B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 185

Media Murder for Monday

Here's your weekly roundup of the latest crime drama news:

MOVIES



Sony Pictures is moving forward with the delayed follow-up to the studio’s 2011 The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (based on the Millennium book series created by Stieg Larsson), which is now slated for an October 2018 release. However, there is a catch; director Fede Alvarez has decided to use a whole new cast, including the role of the books' heroine Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace in the original Swedish trilogy and Rooney Mara in Sony’s Dragon Tattoo directed by David Fincher. The sequel will be based on author David Lagercrantz's The Girl in the Spider's Web, the continuation novel authorized by Larsson's estate.



James Mangold, coming off the hit Logan, is in talks to develop and direct The Force, the upcoming NYPD corrupt cop novel by The Cartel author Don Winslow. The plot has been described by author Stephen King as "Think The Godfather, only with cops. It's that good." It tells the story of a corrupt detective in the NYPD’s most elite crime-fighting unit who has to reconcile the idealistic guardian he still views himself to be with the corrupt cop he’s become, only to find himself attacked on all fronts.



Ridley Scott is currently finalizing plans to direct All the Money in the World, based on a script by David Scarpa that tells the harrowing, real-life story of John Paul Getty III’s kidnapping and subsequent ransom. As a teenager, the grandson of J. Paul Getty was kidnapped in 1973 with a ransom of $17 million sent to the family. While it was initially believed to be staged by the rebellious teen himself, when a lock of his hair and his severed ear was sent to the family, they realized it was real.



La La Land writer-director Damien Chazelle has optioned the movie rights to his mystery thriller The Claim. The project centers on a single father with a criminal background who must uncover the whereabouts of his kidnapped daughter while fighting the mysterious claims of another couple who insist that the child is theirs.



Man Of Steel’s Henry Cavill has officially been cast in Paramount’s upcoming sequel Mission: Impossible 6, a move that director Christopher McQuarrie made last week on Instagram. According to Variety, sources say Cavill would play some sort of a right hand to the head of Cruise’s unit.



Tom Bateman is taking on the role of a villainous gangster in the Liam Neeson starring vehicle Hard Powder, being directed by Hans Petter Moland. It's an adaptation of his Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance and is set in a glitzy Rocky Mountain ski town where an upright snowplow driver's (Neeson) life is turned upside down after his son is murdered by a local drug kingpin. He then seeks to dismantle the cartel, but his vengeful crusade sparks a turf war between a Native American mafia boss and the gangster Viking (Bateman).



Common has been tapped to star in Quick Draw, a revenge action thriller written and directed by Harris Goldberg. The plot is sketchy, but is said to bet set in Los Angeles and "feature hyper-intense shootouts, choreographed car chases, and hand-to-hand combat."



Mark Strong has joined Catcher Was a Spy, playing the central role of Werner Heisenberg, lead scientist for the Nazi atomic program who became the main target in the U.S. effort to infiltrate the Nazi party and determine whether they were capable of building an atomic bomb. Paul Rudd stars as baseball player Moe Berg, a spy tasked with ingratiating himself with Heisenberg and ascertaining if the scientist was a genuine threat who should be assassinated. 



TELEVISION



CBS Films prevailed in competitive bidding for screen rights to the Ruth Ware bestselling mystery novel The Woman In Cabin 10. The story follows a journalist given an irresistible travel magazine assignment, a week on a boutique ultra-luxury cruise ship with only a handful of unimaginably wealthy travelers. But the dream assignment turns into a nightmare when she watches a passenger get thrown overboard after a violent act and all of the passengers seem to be accounted for the following morning as the ship sails on like nothing happened.



Justin Lin (The Fast and The Furious, Star Trek Beyond) has made a deal with Netflix for The Stand Off, a period drama written by Black Swan scribe Heyman, which takes place in 1969 when a newly formed Police unit known as the "SWAT team" embarked on their first major operation: to raid the Los Angeles Headquarters of the Black Panther Party. 



Halfway through its first season, CBS All Access’ first original scripted series, The Good Fight, has been renewed for a second season to premiere in early 2018. The Good Fight, a spinoff from CBS’ The Good Wife, is toplined by Christina Baranski.



