B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 163

Sunday Music Treat

I want to thank a couple of readers of Played to Death who pointed out something that seemed to be an error but was more a miscommunication on my part. It's a good case in point of how sometimes the vision in a writer's mind doesn't make it to the page in a coherent way.



In Played to Death, Scott Drayco says that the first time he sat at a piano when he was a small child, he picked out Count Basie's "Take the A Train." Now, the classic jazz piece was composed by Billy Strayhorn, who played piano and wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington's band. But what I didn't point out was that Drayco had heard the piece in the later Count Basie version. My grandfather was a drummer in a Dixieland band, and Basie was also a drummer, so that seemed fitting. Plus, Basic learned how to play the piano from his mother, just like Drayco did.



Anyway, here's the original Duke Ellington version, followed by Count Basie's version and finally Oscar Peterson's solo piano version, which would be more like what Drayco played (in fact, it's fun to image a young Drayco, his feet not able to reach the floor, playing this piece):

 

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Quote of the Week

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FFB: The Archer Files

Ross Macdonald, born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California (1915), spent most of his early life in Canada, where his father worked as a harbor pilot. His parents separated when he was three, and since his mother suffered from typhoid fever and couldn't support them, he moved around among various relatives, once counting "the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty."



In 1938 he married Margaret Sturm, who as Margaret Millar would have her own career as an acclaimed mystery writer. Between 1938 and 1939 Kenneth Millar studied at the University of Michigan where he met W.H. Auden, who encouraged him to regard detective novels as a legitimate literary form.  Millar eventually settled on the pen name Ross Macdonald to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald.  Ross first introduced the popular divorced former cop-turned-private-eye Lew Archer in the 1946 short story "Find the Woman." A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949, the first in a series of 18 Archer novels.



Macdonald used spiral-bound notebooks, filling about three pages a day while sitting in the same bedroom chair where he wrote all of his books for three decades. He worked on several books at once, often finding ideas for plots by sitting in on local criminal trials. He was a dedicated conservationist, and he and his wife were active in the efforts to save the California condor from extinction. He died from Alzheimer's disease in 1983.



In 2007, Crippen & Landru released a new anthology of Macdonald's Lew Archer short stories, collected together in one volume for the first time. Titled The Archer Files, The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Including Newly Discovered Case Notes, the volume includes previously published stories and several never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories—case notes, so to speak, from the files of Lew Archer.



Novelist William Goldman declared the Archer canon as "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American," and John Leonard of The New York Times stated Macdonald had transcended the genre to become "a major American novelist." His works have inspired countless mystery writers since, such as Sue Grafton, who even set her novels in the same Santa Barbara locale Macdonald had done (although both used the fictional name Santa Teresa for the town).



You can find a Ross Macdonald bio/bibliography at the Thrilling Detective site and memories and quotations about Macdonald from other mystery authors which were assembled for the 50th anniversary of his birth by January Magazine editor Jeff Pierce.



On the January Magazine tribute page above, you'll many fun anecdotes about Macdonald and his influence, such as the following from Michael Connelly:  "I came to him late. The first book of his I read was The Blue Hammer. Of course, it was a joy to realize when I was finished that I had a wealth of Lew Archer stories to go back and read. And I did. This was about the time I was thinking that I wanted to write for a living and Macdonald's books showed me the possibility that crime novels could be art. I still remember in the opening pages of The Blue Hammer how he described a woman's body as having been kept trim by tennis and anger. I read that and knew I was on to something. I was home."

            

Mystery Melange

The 38th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were awarded this past Friday at the University of Southern California's Bovard Auditorium. The Mystery/Thriller category winner was Joyce Carol Oates for A Book of American Martyrs.

The Crime Writers of Canada announced the finalists for the annual Arthur Ellis Awards, which recognize the best in mystery, crime, and suspense writing in fiction and non-fiction by Canadian writers. Winners will be announced on May 24th at Arthur Ellis Awards Gala in Toronto. The books competing for Best Crime Novel include The Winners’ Circle, by Gail Bowen; The Party, by Robyn Harding; The White Angel, by John MacLachlan; Sleeping in the Ground, by Peter Robinson; and The Forgotten Girl, by Rio Youers.

Also from Canada, we have news of the 2018 nominees for the Bloody Words Light Mystery Award (fondly known as the Bony Blithe Award), which celebrates "light" crime fiction (cozies, capers, satires, and humorous books). The finalists include Cathy Ace, The Case of the Unsuitable Suitor; E.C. Bell, Dying on Second; Rickie Blair, Digging up Trouble; Vicki Delany, Hark the Herald Angels Slay; and Elizabeth J. Duncan, Much Ado About Murder. The award will be presented at the Bony Blithe Mini-con & Award Gala on May 25th in Toronto, Canada.

