B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 218

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Mystery Of The Hidden Room

It is rare that I can't dig up something on an author for a Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature. I came across a book online by Marion Harvey, who was reported to have been born in 1900. There aren't any biographies or obituaries as near as I can tell, but due to early publication information and some performance data, the author appears to be American and the author of several mystery novels and plays, including:

The Mystery of the Hidden Room (Grosset & Dunlap, 1922)
The Vengeance of the Ivory Skull  (Grosset & Dunlap, 1923)
The Clue of the Clock (E.J. Clode, Inc., 1929)
The Inner Circle. A Mystery Thriller in Three Acts (New York 1930)
Footsteps: A Breath-taking Mystery Play by Marion Harvey & Nancy Bancroft Brosius (Fitzgerald Pub., 1931)
The Dragon of Lung Wang (London, 1934)
Alias the Eagle (Wright & Brown, 1934)
The House of Seclusion (London, 1935)
The Arden Mystery (London, 1935)

At least three of these works, Hidden Room, Ivory Skull, and Inner Circle, feature Graydon McKelvie, a Sherlock Holmes-worshipping detective. In addition to noting that the criminal device employed in Hidden Room is noteworthy,  SS Van Dine once noted (in The Great Detective Stories, 1927), "The deductive work done by Graydon McKelvie is at times extremely clever."

The Mystery Of The Hidden Room is told from the viewpoint of Carlton Davies, whose former fiancee Ruth Darwin was blackmailed into leaving him by the man she ultimately married, powerful banker Phillip Darwin. When the husband is murdered and Carlton finds Ruth standing over him with a gun in her hand one night, she is promptly arrested, tried, and packed off to prison.

Carlton never lost his love for Ruth and is steadfast in believing her innocent of the crime, but the New York City police don't share his convictions. He decides to do his own investigating, but since his butler happens to work with Graydon McKelvie, Carlton begs for McKelvie's help, and the chase is afoot. It doesn't take long for McKelvie to learn that practically no one involved with the case is being honest about their activities on the fatal night and several of the bit players are AWOL.

The hidden room of the title makes its appearance relatively early in the story, thus it's not much of a spoiler for it to be headlined in the title. The room in which Darwin was killed appears to be a locked room scenario, with burglar alarms on the windows, but even after the secret room is discovered, there remain many mysteries to solve, including a stoneless ring, a new Will naming a mystery woman as the beneficiary, Darwin's missing nephew, and puzzling sachets sprinkled along the investigative trail. McKelvie also has to solve the mystery of a second bullet that can't be found and a lamp that seems to turn on by itself.

Harvey's writing is de rigueur for her day, with dialog tags now considered passe and a bit comical ("'Well, I'll be hanged!' I ejaculated"), and hints of racism regarding a black servant and some "chink" goons. But the story runs along at a relatively jaunty clip and, although the eventual culprit isn't a huge surprise if you've been paying attention, the journey to the unveiling is entertaining.

If anyone can find more biographical details about this mystery (and I mean that literally) author, please feel free to add them. I did find newpaper accounts of Harvey's plays being performed in New York, Alabama and Pennsylvania in the 1930s, but very little details beyond 1935.

Mystery Melange

Book sculpture by Brian Dettmer


The shortlists for the remaining three 2013 Crime Writers Association Dagger Awards were announced last week. Finalists for the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year include Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer; The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes; Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman; and Dead Lions by Mick Herron. Check out the CWA website for all the categories and nominees.

Sisters in Crime Australia also announced the winners of its annual Davitt Awards for excellent in crime fiction. Mad Men, Bad Girls and the Guerilla Knitters Institute, by Maggie Groff, won in both the Best Adult Novel and Best Debut Novel categories. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)


Crime fiction author Sophie Hannah has been tapped to write a new Agatha Christie novel
featuring the author's famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The book has been fully authorized by the Christie estate and will be published by HarperCollins
in September 2014. It is the first ever Christie "continuation" novel
to be written.


Mike Ripley is back with his latest "Getting Away with Murder" column for Shots Ezine. He has a wrap-up of the recent Crime Fest in the UK where he lead the opening session, and also offers a remembrance of the late Elmore Leonard in addition to all the usual entertaining crime fiction reviews and news.

ThugLit is out with its latest issue for Kindle. Editor Todd Robinson has rounded up crime fiction stories from Joe Clifford, Edward Hagelstein, Christopher E. Long, Marie S. Crosswell, Justin Ordonez , Ed Kurtz , Benjamin Welton, and Michael Sears.

The 5-2's latest crime poem offering is "On Hearing the Supreme Court's Ruling Against the Voting Rights Act," by Robert Cooperman. Beat to a Pulp's weekly feature is a little different, three poems from Kyle J. Knapp, who passed away in June at the age of 24. Proceeds from a collection of his poetry available via Amazon will go to Kyle's family and Tompkins Cortland Community College.