NBC has picked up the Jennifer Lopez-starring gritty cop drama Shades of Blue for a third season. The series stars Lopez as Harlee Santos, a single mother and dirty cop working for Ray Liotta's Lt. Wozniak, who is equally willing to step outside the law to do what needs to be done to protect and serve.



Oscar winner Susan Sarandon will be joining Ray Donovan for a recurring role for season five, playing Samantha Winslow, the strong, focused head of a motion picture studio. The series stars Liev Schreiber in the title role, a professional "fixer," the man the town’s biggest celebrities, athletes, and business moguls call to make the most complicated and combustible situations go away. 



Timothy Hutton is set for a recurring guest star role in Amazon’s upcoming original series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. The series stars John Krasinski as Jack Ryan, who uncovers a pattern in terrorist communication that launches him into the center of a dangerous gambit with a new breed of terrorism that threatens destruction on a global scale. Hutton will play Singer, who serves as Deputy Director of Operations. The producers also announced that John Hoogenakker has booked a recurring role the series playing a tough and salty American who works black ops for the CIA.



Hand Of God star Elaine Tan is set for a series regular role opposite John Leguizamo, Allison Miller and Neil Sandilands in Salamander, ABC’s drama pilot based on a Belgian format. Salamander centers on Ethan, a brilliant but misanthropic engineer who recruits a skeptical Homeland Security psychiatrist to help him track a mysterious bank robber whose theft of 66 specific safety deposit boxes sets in motion a series of blackmails that might be linked to a greater conspiracy. Tan will play Meghan, the master thief and anarchist who works alongside the domestic terrorist Jack Wang (Sandilands).



Elizabeth Perkins and Madison Davenport are set to co-star opposite Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson in Sharp Objects, HBO’s eight-episode drama series from Entertainment One. Adapted by Marti Noxon from the book by Gillian Flynn and directed by Jean Marc Vallée, Sharp Objects centers on reporter Camille Preaker (Adams). Fresh from a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital, Camille must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. Trying to put together a psychological puzzle from her past, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims a bit too closely. 



Chicago P.D. is getting a new detective in the form of Tracy Spiridakos, who will play Hailey Upton, a detective in the robbery homicide unit. Upton is a detective described as a hard worker who earned her detective shield on her merits alone after working a mysterious undercover assignment. But because the promotion came to her that way, she's had to prove herself to some colleagues in the boys club who don't believe she earned it.



Australian actor Alex Russell has booked a series regular role opposite Shemar Moore in CBS drama pilot S.W.A.T., executive produced by The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, Neal H. Moritz, Justin Lin and Aaron Rahsaan Thomas. The project is described as an intense, action-packed procedural following a locally born and bred S.W.A.T. lieutenant Hondo (Moore), torn between loyalty to the streets and duty to his fellow officers when he’s tasked to run a highly-trained unit that is the last stop for solving crimes in Los Angeles. Russell will play a man known as a loose cannon with no regard for safety – who's also the newest member of Hondo’s team.



Shemar Moore is slated to make a return to Criminal Minds in the Season 12 finale, although he is not scheduled to return on a full-time basis. One reason for that is the fact Moore landed the starring role in a new CBS adaptation of the 2003 movie S.W.A.T. 



Jim Caviezel, who played the sly former special op in CBS' cyber-thriller Person of Interest, is returning to the network in a new untitled pilot about Navy SEALs. He's been cast as Jason, the leader of his team of SEALs who's well respected and experienced in the field.



Krysta Rodriguez has booked a key recurring role for the second half of Season 2 of ABC’s Quantico. Rodriguez will play the intelligent, passionate and fiercely driven founder of "the Roster," a network and visibility platform for professional women committed to helping one another rise. 



Starz has unveiled a new trailer for American Gods, which follows ex-con Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) who is hired as a bodyguard and traveling partner to the mysterious Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane). The project is from Hannibal executive producer Bryan Fuller who created the show along with Michael Green working from Neil Gaiman’s novel.



PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO



Two Crime Writers and a Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste introduced a new feature of book reviews by blogger Craig Sisterson and also welcomed special guest Casey Kelleher, who talked about her books, how she started out, her love for Martina Cole, reality TV, and much more.



The Story Blender podcast featured Allison Brennan discussing the latest installment in her Lucy Kincaid series, Make Them Pay.

