B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 149

Media Murder for Monday

It's Monday again, which means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news:

AWARDS

The Screen Actors Guild announced their "best of 2018" nominees this past week. Crime drama nods on the film side include BlacKKKlansman, one of the finalists for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture (the SAG equivalent of Best Picture), with John David Washington and Adam Driver also receiving nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Melissa McCarthy was also nominated for her role as a forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?. On the small-screen side, Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series included The Americans, Better Call Saul, and Ozark. For the full list of nominees, you can click over here.

The Critics' Choice TV Awards are in their 9th year and voted on by TV critics and journalists of the Broadcast Television Journalists Association. The crime dramas nominated for Best Drama Series 2018 included The Americans, Better Call Saul, Homecoming, and Killing Eve. Best actor nods include Diego Luna (Narcos: Mexico); Richard Madden (Bodyguard); Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul); and Matthew Rhys (The Americans). Best Actress nominees include Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh (Killing Eve); Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Deuce); Julia Roberts (Homecoming); and Keri Russell (The Americans). For the full list, follow this link.

THE BIG SCREEN

Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster will direct, co-produce and star in an English-language remake of Woman at War, the eco-thriller that Iceland submitted for the Foreign Language competition at the upcoming 91st Academy Awards. Foster will reinterpret the role of Halla (played in the original film by Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), a genial middle-aged music teacher hiding a secret life as an outlaw environmental activist with a grudge against the local aluminum industry. 

Bold Films and Nine Stories have acquired rights to remake The Guilty, the suspense thriller that serves as Denmark’s entry into the Oscar Foreign Language Film race. Jake Gyllenhaal is attached to star as a cop with a dark past who has been suspended and relegated to a desk job. One night, he receives a call from a terrified woman, and he must conquer his inner demons to save her.

Belgium-born actress Lyne Renee is joining Guy Ritchie’s Toff Guys and will play Jackie, the wife of Jeremy Strong’s Cannabis Kingpin character. Written by Ritchie, Marn Davies and Ivan Atkinson, the Miramax film explores the collide between old European wealth and the modern marijuana industrial complex with new gang entrants swarming. Matthew McConaughey, Henry Golding, Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant star as well as Michelle Dockery, who recently replaced Kate Beckinsale in the project.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

NBC has put in development The Last Spy, from Designated Survivor creator David Guggenheim, The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb, Imagine Television and CBS TV Studios. Written by Guggenheim, The Last Spy is an espionage drama in which the members of an elite deep cover CIA unit are killed after their real-life identities are exposed. In the aftermath, the only operative to escape the onslaught recruits her own team of former spies and assets to complete their missions while also working to unravel the conspiracy behind who betrayed her friends and colleagues.

NBC has put in development the crime drama Conway, which centers around St. Louis detective Cal Conway (Vin Diesel) who finds his world turned upside down when he wakes up from a coma with exceptional cognitive abilities. Returning to the force, he sets out to solve the city’s most complex cases but the discovery of a lethal side effect makes Cal wonder whether his new abilities are more of a blessing or a curse.

Warner Brothers is developing a limited series based on the life of American painter Mary Pinchot Meyer. The project hails from Oscar-winning writer David Seidler (The King’s Speech) and Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell’s Safehouse Pictures. Written by Seidler, based on Peter Janney’s book, Mary’s Mosaic, the drama/murder mystery explores different theories about the killing of American painter Mary Pinchot Meyer while also exploring her secret romantic relationship with President John F. Kennedy.

Epix has picked up a seven-episode third season of Get Shorty for premiere in 2019. Get Shorty is based in part on Elmore Leonard’s 1990 bestselling novel, which also spawned Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 feature. The series follows Miles Daly (Chris O’Dowd), muscle for a Nevada crime ring who tries to become a movie producer in Hollywood with the help of a washed-up producer, Rick Moreweather (Ray Romano), as a means to leave his criminal past behind.

Logan Lerman is set to star in the Jordan Peele-produced Amazon drama The Hunt, set in 1977 New York City. The project centers on a group known as The Hunters, who discover that hundreds of high ranking Nazi officials have been conspiring to create a Fourth Reich in the U.S. and set out on a bloody quest to bring them to justice and thwart their new genocidal plans. 