The 2018 Colorado Book Award Finalists include a category for Best Mystery and Best Thriller, and the nominees this year are mystery novels Dead Stop by Barbara Nickless, Fractured Families by Charlotte Hinger, and Hunting Hour by Margaret Mizushima; and thrillers Broken Slate by John A. Daly, Red Sky by Chris Goff, and Trafficked by Peg Brantley.

The 2018 CrimeFest Awards shortlists were also announced ahead of the annual event which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary on May 17-20 in Bristol, UK. The awards include the Audible Sounds of Crime for audiobooks, the eDunnit Award for ebooks, the Last Laugh Award for humorous crime, the H.R.F. Keating Award for nonfiction crime reference/true crime, and also awards for Best Children's and YA books. The winners will be announced at the CrimeFest Gala Awards Dinner hosted by Robert Thorogood on Saturday 19th May.

As part of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in July, Dead Good Books is bringing back the Dead Good Reader Awards where the public can nominate authors and books in the various categories and win a chance of snagging £200 worth of crime books and DVDs. Nominations close Friday May 21, 2018.

Ace Atkins is this year's Keynote Speaker at 5th Annual Mystery Fest Key West June 22-24. Atkins is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-one novels, including the recent Robert B. Parker "Spenser" mysteries. Other headliners of the event include editor and publisher Otto Penzler, proprietor of the Mysterious Book Shop in New York City, and Special Guest Presenter Heather Graham. In addition to the usual panels and book signings, the festival includes a Conch Train mini-tour of Key West, an ice-cream social event with Ace Atkins and Otto Penzler at the historic Key West Lighthouse, and a Bloody Mary Morning breakfast at Key West’s historic Schooner Wharf Bar.

Unfortunately, the news isn't as good for another conference; NoirCon's Lou Boxer posted on Facebook that they are cancelling this year's event that was slated for the fall due to the passing of NoirCon co-founder and co-director. Those who have already registered will be refunded in full, but Boxer added that "Please note that NoirCon as an organization is not over. Deen would not have wanted what she helped build to fall. Once we reorganize, we will return."

Over on Elizabeth Foxwell's blog, The Bunburyist, she profiles a 1977 Los Angeles Times article in which author-critic Dorothy B. Hughes chose 23 selections for a "classic mystery library."

Although DNA has helped convicted many bad guys and exonerated innocent people, the forensic technology still has flaws. In once case, a man was framed by his own DNA for a brutal murder he didn't commit.

Here's a fun site to put on your bucket list: One of the foremost Sherlock Holmes collections is hidden away at a Toronto library.

Did you know your brain needs you to read every day? Well, now you do.



The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Picnic" by Gail Aldwin.

In the Q&A roundup, E. B. Davis interviewed author Tina Whittle over at Writers Who Kill about the sixth book in her Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver series, Necessary Ends; Graphic Policy welcomed Megan Abbott and Alison Gaylin to discuss writing Normandy Gold, a gritty vigilante thriller graphic novel from Hard Case Crime (with illustrations by Steve Scott); the Dorset Book Detective chatted with Paul D. Brazill about his writing, translations, and Brit Grit; and Deborah Kalb spoke with Sara Blaedel, author of the the Detective Louise Rick series who's penned a novel in a new series, The Undertaker's Daughter.

            

Media Murder for Monday

Welcome to another Monday and another roundup of the latest in crime drama news:

MOVIES

Amy Pascal and Neal H. Moritz have teamed up to acquire film rights to Long Bright River, the upcoming suspense novel from Liz Moore that just sold at auction to Penguin Random House imprint Riverhead Books for seven figures. Moore is also set to adapt the book, which is set in her native Philadelphia and revolves around two sisters — one, an addict who has gone missing and the other a police officer who must find her. 

Sophia Lillis, last seen as Beverly Marsh in Warner Bros’ blockbuster picture It, has been tapped as the title character in the studios’ Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase film adaptation, based on the popular Nancy Drew books. Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Kleeman, and Chip Diggins are on board to produce the project, which is expected to begin filming soon. Warner Brothers made a film adaptation of this book in 1939 directed by William Clemens and starring Bonita Granville, who had toplined the previous Nancy Drew films.