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Quote of the Week

            

FFB: A Long Fatal Love Chase

When most people think of Louisa May Alcott, Little Women comes to mind, and indeed, that is her chief claim to fame in literary history. However, she also penned Gothic thrillers ("potboilers") under the name A. M. Barnard, a fact that was brought to light in the early 1940s by a rare book dealer, Madeleine B. Stern, and a librarian, Leona Rostenberg. This led to Stern's book Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott.



One of those thrillers is more of a Gothic suspense romance which she originally titled A Modern Mephistopheles, or The Fatal Love Chase, which she'd dashed off when publisher James R. Elliot asked her to write another novel suitable for serialization in the magazine The Flag of Our Union. After it was rejected for being "too long and too sensational", she reworked it and retitled it as Fair Rosamond, but ultimately it was shelved in a drawer.



Fair Rosamond ended up at a Harvard library, while the original was auctioned off by Alcott's heirs and eventually fell into the hands of a Manhattan rare book dealer. In 1994, a New Hampshire headmaster bought the manuscript and sold publication rights to Random House, receiving a $1.5 million advance. Random published it in 1995 under the title A Long Fatal Love Chase, and it turned out to be a bestseller 129 years after its creation.



The plot centers on lonely, trusting 18-year-old Rosamond Vivian, who lives with her unloving grandfather on an English island and falls for the suave Phillip Tempest, a man almost twice her age. After promising to marry her, he takes her off to his Mediterranean villa near Nice, but when she discovers he's secretly married and may have murdered the son he never acknowledged, Rosamond flees to Paris, assuming one new identity after another. But Phillip stalks her obsessively across Europe, even as Rosamund tries to take shelter with a Roman Catholic priest with whom she falls in love.  



Publishers Weekly observed that "This absorbing novel revises our image of a complex and, it is now clear, prescient writer,"  alluding to the novel's ripped-from-modern-headlines of domestic violence and abuse. The New York Times also noted that genius burned for Alcott following A Long Fatal Love Chase, but never again with such primitive and joyful heat and "One wonders what kind of writer she might have been had she been able to ... take her thrillers as seriously as her feminist editors and elucidators do today."

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Mystery Melange

On Saturday, during the inaugural Murder and Mayhem crime fiction conference in Chicago, organizers presented Sara Paretsky with the very first Sara Paretsky Award, designed to honor great crime fiction from the Midwest. Paretsky, the author of more than 20 books, is best known for her bestselling series featuring crime protagonist V. I. Warshawski, a Chicago private investigator.



The Portland, Oregon-based fan group Friends of Mystery announced that Seattle lawyer-turned-author Robert Dugoni won his first Spotted Owl Award for The 7th Canon. The Rap Sheet has a list of finalists for the award, which celebrates the "best mystery written by an author whose primary residence is in the Pacific Northwest."



The Lamba Literary Awards were announced yesterday by Lambda Literary, the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature. You can check out all the lists via this link, including the nominees for Best Gay Mystery and Best Lesbian Mystery.



George Smiley is set to return in the new John le Carré novel, A Legacy of Spies. The 85-year-old author is bringing his most famous character in from the cold, 25 years after the debut espionage classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.



Harlequin is launching Hanover Square Press, a new imprint led by editorial director Peter Joseph that will publish beginning in January 2018. Early acquisitions include Neil Olson's The Black Painting, a literary mystery involving a stolen work by the artist Francisco de Goya, and Red River, a debut thriller inspired in part by true crime programs such as Serial and Making a Murderer, by Daily Mail First Novel Competition winner Amy Lloyd. Future titles also include a thriller by Charles Rosenberg, who is a legal consultant for TV shows such as LA Law, Boston Legal and The Practice.



The Irish Independent's Tanya Sweeney surveyed how women are leading the charge in a male-dominated genre with "grip lit."



Pursuit Magazine profiled the daring life history of Stanley Weiss that almost sounds as if was lifted out of a spy thriller. Weiss was a mining magnate and foreign policy expert whose accidental friendship with double-agent Guy Burgess proved one of the most influential of his life.



Cuba’s top detective writer is virtually unknown in his home country, while detective fiction fans and literature buffs worldwide know and love Leonardo Padura, even watching his sleuth Mario Conde on Netflix. 