Netflix announced that its upcoming film, The Highwaymen, starring Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner, will debut on the platform on March 29, 2019. The film is directed by John Lee Hancock and follows the untold true story of the legendary detectives who brought down Bonnie and Clyde, during a time when outlaws made headlines and lawmen made history. 

The streaming service also announced a new docuseries titled Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. The four-episode series will feature never-before-heard audio interviews with Ted Bundy on death row. The series will launch on January 24 — 30 years after the date of his execution in Florida.

Amazon has ordered a third season of drama series Goliath, from David E. Kelley and Jonathan Shapiro, for premiere in 2019. Dennis Quaid, Amy Brenneman, Beau Bridges, Griffin Dunne, Sherilyn Fenn, and Shamier Anderson will play in key roles for the new season. Lawrence Trilling, who worked on the first two seasons, returns as showrunner for Season 3. Bill Bob Thornton stars as a down-on-his-luck attorney seeking redemption with a rag-tag team of investigators.

CBS All Access has cancelled its first original series since the debut of the streaming service in 2014. The mystery drama One Dollar was given a straight to series order in August 2017 and premiered a year later in late August 2018. As its title suggests, a one-dollar bill played an integral role in the series, changing hands between a group of characters involved in a shocking multiple murder. The show starred John Carroll Lynch, Nathaniel Martello-White, and Philip Ettinger.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Writer Types welcomed authors Bryan Gruley, Terry Shames and Scott Von Doviak and also took a look at some of their favorite books of 2018.

The Writer's Detective Bureau, hosted by veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, discussed homicide report databases, veteran detective advice for a rookie detective, conducting research with a VPN and why you should avoid TOR.

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Sunday Music Treat

Continuing with lesser-known Christmas music for the season, here's a selection from one of my favorite Christmas albums of my youth, O Holy Night with Luciano Pavarotti, namely "Gesù Bambino" (composed by Pietro Yon in 1917), sung by Pavarotti and the Wandsworth School Boys Choir:

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Quote of the Week

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FFB: Good Cop, Bad Cop

Barbara D'Amato (b.1938) is the author of two Chicago-based series, one with freelance reporter Cat Marsala and the other being what she calls her "Chicago police series."  The second title in the latter group was 1998's Good Cop, Bad Cop, based on the real-life notorious 1969 Chicago police raid on the Black Panthers, which killed Fred Hampton.

D'Amato uses that as a jumping off point to tell a modern-day Cain and Abel story, featuring two sons of a bullying cop father:  Nick Bertolucci, who was part of the Black Panther raid and years later is now Chicago's superintendent of police, and his brother Aldo, the "bad cop" who hates his brother enough to try and sabotage his career after finding evidence that links Nick to one of the deaths in the assault. D'Amato throws in an interesting cast of supporting characters, including Suze Figueroa, the detective who's brought back from D'Amato's first Chicago Police Series novel, Killer.App (1996).

D'Amato prides herself on her research, spending time with cops and walking her mysteries through Chicago's neighborhoods to figure out the timing of crimes. Although she says her favorite author is Agatha Christie ("no wasted words, and plots like steel traps"), she uses a punchy, staccato style better suited to the gritty day-to-day details from cops on the beat, and ratchets up the page-turning quotient with short sentences, paragraphs and chapters. She even adds some dark humor into the mix, not surprising she's worked as carpenter for stage magic illusions, assistant tiger handler, and written musical comedies, as with this scene after a body is found on the rail tracks:

 

Fiddleman got up the el stairs faster than Reilly, who was a fat, pink-colored white man of forty-five.

Fiddleman approached the stock-still el train, on which a few dazed night workers sat. He guessed there were maybe six people on the train, at what was now 1:17.

Three of the passengers, as well as the train's engineer, had got out. A middle-aged man in a camel hair jacket was throwing up at the far end of the station, which was only fifteen feet away, not nearly far enough.

An elderly woman, easily seventy-five, wearing carpet slippers with slits cut for her corns despite the cold weather, was looking down at the tracks. Fiddleman was about to take her gently by the shoulders and move her away from the horrible scene when she said, "Christ, and I just had liver for dinner."

Fiddleman hoped she was speaking from some sort of civilian shock. Then he thought in an instant's flash of remorse, who do I know what sort of life she's had, she's here on the el at this hour, this weather? At her age.

Then he looked down at the track and understood what she meant.