Jake Gyllenhaal will produce and star in the film adaptation of To Die in Vienna, based on the Kevin Wignall novel set to be published in June by Amazon Publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer.  Gyllenhaal will play Freddie Makin, a man who is hired to place Jiang Cheng, a Chinese academic, under constant surveillance. When Freddie returns home early one day, he interrupts a break-in at his apartment. The intruder escapes but then comes back to get his revenge, and Freddie becomes a hunted man. When Jiang Cheng mysteriously disappears, Freddie realizes the CIA may be involved, and his only hope is that nobody discovers the past he has been hiding for so long.

MGM has just closed a deal for James Gray to direct I Am Pilgrim, an adaptation of the espionage novel trilogy by Terry Hayes. Pilgrim is the code name for a man who doesn’t exist and refers to the adopted son of a wealthy American family who once headed a secret U.S. espionage unit. Now in anonymous retirement, he is called upon to lend his expertise to an unusual investigation but ultimately is caught in a race against time to save America from oblivion.

IFC Midnight is acquiring U.S. rights to What Keeps You Alive, the Colin Minihan-directed thriller that stars Hannah Emily Anderson and Brittany Allen as a same-sex couple pitted against one another on their one-year anniversary. 

Denzel Washington is back in the first trailer for Sony Pictures’ The Equalizer 2. In the trailer, intelligence officer Robert McCall helps people and seeks justice for those who are committing crimes, starting with a Turkish mob that has kidnapped a young American girl. But when it involves someone he loves, he must see how far he will go. The Equalizer 2 hits theaters on July 20.

Old Man & The Gun has been slated for a fall release date by Fox Searchlight. The ensemble heist thriller led by Robert Redford and written and directed by David Lowery also stars Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, and Tika Sumpter. The film is based on a David Grann short story in The New Yorker that was inspired by the true story of Forrest Tucker (Redford), who escaped from San Quentin at the age of 70, and the unprecedented string of heists that perplexed law enforcement and enamored the public. Pursuing Tucker was detective John Hunt (Affleck). Spacek plays the love interest of Tucker.

A new clip was released from Mitzi Peirone’s thriller Braid starring Handmaid’s Tale actress Madeline Brewer as a woman named Daphne who reunites with her childhood friends who have since become drug dealers. As she hosts her friends (played by Imogen Waterhouse and Sarah Hay), they begin to play a game, but it soon becomes clear Daphne is in a disturbed mental state, and the game make-believe turns into a twisted, demented maze of hallucinations, role play, torture … and murder.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Amazon Studios has given a nine-episode series order to a U.S. adaptation of Utopia, written by Gone Girl author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, with Flynn also serving as executive producer and showrunner. It will be the first project under an overall TV deal she has signed with Amazon Studios. Utopia follows a group of young adults who meet online that are mercilessly hunted by a shadowy deep state organization after they come into possession of a near-mythical cult underground graphic novel. Within the comic’s pages, they discover the conspiracy theories that may actually be real and are forced into the dangerous, unique and ironic position of saving the world. 

Netflix has preemptively acquired film rights to Tell Me Everything, an upcoming thriller novel from Cambria Brockman. Michael Sugar’s company Sugar23 brought in the project and will produce the adaptation with Anonymous Content and Aevitas Creative Management. Brockman’s debut novel, which Ballantine recently acquired at auction for a June 2019 street date, is set at an elite college in small-town New England and follows the shifting alliances and romantic entanglements of six tight-knit students — until one of them is murdered.

Netflix is not moving forward with a second season of the crime drama Seven Seconds, created and executive produced by The Killing's Veena Sud. Written by Sud and starring Regina King, Seven Seconds chronicles tensions running high between African-American citizens and Caucasian police in Jersey City, where a teenage African-American boy is critically injured by a cop. 

Among the new shows Netflix is picking up are an untitled docuseries based on one of the biggest cold cases in French history, the murder of Grégory Villemin in 1984; The Staircase, the compelling story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed; and 13 Novembre: Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, a three-part documentary exploring the human stories behind the Parisian terrorist attacks on November 13, 2015, which will launch on the service on June 1, 2018. 


Netflix had previously announced Sacha Baron Cohen would topline the six-episode limited series The Spy, and this past week, the company announced that The Americans standout Noah Emmerich has signed on to star opposite Cohen. Written and directed by Gideon Raff, creator of the Israeli drama Prisoners of War on which Showtime’s Homeland was based, The Spy tells the story of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen (Baron Cohen). Eli Cohen lived in Damascus undercover in the beginning of the ’60s, spying for Israel and managed to embed himself into Syrian high society until he was uncovered by the Syrian regime, sentenced to death, and publicly hanged.