Lithub profiled Frédéric Dard, the "most prolific and widely read Francophone writer with whom hardly anybody in the English speaking world, even serious crime genre aficionados, is acquainted." Part of the problem may be that only a handful of his 300+ novels were ever translated into English.



These days, libraries not only celebrate books, but they often also offer a variety of other programs to support their communities and the arts. Coming up April 29 to June 2 in the UK, the Warrington borough’s libraries will profile classic American crime thrillers of the 1940s and 50s, such as The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, with photographer Paul Jackson's exhibition of photographs inspired by the highly stylized black and white films as well as film screenings. Jackson's project has a bit of an interactive component, working with local models and makeup/hairdresser artists for the exhibition called Paint It Black.



Forensic science on television is often portrayed as almost instant magic, but real forensic scientists often do play the role of hero, as this recent story out of Tampa attests.



Speaking of forensics, was Jane Austin poisoned with arsenic? A lead curator of Modern Archives & Manuscripts at the British Library suggested as much in a blog post, but many scholars and medical experts say this theory is bunk, more crime fiction than plausible truth.



From California's John Steinbeck to Maine's Stephen King, here are the most famous authors from every state, including a few crime fiction writers.



This week's featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "The Pickpocket's Proclamation" by Natisha Parsons.



In the Q&A roundup, Omnimystery News welcomed author Nancy Boyarsky to talk about her new first in series mystery The Swap; Owen Laukkanen talked up crime, train-hopping and "forgotten girls" with the Houston Chronicle; and Deborah Kalb chatted with Denmark's "Queen of Crime," Sara Blaedel, author of the new mystery novel The Lost Woman, the latest in her Detective Louise Rick series.

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Author R&R with J.L. Abramo

J. L. ABRAMO is a long-time educator, arts journalist, film and stage actor and theater director. His evolution to writing crime fiction might have been ordained by the fact he was born on Raymond Chandler's fifty-ninth birthday. Abramo's short fiction appeared in various anthologies, but his success as a novelist began when his Catching Water in a Net (the first in his Jake Diamond series) won the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America prize for Best First Private Eye Novel. A subsequent Jake Diamond novel, Circling the Runway, won the Shamus Award for Best Original Paperback Novel of 2015 presented by the Private Eye Writers of America.



Abramo also created a new series in 2012 with Gravesend, which introduced Homicide Detectives Samson and Murphy of Brooklyn's 61st Precinct. The detectives return in Coney Island Avenue during the dog days of August in Brooklyn where the men and women of the 61st Precinct are battling to keep all hell from breaking loose. Innocents are being sacrificed in the name of greed, retribution, passion and the lust for power—and the only worthy opponent of this senseless evil is the uncompromising resolve to rise above it, rather than descend to its depths.



Abramo stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about the book and researching settings and historical periods to make his writing more accurate:

I have always been partial to novels in which location plays an essential role in the narrative.  Dennis Lehane’s Boston, George Pelecanos’ Washington D.C., Loren Estleman’s Detroit—not to mention Dickens’ London and Hugo’s Paris.  I tend, therefore, to take the settings of my novels very seriously—both in terms of significance and accuracy.

In fiction, when a story is set in a real and specific city—be it San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York—I believe the accuracy of the locale needs to be non-fictional.  Geography is sacred.  Readers are willing to suspend belief to a great extent—but if you have two characters meeting at the corner of Coney Island Avenue and Ocean Parkway, two streets which never intersect, you will lose a large number of Brooklyn readers very quickly.

When writing places I am not very familiar with—Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Oakland, Chicago—the research is both extensive and educational.  I study maps.  With locations I am more familiar with, having lived in those places or visited many times—San Francisco, Brooklyn, Denver—I rely on recollection but always double-check geography.  In writing Gravesend and Coney Island Avenue, it was a journey back to the places where I had grown from infancy to manhood—re-walking the streets of my past—making certain those streets were represented correctly.