When asked once what Chicago has to offer mystery writers, she replied, "Chicago has absolutely everything. It's a beautiful city. It has architecture you'll never see anywhere else. And it has a lot of places to hide. There are a lot of old tunnels in Chicago—there are old freight tunnels, abandoned subway tunnels. You can hide here. You can also blend in. Chicago has every ethnic neighborhood known to man. There are so many neighborhoods where you can blend in, depending on how you dress."

Good Cop Bad Cop won the 1998 Carl Sandburg Award for Excellence in Fiction and the Readers Choice Award Lovey Award at the 1999 Love is Murder Conference. D'Amato has also won Anthony and Agatha Awards and is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and of Sisters in Crime International.

            

Mystery Melange

Tom Nolan picked his favorite mystery novels of 2018 for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Likewise, CrimeReads contributing editors compiled "Our Favorite Crime Books of 2018."

Best selling crime writer Val McDermid admitted being "very moved and very touched" as she had an honorary degree conferred upon her at St. Andrews University. McDermid has sold more than 15 million books which have been translated into 40 languages and has been awarded the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for outstanding achievement.

UK's Cambridge University will offer a Masters course in Crime and Thriller Writing, the institution's first genre-specific creative writing course. From October 2019, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of English will offer an MSt (Master of Studies, a Master of Arts equivalent) in Crime and Thriller Writing including creating a portfolio of creative essays or compositions, alongside a thesis consisting of 20,000 words of creative prose.

Some sad news, especially for younger readers:  Barbara Brooks Wallace, a children’s author best known for award-winning novels including the Peppermints in the Parlor mystery series, passed away November 27 at a hospice center in Arlington, Va. She was 95.

In an interview with The Real Book Spy, Eric Van Lustbader indicated that he'd reached the decision to step away from the Jason Bourne series, a franchise he’s anchored since 2002. The author said that after eleven Bourne novels in sixteen years, "I had pretty much said everything that I wanted to say with Bourne, and that I wanted to do something different."

Writing for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester compared Agatha Christie to the works of other Golden Age authors such as Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, trying to find out the core reason for Christie’s appeal to so many readers in so many different times and places.

Lisa Scottoline has been chosen as the 2019 All Henrico Reads author, an annual reading program in which the entire community is encouraged to read the same book. Scottoline is the bestselling author of 32 novels, including After Anna, her 2018 thriller that will be the subject of the all-reads program.

Mysterious Press has released Mystery Stories by Elizabeth Peters, three shorts from the late author best known for her beloved Amelia Peabody series, in both paperback and digital formats. The stories, which include a Christmas slaying, an Egyptian puzzle, and a night in the home of a stranger, are being made available for the first time in a single volume.

Joanne Sinchuk, who founded Murder on the Beach bookstore in Florida's Delray Beach in 1996, told the Palm Beach Post that "We used to sell books, now we sell entertainment." That inludes author signings, internet sales, and independently published authors who are selling as well as the traditional New York published authors. (HT to Shelf Awareness)





Kate Jackson has rounded up vintage crime book bloggers who will offer up their opinions on the "Best Vintage Crime Reprint of the Year." Bloggers such as JF Norris of Pretty Sinister Books will be showcasing their favorites and on December 22, Kate will set up a poll for readers to vote from among all the blogger-chosen titles. The Reprint of the Year winner will be posted on December 29th.

Japan Times had a brief profile of "Japan’s modern crime literature: Centuries in the making."

Scott Alderbert checked out "Literary Stoner Noir" over on Do Some Damage.

Jason Carter, blogger and James Ellroy aficionado, penned an essay on "James Ellroy’s Lonely Places: a Retrospective" for The Venetian Vase.

In a surprise to virtually no one, thriller author James Patterson once again topped the list of the highest paid authors in the world. The top five also included J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series as well as a crime series under the name Robert Galbraith, and Stephen King, who writes in both horror and crime genres.

The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Maybelle" by Teresa J. Wong.

In the Q&A roundup, Publishers Weekly spoke with Ian Andrew, who won the 2017 BookLife Prize for his thriller, Face Value; Writer Interviews welcomed Wallace Stroby, an award-winning journalist and the author of eight novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews named "Crime fiction's best bad girl ever"; and the Mystery People chatted with noir author Ken Bruen about his latest Jack Taylor novel, In the Galway Silence.

