instructors will deliver their presentations and respond to questions in real time. The all-new website is currently under construction and registration will soon be available soon.

International Thriller Writers is presenting a Virtual Winter Thrills event from January 11 to March 18, 2021. The online, ongoing conference will offer chances to participate in the Master Class, Practice PitchFest, and the brand new Thriller MBA course segments. The classes will be taught by ITW bestselling authors, agents, editors, and marketing professionals, including a critique of your query letter. Check out the lineup and register via the following link.

The Killer Nashville conference is now taking submissions for the 2021 Claymore Award for unpublished manuscripts. Created in 2009, the Killer Nashville Claymore Award assists new and rebranding English-language fiction authors to get published, including possible agent representation, book advances, editor deals, and movie and television sales. Submissions for Killer Nashville's Silver Falchion Awards in various categories for published books opens September 25.

In light of Netflix’s new Sherlock-flanked detective adventure, Enola Holmes, escape room crew Escape Hunt UK has put together a fun little game that takes you across Victorian London on a hunt for the titular heroine, which you can play entirely within your own home. The free game, which somewhat takes cues from the film's narrative, comes in the form of a downloadable PDF, which includes a map, a copy of The London Gazette, and a series of clues and activities to solve on an answer sheet to find Enola somewhere in 1884 London.

The Folio Society is set to publish the first-ever illustrated edition of Mario Puzo’s genre-defining gangster novel, The Godfather, a brilliant and brutal story of Mafia feuds in post-war New York. This new title is lavishly illustrated with atmospheric artwork by Robert Carter and has an introduction by Jonathan Freedland.

Just in case you didn't think books were valuable comes this news item:  Stolen books worth £2.5m found under floor of Romanian house. About 200 "irreplaceable" books, including first editions of Galileo and Isaac Newton, were taken by thieves in January 2017 who cut holes in the roof of a warehouse in Feltham then abseiled in, dodging sensors. The men were identified as being part of a Romanian organized crime gang.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Bird Heart Racing" by Amy Holman.

In the Q&A roundup, Lynda La Plante chatted with The Telegraph about nudity, blindness, being barred from the set of her TV show after falling out with the show’s producers, and bringing up a teenager in La Plante's seventies; the Sunday Post spoke with Lee Child prior to his appearance on the last day of the Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival; and Hank Phillippi Ryan was interviewed by Rick Brown of Yard Light Media about her latest novel, First to Lie.

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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

Compelling Pictures has closed a deal to produce a feature adaptation of Michael Connelly’s recent bestseller, Fair Warning, which is being seen as a potential franchise. Connelly will write the screen adaptation and serve as co-producer. Fair Warning is the third in Connelly’s series of books about investigative journalist Jack McEvoy and is set around the rapidly evolving "wild west" world of DNA sequence data harvesting—specifically in regard to such data being sold for profit within an industry that has no oversight.

Amazon Studios is set to produce All the Old Knives, starring Chris Pine and Thandie Newton. Based on the acclaimed novel of the same title by Olen Steinhauer, who also adapted the screenplay, the studio has tapped Janus Metz to direct the spy thriller. The story is set in the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea and follows ex-lovers Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison—he a CIA spy, she an ex-spy—who meet over dinner to reminisce about their time together. The conversation moves inevitably to the disastrous hijacking of Royal Jordanian Flight 127, which ended in the deaths of all on board. That failure haunts the CIA to this day, and Henry has come to Carmel to close the book on that seedy chapter. As they parry and flirt over California cuisine, it becomes clear that one of them is not going to survive the meal.

Break, one of Rutger Hauer’s final movies, will be getting a multiplatform release on January 5, 2021, via Conduit Presents. The Michael Elkin-directed crime sports drama follows a young inner city kid who is wasting his talents on petty crime. He has the ability to become a world-champion snooker player, if only he can overcome his circumstances, his ties to the mob, and himself. 

Andrew Koji has joined the cast of Brad Pitt’s Bullet Train action movie at Sony Pictures. David Leitch is set to direct the project, which is based on the Japanese novel, Maria Beetle, by Kotaro Isaka. Although plot details are being kept under wraps, the project is described as a contained thriller in the vein of Speed and centers on a group of assassins, with Koji playing one of the assassins along with Pitt. 

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Stephen Graham (The Irishman) and  Sean Bean (Game of Thrones) are set to star in the BBC prison drama, Time, from Cracker creator Jimmy McGovern. The project is described as a high-stakes portrayal of life in the modern British penal system, seen through the eyes of two very different men. Bean plays Mark Hebden, a teacher, husband and father, who killed an innocent man in an accident, and consumed by guilt, accepts and even welcomes his four-year sentence. Separated from his family, he has no idea what to expect in this unforgiving new environment and needs to learn quickly how to survive. Graham plays Eric Reid, a prison officer. Caring and honest, Eric tries his very best to protect those in his charge, something which is a daily challenge in this understaffed and high-tension world. When one of the most dangerous inmates identifies Eric's weakness, Eric faces an impossible choice between his principles and his love for his family.