Cinemax has given a straight-to-series order to the drama Jett, from Snakes on a Plane and Gothika scribe Sebastian Gutierrez, with Carla Gugino attached to star and executive produce. Written by Gutierrez, The story centers around world-class thief Daisy "Jett" Kowalski (Carla Gugino), fresh out of prison, who's forced back into doing what she does best by dangerous and eccentric criminals determined to exploit her skills for their own ends. 

Dane DeHaan is set to star in Sky's brand-new crime thriller ZeroZeroZero. The upcoming series, based on a novel by Roberto Saviano, follows a number of power-hungry criminals and the product that links them all: cocaine. Joining DeHaan in the new eight-episode drama are Andrea Riseborough (The Death of Stalin), Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspect), and The Missing's Tchéky Karyo. 

CBS has renewed eleven returning series for 2018-2019, including its entire Friday lineup of dramas, MacGyver, Hawaii Five-O, and Blue Bloods, along with Bull, NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS: Los Angeles, and Madam Secretary, They join previously announced renewals of NCIS, SEAL Team, and S.W.A.T., among other non-crime dramas. Veteran drama Criminal Minds and the techno-thriller series Scorpion are both still on the "bubble."

NBC has pulled the action drama Taken off the schedule, effective immediately. The series — a prequel to Luc Besson’s hit movie franchise — was retooled heading into Season 2 with a new showrunner and a casting shakeup. The story follows the origins of younger, hungrier former Green Beret Bryan Mills (Clive Standen) as he deals with a personal tragedy that shakes his world. As Mills fights to overcome the trauma of the incident and exact revenge, he is pulled into a career as a deadly CIA operative, a job that awakens his very particular, and very dangerous, set of skills. In 30 years, this character is destined to become the Bryan Mills in the Taken films starring Liam Neeson.

Michael C Hall, best known for playing the forensic technician/serial killer on Showtime’s Dexter, is running around the British countryside looking for his daughter in the first trailer for Netflix’s forthcoming crime thriller Safe. Hall stars alongside Sherlock’s Amanda Abbington in the eight-part drama that centers on Tom, a pediatric surgeon who is raising his two teenage daughters in a picturesque gated community after the death of his wife. Everyone seems to be recovering and thriving, until one evening, one daughter sneaks out to a party. A murder and a disappearance ensue, bringing buried secrets to the surface. Harlan Coben exec produces alongside Hall, Nicola Shindler, Danny Brocklehurst, and Richard Fee. The series launches May 10.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The Crime Friction podcast welcomed Art Taylor, whose latest stories can be read in Down & Out The Magazine and Black Cat Mystery Magazine. Taylor has won four Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, two Macavity Awards, and three consecutive Derringer Awards for his short fiction, and his work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories

Meet the Thriller Author host Alan Petersen welcomed Thomas Greanias, a New York Times bestselling novelist and one of the world’s leading authors of adventure. His books in print have been translated into multiple languages and sold in 200 nations around the globe. A former journalist and on-air correspondent for NBC, Greanias infuses his international thrillers with provocative issues ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

In the latest edition of Crime Cafe, host Debbi Mack interviewed crime fiction author David Swinson about his writing and series with Frank Marr, a retired D.C. police detective working as a private eye for a defense attorney.

THEATER

The world premiere of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Curtain appears at the Theatre Royal Bath from Wednesday, April 25 to Saturday, May 5. In this production from award-winning dramatist Simon Read (who wrote the play on a commission from the Theatre), Robert Powell stars as Holmes, who lives in retirement on the South Coast. All too aware that he’s older and slower, he’s concerned that he might have lost his touch, paranoid that he is an easy target for his enemies. So when Mary Watson (wife of his former associate Dr. John Watson and played by Liza Goddard) tracks him down to tell him she has seen her long-dead son through the window of 221B Baker Street, apparently alive and well, Holmes is determined to solve the mystery and confront his own demons at the same time.