I have also had to do a great deal of research with regard to period.  In the first Jake Diamond novel, Catching Water in a Net set in 2000, Jake turns 40 at the end of the book.  By the time the third in the series was released, set in 2003, Jake was 43.  The fourth book in the series, Circling the Runway, came nearly a dozen years later, 2015, however (since I didn’t wish to have my protagonist pushing 55 years old quite yet) I decided to set the narrative back to 2004.  This required re-familiarization with the sports, music, literature, movies, and other historical events and cultural elements of that year.  It required study.  Similarly, for Chasing Charlie Chan, set in 1994 and flashing back to Hollywood and Las Vegas in the late-forties, I needed to do a great deal of reading about those periods and about the characters in the book who were actual historical figures. In cases like these, research for a novel can be enjoyable—the knowledge gained about the highly successful and prolific Charlie Chan film franchise was fascinating.  Non-fiction books such as The Charlie Chan Film Encyclopedia, Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, We Only Kill Each Other—and many newspaper and magazine articles about Werner Oland, Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, Mickey Cohen, Meyer Lansky—were invaluable and terrifically entertaining.  I was also aided and inspired by the works of James Ellroy—L.A. Confidential and others.

The investigative work of my protagonists—whether private eye Jake Diamond in California or Brooklyn NYPD detectives Samson, Ripley, Senderowitz and Murphy in Gravesend and my latest novel, Coney Island Avenue—tend to be more about intuition, legwork and often luck than about highly scientific forensics.  For that research I tend to go back to reading about true crime investigations from the pre-CSI era.  I also seek out older private and police detectives who recall the good old days of criminal investigation—when being a gumshoe meant hitting the pavement—and who enjoy sharing reminiscence over Scotch.

Although I write predominantly fiction—I am committed to truth and fact when it comes to specific locations, time periods, vernacular and personalities.  Homework is always required—but it is the kind of homework that is challenging, enlightening and, for this writer, a world of fun.  And more fun yet—my next novel will require brushing up on my Italian language skills.

 

Coney Island Justice is available via Down and Out Books and from all major booksellers. You can find more about J.L. Abramo via his website or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

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Media Murder for Monday

Welcome to Monday and the weekly wrap-up of crime drama news:



MOVIES



Sony is picking up the rights to Hunting El Chapo: The Thrilling Inside Story of the American Lawman Who Captures the World’s Most-Wanted Drug Lord, the upcoming book by Cole Merrell and Douglas Century. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is the Sinoloa drug cartel boss who, in addition to being one of the most powerful crime lords of all time, had a knack for escaping his prisons. The project will compete with Fox's thriller, The Cartel, adapted from Don Winslow's fictional take on El Chapo, with Ridley Scott attached to helm. 



Tom Hanks' techno-thriller The Circle will have its much anticipated world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday, April 29. Based on David Eggers’ 2013 novel of the same name, The Circle examines how perilous it is for technology companies to know everything about you at all times.



The STX action thriller Den of Thieves starring Gerard Butler and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson will be released on Jan. 19, 2018. The movie will also star Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and Evan Jones, directed by Christian Gudegast from his original screenplay written with Paul Scheuring. The project follows an elite crew of bank robbers who set out to pull off the ultimate heist when they realize $120 million in cash is taken out out of circulation daily and destroyed by the Federal Reserve.



TELEVISION



Jonathan Kellerman’s best-selling Alex Delaware novels will be adapted as a TV series by IDW Entertainment. Launched in 1985 with When the Bough Breaks, the novels follow Alex Delaware, a forensic psychologist who works with the LAPD to assist in solving murder cases. His partner in crime, Milo Sturgis, is a gay homicide detective, which has prompted praise from mainstream critics and the LGBT community for creating realistic and developed characters.



A second series of the award-winning spy drama The Night Manager is in development, according to director Susanne Bier. Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman starred in the BBC One thriller based on John le Carre's 1993 novel, but there is no word yet on their return for the follow-up. Although the book doesn't have a sequel, Susanne Bier, who won an Emmy for directing the first series, said that scripts for a second installment were being developed by "a team of writers," and BBC TV chief Charlotte Moore told The Telegraph that "Le Carre is very involved" in discussions about the next series. 



House of Lies alum Larenz Tate is set as the male lead opposite Allison Miller in the ABC drama pilot Salamander. The story centers on Ethan (Tate), a brilliant but misanthropic engineer who recruits a skeptical Homeland Security psychiatrist, Nora (Miller) to help him track a mysterious bank robber whose theft of 66 safety deposit boxes sets in motion a series of blackmails that might be linked to a greater conspiracy. South African actor Neil Sandilands will play Jack, a domestic terrorist of sorts, while John Leguizamo will co-star as an ex-cop and one of Ethan’s best friends.