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Author R&R with William Ian Grubman

William Ian Grubman is a retired businessman, philanthropist, artist, author, art collector, and performing artist from Los Angeles, California. His art background prompted his interest in writing a crime novel set in the art world, resulting in The Storm over Paris, the first of three installments featuring the same family.

The fictional thriller is set during the Nazi occupation of Paris and centers on Mori Rothstein, whose expertise in the works of the masters has gained him a loyal following—but also the attention of Hermann Goering, the head of the Nazi Gestapo, who forces Rothstein to identify the most prized paintings for a museum being designed by Hitler. After Mori begins to recognize artworks he sold to others long ago and realizes they are stolen, he devises a daring plan with the help of his son, Émile, to smuggle the precious paintings out of the Nazis’ clutches. When a high-ranking German officer is killed, the Rothsteins find themselves on the run and drawn into a web of intrigue, kidnapping, and murder.

Grubman stopped by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching his debut novel:

Several years ago, I decided to write a story about art forgery. I’ve been a student of art my entire life, as well as a collector. Unfortunately, I gave little thought to the process, and I had never attempted writing anything more than a column or two for a newsletter. Needless to say, I was beginning a journey, a long one, and discovered quickly that I was writing a novel about a family. Forgery would become a sub-plot.

It wasn’t difficult at first. I began with a character, added another, created a simple domestic scene, and was off. The problem was, after I finished a couple of pages, I realized I was on the wrong track. In my mind, I was writing a book that took place in present day New York. I discovered the story was something other than what I had planned. The plot wasn’t so much about art forgery as it was about a man and survival, and it didn’t take place in New York, nor was it present day. I had to go back. I had to go to Paris.

I’ve visited Paris many times and know my way around the city relatively well. The problem was, the Paris I know and Paris of the 1940s are quite different. My characters were coming to life, but I needed to understand what day to day life was like in a city controlled by the Nazis.

First, I turned to the internet for pictures, stories, and information; then to books. Hector Feliciano’s The Lost Museum provided a great deal of information about stolen art and the players on both sides of the trading table. That would help in creating the plot line between Mori and Goering. From there, Ronald C. Rosbottom’s historical account When Paris Went Dark helped provide me with a graphic view of the city. I recall when reading Rosbottom’s book, for some unexplained reason, my visuals were in black and white. Possibly a holdover from newsreels of the war. For whatever reason, color eluded me, as did the weather. Each time I thought of Paris during that period, it was black and white and cold. I decided my story would take place in the warm summer months, and I built in as much color as I could to a time shrouded in darkness.

In addition to reference books and the internet, my greatest asset was a map of Paris that sat beside my computer during the creation of my story. As I mentioned, I am familiar with the city, but the map brought intimate light, helping add detail to each scene. Additionally, I researched businesses that were in existence prior to 1940. That would bring depth to my story. I included a few of those names in the text and chose names that would be recognizable to my reader.

I did however make a conscious decision not to include the inner workings of the Louvre in the story. Doing that would have detracted from the intimacy of my tale, overshadowing the plight of the people of Paris. The inner workings of the Louver will have to wait for another book.

My characters began to unfold nicely, but their back stories required work. I found once I created their personas, physical as well as emotional, quirks, habits, likes, dislikes, etc. they came to life easily.

While the story progressed, I was still missing an important layer of the yarn: the hiding place. Without giving anything away about the plot, my biggest obstacle was where to place the stolen goods. That required a trip to Paris. I needed to see the city, walk its streets, put myself in Mori’s shoes.

One afternoon I was visiting Parc Monceau, one of the few parks I had never seen during previous trips to Paris. I was enchanted by its size and charm and discovered within its boundaries several follies that attracted my attention. Most notably, a pyramid with a small door on one side. Voila! I found what I was looking for. I found my hiding place. I was so excited. That jubilation was cut dramatically short when I realized the hiding place only worked if there was a method of transporting that which I wanted to hide.

It would be several weeks before the movable trash can would become a mode of transportation. Once I had a visualization of the object, designing it was easy.