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Sunday Music Treat

Yesterday was National Astronomy Day (actually there are two, one in spring and one in fall). English composer Gustav Holst composed the suite The Planets between 1914 and 1916, with eight movements, one for each planet in our solar system as known at the time (Pluto wasn't found until 1930 and has since been reclassified as a "plutoid"). Here's the movement for Jupiter, "The Bringer of Jollity," with Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic:

 

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Fans of piano music and Scott Drayco will also be happy to know Holst also composed a version for two pianos, actually before the actual orchestrations:

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Quote of the Week

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FFB: The Problem of Cell 13

Jacques Heath Futrelle (1875-1912) was an American journalist and mystery writer who worked for the Atlanta Journal, where he began their sports section and met his great love and fellow writer, Lily May ("May") Peel. Soon after, Futrelle was off to Boston to join the editorial staff the Boston Post, but he missed Peel too much to stay. Before taking a job with the New York Herald, Jacques and May married in Georgia in July 1895, and after their honeymoon, the couple settled in to enjoy the New York literary life, including neighbors such as Edith Wharton and O. Henry. Inspired by his love of mysteries, especially the Sherlock Homes stories, Futrelle turned his own hand to penning short crime fiction in his spare time.



After emotional exhaustion following a period covering the Spanish-American War, Futrelle took a break from journalism to work as a two-year contract as a theatrical manager. He and May moved to Richmond, Virginia, where Jacques traveled for the small repertory company and tried his hand at dramatic writing. At the end of his stint with the theater, Jacques took a job at the Boston American newspaper, although he also continued to write short stories.



In 1906 Futrelle decided to leave journalism to turned his hand to writing fiction full time and became especially known for his series of stories featuring the "Thinking Machine," Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen ("a Ph.D., an LL.D., an F.R.S., an M.D., and an M.D.S."), who first appeared in 1905 in a serialized version of "The Problem of Cell 13." That was to be followed by The Chase of the Golden Plate (1906), The Simple Case of Susan (1908), The Thinking Machine on the Case (1908), The Diamond Master (1909), Elusive Isabel (1909), and The High Hand (1911).



In April of 1912, after celebrating his birthday in London following a publishing deal, Futrelle and his wife began their return journey from Europe to New York, booking their trip on the RMS Titanic. Though May made it into a life boat after the ship struck an iceberg on April 15, Jacques Futrelle died in the sinking. As the legend goes, after Futrelle ensured that his wife got on a lifeboat, he was last seen speaking on deck and smoking cigars with philanthropist John Jacob Astor, who also perished in the tragedy. Two more Thinking Machine novels were published posthumously, My Lady’s Garter in 1912 (which his widow inscribed "to the heroes of the Titanic, I dedicate my husband's book") and Blind Man’s Bluff in 1914. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine also published some uncollected stories in 1949 and 1950.



"The Problem of Cell 13" is a short story by Jacques Futrelle, first published in 1905 and later collected in The Thinking Machine (1907), which was featured in crime writer H. R. F. Keating's list of the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. The story was also selected by science fiction author Harlan Ellison for Lawrence Block's Best Mysteries of the Century. It's seen by some crime fiction historians as a forerunner of the "locked room" detective story, and like many others of Futrelle's work, deals with an "impossible" scenario.



"The Problem of Cell 13" features Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen as the protagonist, although part of the story is seen through the POV of a prison warden. The story is set in motion after a scientific debate with two men, Dr. Charles Ransome and Alfred Fielding, which leads Van Dusen to insist that nothing is impossible when the human mind is properly applied. To prove it, he agrees to take part in an experiment where he'll be incarcerated in a prison for one week and escape on his own devices. He enters cell No. 13 with only three special requests: that his shoes should be polished, that he be provided with tooth-powder, and that he also be given 25 dollars (2 notes of 10 dollars and 1 note of 5 dollars). The only escape routes are a window with iron bars or having to walk through seven different doors to freedom.



Needless to say, mission is ultimately accomplished (with a little bit of aid from his confederate, newspaper reporter Hutchinson Hatch, and some rats), and Van Dusen also indirectly manages to get an inmate to confess to a crime he committed, something the police detectives hadn't even been able to do. When the warden wonders what would have happened if key elements of Van Dusen's escape hadn't been available, the "Thinking Machine" simply states there were also two other ways he could have done it - leaving those details to the speculation of the police and the reader.



The story was adapted for U.S. television by Arthur A. Ross in 1962 as part of the Kraft Mystery Theater series and won the 1963 Edgar Award for Best Episode in a TV Series. Other adaptations included "Cell 13" in 1973 for the British series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes featuring Douglas Wilmer (known for playing Sherlock Holmes in 1960s BBC productions), as well as couple of radio plays and a 2011 stage version.



Although not terribly well known today, Futrelle's work is still well regarded as part of the early Golden Age of crime fiction. His work has influenced many writers since, including John Dickson Carr, who referenced him in 1938's The Crooked Hinge, and Max Allan Collins, whose 1999 novel The Titanic Murders had Futrelle investigating a series of murders taking place the doomed ship. Jon Jermey and Mike Grost have more details on Futrelle and the scientific side of his writing over on the GA Detection website.