Filming has started ITV's drama series, Grace, an adaptation of Peter James's novels starring John Simm as tenacious detective Roy Grace. Screenwriter and Endeavour creator Russell Lewis has adapted two of the Pan Mac-published Brighton-based thrillers, Dead Simple and Looking Good Dead, into two-hour screenplays. The cast also features Richie Campbell, who takes the role of DS Glenn Branson, and Rakie Ayola as ACC Vosper.

Happy Face is the latest podcast series to be adapted for television. CBS All Access is developing the adaptation with Your Honor writer Jennifer Cacicio and The Good Fight creators Robert and Michelle King. The podcast, produced by iHeart Media, tells the story of Melissa Moore, who at age 15 discovered that her father, Keith Hunter Jesperson, was a serial murderer, known as the Happy Face Killer because he drew smiley faces on his letters to the media and prosecutors. As an adult, Moore has changed her name, guarded her secret, and cut off all ties to her father who is currently serving life in prison. But when he contacts her to take credit for more victims, she is pulled into an extraordinary investigation into her father’s crimes, the impact they had on his victims’ families and ultimately into reckoning with her own identity. 

Genevieve Padalecki will take on a regularly recurring role opposite her husband, Jared Padelecki, on his new CW series, Walker, a reimagining of CBS’s long-running 1990s action/crime series Walker, Texas Ranger. The series centers on Cordell Walker (Jared Padalecki), a widower and father of two with his own moral code, who returns home to Austin after being undercover for two years only to discover there’s harder work to be done at home. Genevieve Padalecki will play Emily, Walker’s strong, capable, and generous late wife who is brave and focused on helping the disenfranchised. Appearing in flashback, Emily is a grounded and authentic hero in the Walker family.

Although Stumptown was picked up for a second season in May, ABC has ultimately decided to cancel the series after one season due to COVID-related circumstances. Based on the graphic novel series of the same name, Stumptown starred Cobie Smulders as P.I. Dex Parios, a "strong, assertive, and sharp-witted army veteran with a complicated love life, gambling debt, and a brother to take care of in Portland, Oregon." Jake Johnson, Tantoo Cardinal, Cole Sibus, Adrian Martinez, Camryn Manheim and Michael Ealy also starred.

ABC has given a straight-to-series order to the Erin Brockovich-inspired drama, Rebel, starring Katey Sagal. Inspired by the present-day life of Erin Brockovich, Sagal will star as Annie "Rebel" Bello, a blue-collar legal advocate without a law degree who is funny, brilliant, and fearless, caring desperately about the causes she fights for and the people she loves. The drama is written by Krista Vernoff, showrunner for Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19, and is set to debut in 2021 under the direction of Tara Nicole Weyr.

Channel 4 has ordered an adaptation of the Swedish crime thriller, Before We Die. Lesley Sharp leads the cast in the Bristol-set series, playing detective Hannah Laing who becomes deeply conflicted when she discovers her son is playing a crucial role as an undercover informant in a brutal murder investigation. Patrick Gibson plays her mixed-up son, Christian, while Croatian actor Toni Gojanović, who starred in HBO Europe’s Success, will take on the role of Davor Mimica, the leader of the criminal gang. Vincent Regan stars as Billy Murdoch, a non-conformist investigator, who is seconded to Hannah’s unit to advise on Eastern European drug gangs.

CBS Studios is adapting Ragnar Jónasson’s best-selling Nordic noir book, The Darkness. Andrea Janakas, who wrote the Amanda Seyfried-starring short film, Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves, is attached to write the eight-part series set in Reykjavik, Iceland. It follows Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir, who is given—two weeks before retirement—the cold case of a young Russian woman whose body washes up on an Icelandic shore. Hulda discovers that another young woman vanished at the same time, and that no one is telling her the whole story. Even her colleagues in the police seem determined to put the brakes on her investigation.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone welcomed author Lisa Hall to talk about her psychological thrillers, trashy TV, the wonders of the show Naked Attraction, her journey to becoming a writer, and much more.

Crime Cafe host, Debbi Mack, chatted with crime writer and artist Jessie Chandler.

Writer Types host, Eric Beetner, was joined by Nancy Stohlman to talk about flash fiction and her new book, Going Short; plus authors Beau Johnson and Ryan Sayles also stopped by.

Meet the Thriller Author spoke with Joshua Hood, author of The Treadstone Resurrection and Search and Destroy Series.

Walter Mosley was the special guest on Wrong Place, Write Crime, discussing Easy Rawlins, Leonid McGill, race relations in America, science fiction, the Bill Clinton boost, and Mosley's collection of short stories, The Awkward Black Man.

My Favorite Detective Stories welcomed Julian Sher, an award-winning investigative journalist in TV, print, radio, and on the Web, who also co-authored two books on outlaw motorcycle gangs.

The Gay Mystery Podcast spoke with Christopher Rice (the son of author Anne Rice), whose two novels of dark supernatural suspense, The Heavens Rise and The Vines, were both finalists for the Bram Stoker Award.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club shared their current favorite crime reads.

The Tartan Noir Show returned with a look at the Bloody Scotland conference, which went online this year with panels and interviews featuring special guests Jeffrey Deaver, Attica Locke, Peter May, Ann Cleves, Jo Nesbø, Ian Ranklin, Robert Crais, Lee Child, and more.

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