Shudder, the premium streaming service backed by AMC Networks, has acquired the Scandi-noir drama Jordskott from ITV Studios Global Entertainment. The first two episodes of Season 1 will launch April 6, with two new episodes premiering each week thereafter. The 10-episode first season focuses on the seven-year disappearance of police investigator Eva Thörnblad’s (Moa Gammel) daughter, Josefine.



Patricia Clarkson is set to co-star in Gillian Flynn’s drama Sharp Objects for HBO. The straight-to-series eight-episode drama centers on reporter Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) who returns to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. Eventually, she finds herself identifying with the girls too much. Clarkson will play Adora Crellin, Camille’s mother, and queen of Wind Gap’s highest society. 



Hal Holbrook is heading to Hawaii to guest-star on an upcoming episode of Hawaii Five-0. He'll play a veteran who served in the military with Steve McGarrett's (Alex O'Loughlin) grandfather and survived the bombing of the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.



Sleepy Hollow alum Lance Gross has booked a series regular role opposite Meaghan Rath in The Trustee, ABC’s dramedy described as "a fun, female buddy cop comedy" about Eliza Radley, a driven but stubborn detective who finds unlikely help from her precinct’s trustee, a larger-than-life ex-con finishing out her prison sentence doing menial tasks for the police department. Gross will play police detective J.D. Hayes, a colleague and love interest of Radley.



Bobby Cannavale is joining the cast of USA Network’s Mr. Robot, while longstanding guest star B.D. Wong will be a series regular when the show returns sometime in October. Cannavale will play the the role of "Irving, described as a “laconic, no-nonsense used car salesman," and Wong continues his role as Whiterose, leader of the Dark Army hacker collective backed by China.



Erin Moriarty will take on a key role in Fox’s untitled university thriller drama pilot (formerly known as Controversy), joining Archie Panjabi, Austin Stowell, and Rita Wilson in the cast. The project tackles the hot-button topic of college campus sexual crimes, with Moriarty playing a co-ed who accuses several star football players of assault.



USA Network has found its actors to play Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. in the upcoming pilot Unsolved: The Murders of Biggie and Tupac. Marcc Rose (Shakur in Straight Outta Compton) will take on the role of Tupac, while Wavvy Jonez, who was discovered during a nationwide open casting call, will play Biggie Smalls. The drama is based on the experiences of former LAPD detective Kading, who is consulting on the pilot script and will also serve as co-executive producer.



Roslyn Ruff is set for a series-regular role opposite Reba McEntire in ABC’s untitled Marc Cherry drama pilot from ABC Studios. The project stars McEntire as Ruby Adair, the sheriff of colorful small town Oxblood, KY, who finds her red-state outlook challenged when a young FBI agent of Middle Eastern descent is sent to help her solve a horrific crime. Ruff will play Inez Winemiller, a jolly church lady who runs the local bed and breakfast.



CBS has punted (for now) the untitled Paul Attanasio Latino cop family drama pilot, executive produced by Leonard Goldberg, for "casting reasons." Written by Homicide creator Attanasio, the drama revolves around the multi-generational members of a Mexican-American family with deep roots in San Diego intertwine personally and professionally due to their powerful careers in law enforcement. 



Ewan McGregor is almost unrecognizable in the trailer for the third season of Noah Hawley's anthology series Fargo, which returns in April. McGregor will play the dual roles of twin brothers whose lives are turned upside down because of their twisted sibling rivalry that leads to petty theft and even murder.



PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO



Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomed Allison Brennan to the studio to discuss her two series—the Lucy Kincaid/Sean Rogan thrillers and the Maxine Revere cold case mysteries.



Hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste, of the Two Crime Writers and Microphone podcast, discussed censorship, World Book Day, writing, and more and also welcomed special guest Daniel Cole, who talked about his novel Ragdoll.



Beyond the Covers snagged author Alan Jacobson to discuss his latest thriller featuring esteemed FBI profiler Karen Vail who's on the hunt for an escaped serial killer.



Noir on the Radio host Greg Barth welcomed crime fiction author Chris Roy, who has a unique take on crime as a currently-imprisoned author. Independent publishers New Pulp Press signed Chris for his novel Sharp as a Razor in late 2016 and later that same year also picked up his Shocking Circumstances trilogy. 