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Mystery Melange

The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival announced the longlist for the 2018 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, with the winner to be announced at the festival in Harrogate in July. The prize was created to celebrate "the very best in crime fiction" and is open to UK and Irish crime authors. For the entire list of the eighteen finalist books, follow this link to the official festival website.

The Short Mystery Fiction Society announced this year's finalists for the Derringer Awards, honoring the best in mystery, thriller, and suspense short stories, with categories for Best Flash Fiction, Best Short Story, Best Long Story, and Best Novelette. The complete honoree list is available via the SMFS website, with the winners to be announced in May.

The ITW Thriller Fest Conference organizers announced that the 2018 Thriller Legends are Bob and Pat Gussin from Oceanview Publishing for their unparalleled contributions to the crime fiction world, the writers, and the art of the thrill. Oceanview Publishing was established in 2006 and has received many awards and nominations such as Independent Publishers Awards, Indie Excellence Awards, and ALA Book of the Year. The Gussins will be honored at the awards banquet on the Saturday evening of ThrillerFest, which runs July 10 – 14.

One of this year's Sarton Women's Book Awards that are sponsored by the Story Circle Network, an international nonprofit association of women writers, was Christine Evelyn Volker for her crime fiction work, Venetian Blood: Murder in a Sensuous City. The award program is named in honor of May Sarton, who is remembered for her outstanding contributions to women's literature as a memoirist, novelist, and poet.

The Florida Book Awards also announced this year's winners, including those in the Popular Fiction category. The Gold Winner was Patricia Gussin for her book Come Home (Oceanview Publishing); the Silver award went to Robert Macomber for An Honorable War (Pineapple Press); and the Bronze winner was Ward Larsen for Assassin’s Code (Forge Books).

Ace Atkins, the bestselling author of two dozen mysteries and thrillers, will receive the Hall-Waters Prize from Troy University on April 20, 2018 and speak the following day at the Alabama Book Festival, in Montgomery, Alabama. The award is presented regularly to a person who has made significant contributions to Southern heritage and culture in history, literature or the arts.

Tonight at St. Johnsbury, Vermont's Athenaeum, it's an "Evening of Pulp Fiction." Editor Dan Szczesny, along with authors S. J. Cahill and Judith Janoo, will hold a multi-media presentation including readings centered around Murder Ink, a three-volume anthology of newsroom detective short fiction told by authors from around New England.

Amazon’s Kindle Storyteller Award will return for a second year. Celebrating the work of self-published authors, independent of genre, the £20,000 prize drew thousands of entries in its inaugural year, and in 2018, Amazon will also award £5,000 to a second title in what it is calling a Judge’s Prize. The next Kindle Storyteller Award is open to all authors who publish their book through Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon.co.uk from May 1st to August 31st, 2018. Last year's winner was David Leadbeater for his Crime Thriller The Relic Hunters.

National Book Foundation’s "‘Book Rich Environments" is entering its second season. The program is designed to distribute free, new books to young readers through public housing authorities in the United States to combat lack of literary access, often termed "book deserts," by connecting communities with resources that help foster lifelong, joyful relationships between readers and books. The number of books handed out will jump from 270,000 last year to 422,000 this year, with programming at 37 sites in 19 states.

Crime fiction has become the most popular fiction genre for the first time in the UK, according to data revealed at The London Book Fair. Sales of crime and thriller books have increased by 19% since 2015, marking the first time the genre has overtaken sales of general and literary fiction. Last year some 18.7 million units of crime fiction were sold, compared to 18.1 million general and literary fiction, according to data from Nielsen BookScan.

 

Writing for The Guardian, Henry Sutton, a senior lecturer in creative writing at UEA and director of the MA Crime Fiction, also noted the reasons why "thrillers are leaving other books for dead," noting that crime fiction is "fast developing as the most versatile narrative of our times."

A librarian, hoping to solve an odd book mystery pointed out by one of her patrons, discovered the secret codes used by elderly library-goers.

The Washington Post reported on a book mystery of a different sort: why is a small town in Virginia, population 4,000, responsible for producing some 140 million books a year?

NPR reported on the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and their sometimes-funny, sometimes-touching typewriter experiment that has resulted in the book Notes From a Public Typewriter.

The Paris Review took a look at William Shakespeare's Twitter account. You read that right.

The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Anatomy of a Good Thing Gone Bad" by John Dorroh. And don't forget to check out the 30 Days at the Five-Two series of posts celebrating National Poetry Month.