There is one piece of research that I missed along the way. During various trips to the City of Lights, I have often strolled along the banks of the Seine for no other reason but to enjoy the beauty of Paris from the water’s edge. I’m not sure why, but for some unknown reason I had always believed the water to move in a distinct direction. That was the one thing I failed to research during the writing of The Storm over Paris, and an important part of the story. When the book was completed, my editor asked the question about the flow of the river. I was not only embarrassed, but shocked. That detail would require me to rewrite several scenes of the story.

I learned a very hard lesson from that (correctable) mistake ... one can never do enough research.

 

You can read more about William Ian Grubman and The Storm Over Paris via the author's website and also follow the author on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The Storm Over Paris is now available via all major booksellers.

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Media Murder for Monday

It's Monday again, which means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news:

AWARDS

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the nominees for the 2019 Golden Globe Awards for both film and television. Some of the big-screen crime drama nods include a Best Picture nomination for BlacKkKlansman (based on the real story of an African American police officer who infiltrated the Klan) and also its star, John David Washington, and director, Spike Lee; and Best Actress honors to Nicole Kidman, for the crime drama Destroyer, and also Melissa McCarthy, who played a forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

On the TV side, The Americans, Bodyguard, Killing Eve, Homecoming, The Alienist, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Escape at Dannemora, Sharp Objects, and a Very English Scandal were all nominated for Best Drama or Limited Series. You can find the complete list via this ink.

The New York Film Critics also handed out their awards for film in 2018. Can You Ever Forgive Me? was a big winner with the online critics group with Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant winning Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor respectively.

THE BIG SCREEN

Fox 2000 has acquired the best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing, described as a mixture of a crime thriller and a coming-of-age tale, and has tapped Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine to produce a feature film adaptation. The story is set in a small southern town where a young woman named Kya raises herself in the marshes after she is abandoned by her family. After her former boyfriend is found dead, Kya becomes the prime suspect in his murder.

Fimmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga announced that Spectre actress Lea Seydoux and regular 007 castmembers Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris are returning for Bond 25. Seydoux played psychiatrist Dr. Madeleine Swann in Spectre who works at Austrian clinic and has an affair with Mr. Bond. She is arguably the first Bond girl to reprise a role in a picture (although Maud Adams played different characters in separate films). Fiennes will continue on as Bond’s crusty MI-6 boss, Whishaw as the famed tech gadget guru Q, and Harris as 007 sidekick Moneypenny. TMGM plans to release the film on Feb. 14, 2020.

Stefano Sollima (Sicario: Day of the Soldado) is in talks to direct Without Remorse, based on the Tom Clancy novel that serves as the origin story of John Clark, to be played by Michael B. Jordan. The film will be the first of two novels (the other being Rainbow Six) that Paramount is adapting based on the character from the Jack Ryan universe.

Antoine Fuqua is developing and may direct the historical-action epic, The Devil Soldier, based on Caleb Carr's bestselling novel which is described as "an American version of Lawrence of Arabia, set in 19th century China." Carr’s bestseller The Alienist was turned into a hit limited series for TNT.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Starz has acquired the eight-episode crime drama series Dublin Murders, adapted from Tana French’s first two novels in the Dublin Murder Squad crime series, In The Woods and The Likeness. Dublin Murders follows Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) – a smart-suited detective whose English accent marks him as an outsider – who is dispatched to investigate the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of Dublin with his partner, Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene). Reilly is pulled back into another case of missing children and forced to confront his own darkness even as Cassie is sent undercover for another murder case and forced to come face to face with her own brutal reckoning.

ABC, which is rebooting its iconic series NYPD Blue, is also looking to bring back another 1990s New York cop drama, Dick Wolf’s New York Undercover. Created by Wolf and Kevin Arkadie, New York Undercover aired on Fox for four seasons, between 1994-98. It starred Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo as two undercover detectives in New York City’s Fourth Precinct and was the first police drama on American television to feature two people of color in the starring roles.

Quantico star Pearl Thusi is set to star in Queen Sono, Netflix's first African original series. Thusi will play a highly trained spy in a South African agency in the series.

Apple is in advanced talks to buy rights to the gritty Israeli TV show Nevelot (English translation: "Bastards") and adapt it for the U.S., beating out bids from competitors including Showtime, FX and Amazon. The show's plot involves two military veterans who go on a youth-focused killing spree because they believe today's kids don't understand the sacrifices of their generation. Richard Gere is also in talks to star in the series.