THEATER



Tony Award-winning 59 Productions (An American in Paris, War Horse) and writer Duncan Macmillan are bringing Paul Auster's seminal American novel City of Glass to life in the world premiere stage adaptation at Manchester's Home Theater. The story follows reclusive crime writer Daniel Quinn who receives a mysterious call seeking a private detective in the middle of the night and quickly and unwittingly becomes the protagonist in a thriller of his own. The production continues at The Home through March 18 before moving on to the Lyric Hammersmith, 20 April-20 May



GAMES



Late Shift: A Cinematic FMV Crime Thriller is headed to PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The setup: after being forced into the robbery of a lucrative auction house, mathematics student Matt is left proving his innocence in the brutal London heist. The consequences of his actions take him on a vicious and violent journey across the capital, escaping the twisted web the player has the power to weave.

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Your Sunday Music Treat

Hazel Dorothy Scott (1920-1981) was a Trinidadian-born pianist (a child musical prodigy who at only eight years old was given a scholarship from the Juilliard School of Music to be privately tutored) and a singer who also performed as herself in several films. A lifelong outspoken advocate for civil rights, she became the first person of color to have a TV show, The Hazel Scott show, in 1950. Here's a clip of her playing "Black and White" on two grand pianos from the film The Heat's On:

 

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Quote of the Week

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FFB: Trent's Own Case

Edmund Clerihew "E.C." Bentley (1875-1956) was an early 20th-century popular English novelist and humorist who's also credited with being the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. His 1913 detective novel Trent's Last Case was well-received, numbering Dorothy L. Sayers among its admirers, and its tricky plotting has led some to label it as the"first truly modern mystery." It was adapted as a film in 1920, 1929, and 1952.



Despite its title, Trent's Last Case was actually the first novel in which artist and gentleman sleuth Philip Trent appears, and after collecting all the evidence and coming to all the wrong conclusions, he vows he will never again attempt to dabble in crime detection. That was not to be the case, however, followed by a book of short stories, Trent intervenes, and finally Trent's Own Case, a sequel of sorts that was published twenty-three years after the original in 1936 (co-written with H. Warner Allen).



When the first book appeared, Trent was a breath of fresh air in the early Edwardian era but by the time the sequel appeared, the Golden Age era of crime novels was in full swing with books from the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, John Dickson Carr and many more. So, perhaps it was something to be expected that Trent's Own Case would begin to feel less path-breaking and more ordinary.



In this outing, the murder of a sadistic philanthropist sparks off an elaborate investigation led by Trent, who'd been painting the portrait of the man before he was killed. When a friend of Trent's confesses to the murder and tries to commit suicide, Trent comes out of retirement and offers to assist his police friend, Inspector Bligh. with the investigation. After a meandering investigation that finds Trent visiting France, two subsequent murders, and the disappearance of an actress, Trent finally solves the mystery and nails the guilty culprit.



Reviewer Mike Grost once said of the book, "This novel is full of many little subsidiary mysteries, each lasting a chapter or two, and each focusing on a new cast of characters. It gives the work as a whole the feel of a short story collection, or a loosely linked short story sequence à la The Arabian Nights." Bentley (and Allen) seem to have absorbed and "repurposed" bits from the new influencers of the genre such as Sayers and Freeman Wills Croft. It is also a book of its time, containing references that are considered offensive to many modern audiences, including racism and sexism.



As a side note, from 1936 until 1949 Bentley was president of the Detection Club and also contributed to two crime stories for the club's radio serials broadcast in 1930 and 1931 (later published in 1983 as The Scoop and Behind The Screen). In 1950 he contributed the introduction to a Constable & Co omnibus edition of Damon Runyon's "stories of the bandits of Broadway", which was republished by Penguin Books in 1990 as On Broadway.

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Mystery Melange

Barnes & Noble announced that Abby Geni’s The Lightkeepers, "a sublime debut novel about a young woman who finds herself at the center of a murder mystery on a remote island," was the winner of the 2016 Discover Award for fiction, a prize that carries with it $30,000 and a full year of marketing and merchandising support from the bookseller.