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Media Murder for Monday

Monday greetings to you! Here's a roundup of the latest crime drama news to start off your week:

MOVIES

Castle alum Stana Katic, Sarah Megan Thomas, and Radhika Apte are set to star in an untitled female-driven WW II spy drama based on the real-life spies in Winston Churchill’s "secret army." The film centers on British intelligence officer Vera Atkins (Katic) and two of the women she sends to France as spies, Virginia Hall (Thomas) and Noor Inayat Khan (Apte). Atkins is a crafty recruiter with a secret of her own; Hall is a daring American with a wooden leg who was the first female field agent and ultimately the spy the Nazi’s dubbed "the most dangerous of all"; and Khan is a pacifist of Indian descent who was the first female wireless operator. These civilian women form a sisterhood while entangled in missions to turn the tide of the war. Thomas wrote the screenplay and will produce with Lydia Dean Pilcher (Queen of Katwe) who is set to direct.

Following the success of director David Leitch’s 2017 action-thriller Atomic Blonde, about an undercover MI6 agent sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent, star Charlize Theron has confirmed that plans are moving forward on a sequel. An adaptation of the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart, the film was praised for the performances of Theron, James McAvoy and John Goodman, and for its action sequences, and earned more than $98 million worldwide. 

Jaime King has been cast as the female lead in Cutman, the indie drama starring Ray Liotta that comes from producer-director Michael Mailer. The script, written by Tiffany Heath, follows a retired boxer who is dying of cancer and working as an enforcer for low-level mobsters who just wants to die in peace before he meets a junkie and her daughter as they all search for meaning and revenge. King will play the junkie Josie, who uses her combination of feminine wiles and fierce will to complete a dark mission. 

Riverdale star K.J. Apa has been tapped to replace YouTube phenom Kian Lawley in Fox 2000’s drama The Hate U Give after Lawley was dropped due to videos of him making racist remarks. George Tillman Jr. is directing the adaptation of the Angie Thomas novel, which stars Amandla Stenberg as a teen who witnesses a police officer kill her best friend and undergoes a political awakening. 

Jim Carrey makes his return to the big screen in the new thriller Dark Crime from director Alexandros Avranas, as seen in a new trailer. The film, based on the 2008 New Yorker article "True Crime" by David Grann about real-life murderer Krystian Bala, follows Tadek (Carrey) as a Polish detective who becomes obsessed with solving a grisly murder and finds similarities between the murder and a crime in a book by famous author Krystov Kozlow (played by Marton Csokas). His journey down the rabbit hole eventually leads him to uncover a tangled web of lies and corruption. Dark Crimes is The film is set to hit Direct-TV April 19 and opens in theaters May 18. 

The first trailer has landed for the well-received Sundance crime thriller American Animals from director Bart Layton. Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters and Blake Jenner star in the genre-bending movie that's based on the true story of four teenagers in Lexington, Kentucky, who tried to strike it rich by pulling of a $10M heist centered on a library. 

A new trailer was released for Ocean’s 8, the female-driven offshoot from the mega-successful 2000s film series that itself was spawned from the 1960 Rat Pack picture. The heist yarn stars Sandra Bullock as convicted felon Debbie Ocean, along with Cate Blanchett and their merry sisterhood of thieves including Anne Hathaway, Sarah Paulson, Mindy Kaling, Jaime King and Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter. Anne Hathway plays their self-absorbed mark.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

NCIS star and executive producer Mark Harmon has signed a new agreement to continue on the CBS Studios series. With him on board, the long-running crime procedural drama has been renewed for the 2018-2019 broadcast season for its sixteenth year. According to Forbes, Harmon earned $19 million from NCIS in 2017, which makes him the seventh highest-paid actor on TV, behind only Sofia Vergara and the principal cast of The Big Bang Theory. NCIS has been the most-watched scripted drama series on television since 2009 and is the most-watched show worldwide. Season 16 will be NCIS' first without star Pauley Perrette, who announced she would leaving at the end of Season 15, leaving Harmon and David McCallum as the only remaining original cast members. 

ITV announced that Grantchester, based on the novels by James Runcie and starring James Norton and Robson Green, will return for a fourth series. However, it will be James Norton’s final episodes as character Sidney Chambers, the charismatic, jazz-loving clergyman, and one half of the unlikely crime-fighting duo based in 1950s Grantchester. Casting of the new vicar arriving in the hamlet of Grantchester will be announced shortly, ITV has said. Along with Robson Green, who plays Detective Geordie Keating, returning members of Grantchester’s ensemble cast include Al Weaver, Tessa Peake-Jones and Kacey Ainsworth.