Oscar winner Brie Larson is finalizing a deal to star in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the new film adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel and directed by Charlie Kaufman for Netflix. The story centers on Jake, who is on a road trip to meet his parents on their secluded farm with his girlfriend (Larson), who is thinking of ending their relationship. When Jake makes an unexpected detour leaving her stranded, a twisted mix of palpable tension, psychological frailty and sheer terror ensues.

Netflix has renewed Narcos: Mexico for a second season, an announcement that comes just three weeks after the first season’s Nov. 16 premiere. The series charts the origins of the country’s drug war through the rise and fall of the Guadalajara Cartel under Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo (played by Diego Luna). Season 1 follows Gallardo as he unites Mexico’s disparate smuggling organizations into the country’s first global drug empire, while DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena’s (Michael Peña) efforts to expose the operation lead him to a horrific outcome with decades-long geopolitical consequences.

Desmond Chiam (The Shannara Chronicles) has been tapped as one of the male leads opposite Poppy Montgomery in Reef Break, ABC’s 13-episode summer crime drama. Reef Break is described as "a sexy, action-packed drama" starring Montgomery as Cat Chambers, a thief-turned-fixer for the governor of a stunning and seductive Pacific Island paradise. Desmond will play Jake Wyatt, a detective on the island who knows his way around a life-or-death scenario. After a one-night stand as strangers, Wyatt and Cat (Montgomery) suddenly are working on a case together — a scenario he’s not quite prepared to handle.

NCIS: New Orleans will welcome LeVar Burton, best known as Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation, for a guest starring role playing Rufus Nero, a Naval intelligence agent who works with Pride's team after a deadly virus is stolen. Cooperation between Rufus and the agents is imperative, given that this is a rare virus that could do a lot of damage if not recovered as quickly as possible.

Netflix has released the trailer for their upcoming docuseries The Innocent Man. Based on the 2006 non-fiction book by John Grisham, the six-part documentary series focuses on two murders in Ada, Oklahoma in the 1980s and the dubious means to which the convictions were obtained.

There's also a new trailer for the forthcoming Netflix action-drama Triple Frontier, about a group of former Special Forces operatives played by Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal.

The riddle of Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) is the central question for NBC’s The Blacklist as it returns for Season 6 and the just-released trailer suggests that the master manipulator of the underworld may be behind bars for a while.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The Guardian Books podcast sat down with Sara Paretsky, author behind the iconic Detective VI Warshawski, to discuss her latest book in the long-running crime series, Shell Game.

The latest episode of Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is a Christmas-set feature, the first chapter of the mystery novel Ruined Stones written by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, which is read by actor Paddy Myers.

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste delved into the "hot" topic of sex in crime fiction. They're joined by top crime writers Steph Broadribb, Mark Edwards, and Susi Holliday. They discuss the do's and don't's of sex scenes in crime fiction, share some of the best and worst examples, and the results of the incredibly scientific poll carried out among crime fiction readers.

Debbi Mack interviewed crime writer Paul Heatley on the latest episode of the Crime Cafe.

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham had a quick round up of some adaptation news and some holiday recommendations from readers.

Det. Adam Richardson discussed twins' DNA, Massive Parallel Sequencing, the First 48 hours of an investigation, and discovering your characters, in the latest Writer's Detective Bureau podcast.

GAMES

The immersive entertainment company Nomadic and virtual reality games publisher VRWERX are teaming to develop an adrenaline-laced virtual reality experience based on Paramount’s hit film franchise Mission: Impossible. The location-based game, which is scheduled to open next spring in Orlando, will bring players inside a mission and give them the vicarious thrills of pursuit—running, jumping and interacting with objects in a physical space that’s enhanced through virtual reality.

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Sunday Music Treat

Continuing with lesser-known Christmas music this week, here's an excerpt from Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, "Balulalow." Written for treble voices, it's usually sung by a boys choir or by a group of girls (I had the good fortune to be in a girls' ensemble as a teenager that performed these carols).