English teacher Claire McFall took home the inaugural Scottish teenage book prize for her YA thriller Black Cairn Point, set in Dumfries and Galloway. Teenagers across the country voted for her book in the prize that was set up by the Scottish Book Trust with support from Creative Scotland to  encourage teens to actively celebrate the books they love. McFall's Ferryman previously won the Older Readers Category of the Scottish Children's Book Awards 2013 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.



Melbourne, Australia's first Noir at the Bar event is heading down under on March 28 at the Grub Street Bookshop. Organizers Andrew Nette and Iain Ryan will be joined by Kat Clay, Liam Jose, Leigh Redhead, Jock Serong and Emma Viskic for readings from the noir fiction stylists "and drinks in a cool establishment."



Tuesday, April 25 at City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco, can catch Oakland Noir, a panel moderated by Eddie Muller a.k.a. the "Czar of Noir" and Jerry Thompson and featuring authors Kim Addonizio, Nick Petrulakis, Jamie DeWolf, Joe Loya. The panel celebrates the new crime fiction anthology from Akashic Books on the topic, continuing the publisher's "city noir" series with each story is a particular anthology set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.



The third annual Independent Bookstore Day this year will take place on Saturday, April 29, with 457 stores from around the country participating. Organizers of the event are offering bookstores promotional literary items, and each store will also have its own listing of special guests, author signings, live music, cupcakes, scavenger hunts, kids events, art tables, readings, barbecues, contests more. For participating stores near you, check out this map from the official website. (HT to Shelf Awareness)



The latest issue of Suspense Magazine has interviews with Patricia Cornwell, James Rollins, Mark Greaney, Matt Hilton, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Carey Baldwin, Kelly Parsons, and debut author Mikel Santiago. Jon Land also talks about writing fiction and there is the usual lineup of review galore.



From Sandra Seamans comes news that Rick Ollerman will be launching a new digest-sized magazine this summer called DOWN & OUT: The Magazine. The first issue features a new Moe Prager story by Reed Farrel Coleman and the second a new Sheriff Dan Rhodes story by Bill Crider. It's always a pleasure to welcome a new venue for short crime fiction to the scene, and we wish the endeavor all the best. You can check out the placeholder website link here.



On the other end of the spectrum, The Bookseller reported that subscribers of the quarterly Crime Scene Magazine were told the publication is shutting down. Established only in 2015, the magazine devoted to crime TV, film and books was available in print and digital forms and featured previews and reviews, interviews, features, and on set-reports, all in an eye-catching format.



The UK's National Railway Museum opens a free new exhibition trail March 23 through September 3 titled The Missing Passenger. Participants can unearth the clues on platforms 5 and 6 in this mysterious railway crime scene, unpick motives, and reach the final conclusion of this curious whodunnit. To celebrate, the museum is offering the chance for UK residents to win afternoon Champagne Tea for Two in the Countess of York at the National Railway Museum, plus a stay at the Novotel York Central.



Northern Illinois University is using grant money to digitize a large collection of dime novels, the popular format of short works from the 19th century, and are making them available online for browsing. Titles include the Nick Carter detective series, the James Brady detective series, and the New York Detective Library. (HT to Bill Crider)



Do you like your crime fiction on the cozy side? Then, you should check out this list of the "Top 10 Cozy Mystery Blogs."



Love that old book smell? A Columbia University preservation expert and a curator at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan have created "an unusual poetic-scientific experiment in the little-visited olfactory wing of history, trying to pin down the powerful connection between smell and memory." Part of their efforts to convey a sense of the building’s history beyond just its look and feel is to replicate the aromas inside the personal book vault of John Pierpont Morgan, the financier and collector who built the library in 1906.



The New Yorker had a little fun with a tongue-in-cheek look at "Mystery Novels Inspired by a Co-Working Space."

 

This week's featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "Twenty-Seven" by Lisa Olsson.



In the Q&A roundup, Criminal Element sat down with Eliot Pattison, author of The Skeleton God, the ninth Inspector Shan mystery; the Mystery People welcomed David Joy to talk about his new novel The Weight Of This World, which continues the "rural noir" theme of his debut novel, Where All Light Tends to Go; the MP gang also interviewed Tim Dorsey, known for his mischievous characters and their bizarre adventures, including his latest Florida-based book, Clownfish Blues; and Craig Sisterson snagged Brad Parks (the only author to have won the Nero, Shamus, and Lefty awards for crime writing) for an interview over on the Crime Watch blog.

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