USA Network has ordered four hourlong scripted pilots, including Treadstone, an action-packed drama that delves into the CIA black ops program known as Operation Treadstone from Universal Pictures’ Bourne film franchise; Erase, a crime thriller-with-a-twist starring Denis Leary as a dirty ex-cop who decides to do the right thing and bring down his complicit superior officers until his best weapon in this battle – a photographic memory – is suddenly compromised by symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s; Briarpatch, based on the Ross Tom novel about a dogged investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered by a car bomb; and Dare Me, a drama based on Megan Abbott’s book set within the cutthroat world of competitive high school cheerleading.

HBO Documentary Films has acquired the rights to journalist Michelle McNamara’s bestselling true-crime book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, to develop as a docuseries. The project is a meticulous exploration of the case of an elusive, violent predator who terrorized California in the late 1970s and early '80s. McNamara, the late wife of Patton Oswalt, was in the midst of writing the book when she unexpectedly died in her sleep in 2016, leaving the book to be completed by McNamara’s lead researcher Paul Haynes and a close colleague, Billy Jenkin

Sacha Baron Cohen is set to headline the six-episode limited series The Spy, which will debut globally on Netflix (outside of France), and on OCS in France. Written and directed by Gideon Raff, creator of the Israeli drama Prisoners of War on which Showtime’s Homeland was based, The Spy tells the story of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen (Baron Cohen), who lived in Damascus undercover in the beginning of the 60s, spying for Israel. He managed to embed himself into Syrian high society and rise through the ranks of their politics until he was uncovered by the Syrian regime, sentenced to death, and publicly hanged in a Damascus square in 1965.

Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, who recurred as powerful studio head Sam Winslow in Season 5 of Showtime's Ray Donovan, will reprise her role in Season 6 as a series regular. Production begins this month in New York on the show’s sixth season, which is slated for a fall premiere. The series, starring Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight, has relocated from Los Angeles to NYC for Season 6, following an emotional fifth season that culminated with Winslow (Sarandon) as one of Ray’s (Schreiber) last-standing clients, after the death of a young star left his career in jeopardy.

Michael McGrady, known his recurring role of Frank Barnes on Ray Donovan, has joined the cast of NBC’s hit series Chicago P.D. as a recurring character for the remainder of Season 5. McGrady will play Assistant State’s Attorney James Osha, a prosecutor described as formidable, ambitious, and intelligent. He’ll play a crucial role in the battle between Voight (Jason Beghe) and Woods (guest star Mykelti Williamson) that has waged on throughout this season.

Oxygen Media is further expanding its true-crime slate, adding ten new original series including Serial Killer with Piers Morgan that will feature Morgan going into some of the most dangerous maximum security prisons in the United States to explore the minds of three of America’s most depraved serial killers. Other series include In Defense Of, which explores the complex relationships between notorious criminals, including Timothy McVeigh and Jodi Arias, and the defense attorneys who represented them in court; and License to Kill featuring renowned plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow as he investigates cases of murderous doctors and nurses. For all of the upcoming shows, head on over to the full Deadline report.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Two Crime Writers and Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste talk about all things Will Self and the dreaded "Death of the Novel," the difficulty of banning books, and much more in their latest podcast. Special guest Sarah Hilary talked about winning the Theakstons award with her debut novel, how she came to be a writer, and other inspiring info.

The latest Writer Types podcast Crime Quiz returned, this time live from Anne's Book Carnival in Orange County, with panelists Sue Ann Jaffarian, Rochelle Staab and Tyler Dilts.

Read or Dead hosts Katie and Rincey featured book news (including a new Tana French novel) in their latest podcast and discussed the trope of the unreliable, often female, narrator.

THEATER

Rebus, the abrasive, hard-drinking and brilliant Edinburgh detective created by Ian Rankin, is to be the star of a new stage play after Rankin's collaboration with the playwright Rona Munro. The production will feature a new crime story to be solved by the dour detective, the protagonist of 24 books that have sold more than 30 million copies across the world, who is now retired and working on cold cases. Rebus has twice been portrayed on television, by John Hannah and Ken Stott. Rebus: Long Shadows will premiere at the Birmingham Repertory theatre in September, directed by the Rep’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert. It is expected to tour the UK afterwards, including Rebus’s Edinburgh stomping ground. The actor Charles Lawson, best known as Jim McDonald in Coronation Street, will star in the title role.

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