 

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FFB: Five Passengers From Lisbon

Born in 1899, she was called America's Agatha Christie by her biographer, Rick Cypert, and was once the third highest paid female mystery writer (after Christie herself and Mary Roberts Rinehart). Her name is Mignon Good Eberhart and she was nothing if not a prolific writer, with 59 novels and numerous short stories, novellas and plays, many adapted for film in the 1930s and 1940s. It didn't hurt that she got an early start on her career as a teenager, mostly, as she later said,

"because I preferred writing to studying Caesar's Commentaries and algebra. There was one halcyon period during which I traded work on English themes for the solution of geometry problems, with an obliging classmate, but, perhaps for the best, this was very brief. There was a long novel to which I could add chapters at will, and numerous plays, all of which were advisedly destroyed. In my early twenties I gathered up courage and postage stamps and sent a book-length typescript to an editor. It was accepted. The story was a murder mystery and thus started me on a hard but rewarding writing path. The writer hopes that a mystery novel is entertaining to read but it is not easy to write."

That first book was The Patient in Room 18, introducing nurse Sarah Keate and police detective Lance O'Leary (who both appeared in four more novels), later made into a movie starring Ann Sheridan and Patric Knowles. Female sleuths abound today, but it was still somewhat revolutionary for the time. Eberhart wasn't necessarily an early feminist, however—she said of her creation, "I loved her because she had a good sharp tongue." It was only a year after the publication of this book that Agatha Christie followed suit and introduced Miss Jane Marple for the first time in a novel. Another of her popular heroines was Susan Dare, a precursor to Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote. Dare, quite possibly Eberhart's best creation, only appeared in short stories, some of which you'll find in the 2007 Crippen and Landru collection titled Dead Yesterday.



Eberhart's books primarily feature female heroines in often-exotic locations; in fact, her primary contribution is quite probably to the development of the romantic-suspense subgenre in crime fiction, one reason she's often said to resemble more Rinehart than Christie. Another reason for that comparison is Eberhart's dedication to character development and her interest in scientific detection, as seen through her nurse-protagonist and medical themes. Plus, Rinehart herself had her own Nurse Pinkerton.



Some contemporary readers will find formulaic elements and eye-rolling elements in Eberhart's novels, particularly the early ones where female heroines tend to show poor judgement and even faint (does anyone really faint all that often? Did they ever?), but she was adept with the elements of suspense and atmosphere in what Thrilling Detective said was "spare but almost lyrical" writing. Mike Grost added that that "suspense passages in Eberhart often show the heroine with a heightened sensory awareness of her surroundings, and are almost hallucinatory in their intensity."

These qualities are seen in her closed community mystery from 1946, Five Passengers From Lisbon. Five passengers and three crewmen survive a sinking Portuguese cargo ship via a lifeboat, but when they're picked up by a U.S. hospital ship, the Portuguese mate is found murdered. Against a backdrop of Portugal being a haven for espionage with undertones of Nazi and Resistance alliances, Eberhart spins a claustrophobic web first as the group floats in the darkness:

There were no signs of other lifeboats; although once a barrel floated past and they thought at first it was a man, and another time it was a man, on his face, dead when they reached him. Alfred Castiogne bent down to drag the floating, dark bulk a little out of the water, and to cast it back again. Marcia remembered the way his thick shoulders hunched over, and the moment while the boat drifted and Gili's whimper. But nobody said anything; it seemed too natural an event, so precisely and unexpectedly part of the pattern of the night.

and again along the dim windowless corridors and decks shrouded in fog:

The deck below seemed deserted, too. She reached the last wet black step and turned sharply around the stairway. But the deck was not deserted; it was, instead, horribly inhabited. Marcia stopped, holding the railing. The foghorn began again, so waves of sound broke over the deck, shaking the ship and all the impenetrable grey world about her with dreadful tumult. It kept on sounding, while Marcia stood, looking down at the dark swarthy little man who lay with his eyes no longer suspicious and wary but blankly open, staring upward. He was Manuel Para and his throat had been cut.   

A very long time seemed to have passed when suddenly she knew that someone was coming down the stairway immediately above her, following the steps her feet had taken. She looked up. It was a man in a red bathrobe. She could see him, and he had no face, but only white bandages with holes for eyes.

In H. R. F. Keating's Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, he describes Mignon Eberhart as the heir and successor to Mary Robert Rinehart and a "star writer" in the first person single feminine tradition. Gertrude Stein described her as one of the "best mystifiers in America." She received the Scotland Yard Prize in 1930, became the Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of American in 1971, and 1979, received a MWA special Edgar to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of her first novel.

            

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