Chris Rhatigan, editor of the ezine All Due Respect, announced that ADR is changing to a quarterly ebook and print magazine published by Full Dark City Press, and will start paying authors. (Hat tip to Kevin Tipple.)

Karin Slaughter will be the next featured guest of the Center for Fiction Masters Program in New York, talking about her craft, her
new novel Unseen, and the elements that have made her one of the most
successful thriller writers today. Details about ticket information for the event on September 11 are available via the CFA's website.

The Q&A this week includes Louise Penny, chatting with BocaRaton Magazine about her latest book, How the Light Gets In; Karen Charlton joins Scene of the Crime to discuss her new novel, The Missing Heiress; Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Short Interview" is Nick Quantrill about his latest private eye novel, Crooked Beat; and Reed Farrel Coleman chats about writing with Robb Cddigan.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Vincent Cassel (Black Swan, Ocean’s Twelve) is taking over as a last-minute replacement for Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Soviet thriller Child 44, based on Tom Rob Smith's bestseller. The cast also includes Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman, and Joel Kinnaman in the story of a military cop investigating a series of child murders in 1950s Stalinist Russia.

Rachel Brosnahan (who played a call girl on Netflix's House of Cards) has signed to star in the indie movie The Sainthood of Bethany Wolfe. Brosnahan takes on the character of a young girl who was taken in by a priest after losing her parents in a bloody murder-suicide but grows up to be a contract killer.

Matt Damon is in preliminary talks to direct The Foreigner for Paramount, which would be the actor's directing debut. The project is based on a New Yorker article by David Grann (with a script by Oscar-winning Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio), and details corruption and high-level murders in
Guatemala that reached all the way to the country's president.

TELEVISION

A&E has decided to renew Longmire, the crime drama based on the novels by Craig Johnson. Unfortunately for fans of  The Glades, the network is canceling that show, which starrred Matt Passmore as a Chicago detective who took a South Florida job with FLDE.

JJ Abrams and HBO are developing a TV adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel Westworld (which was previously made into a film starring Yul Brenner). The sci-fi thriller is based in a futuristic amusement park where humans interact safely with androids, until a power glitch causes the androids to run amok.

Omnimystery News reported that Lionsgate and Munich-based Tandem Communications are teaming up to develop drama series for US and Europe markets. The first such project is Sex, Lies and Handwriting, a crime drama based on a book by Michelle Dresbold and featuring a handwriting expert drawn into solving crimes based on the use of her expertise.

Two Tony-award winners are headed to TV crime dramas for guest stints. Laura Osnes, currently starring in the title role of Broadway's Cinderella, will appear on an upcoming episode of the CBS drama series Elementary; and Sutton Foster will join USA's Psych season finale, titled "A Nightmare on State Street."

FX Networks has ordered a pilot based on a character created by crime novelist Charles Willeford. The show is titled Hoke and stars Paul Giamatti stars as Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley. Screenwriter Scott Frank (Minority Report, Get Shorty) is adapting the novel for the small screen. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Former Chuck executive producer Matt Miller and former Chuck writer Zev Borow have sold the cop/family drama Bad Guys to Fox. The show is about an NYPD detective and a single mom raising a
teenage son, and her recently paroled ex-con father who
wants a second chance with his daughter and grandson.

Lisa Kudrow is joining Scandal, Shonda Rhimes' Washington, D.C. drama series for ABC, playing a politician.

Cinemax is close to placing a pilot deal for the gangster drama Blanco, about an uptown gangster who uses his status as a confidential informant to
turn the tables on law enforcement and build his criminal empire.

Steve Lewis of The Mystery File, posted a cheat sheet listing of mysteries, crime dramas, horror and fantasy shows for the upcoming 2013-2014 season.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

It's a Crime radio, hosted by Margaret McLean, welcomed former homicide detective Derek Pacifico, talking about the laws of search seizure.

THEATER

Vertigo Mystery Theatre will stage Gaslight in The Playhouse at The Vertigo Theatre Centre, Calgary, Alberta, January 31 through February 24. The mystery play (a/k/a Angel Street) was written in 1938 by PatRick Hamilton and was adapted into a 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton and Angela Lansbury in her on-screen debut.

Troubled Daughters

 

Blogger, journalist and crime fiction reviewer Sarah Weinman has edited a new anthology published just this past week, titled Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. Weinman selected 14 stories by women authors from the 1940s through the mid-1970s who helped create the domestic suspense genre and paved the way for writers like Gillian Flynn, Tana French and Sue Grafton. Weinman offered up a Q&A about the anthology and the inspiration behind it: 

Q: What inspired you to compile this
anthology? Were you working on it before the big splash created by GONE GIRL?

A: TROUBLED DAUGHTERS emerged from an essay I wrote for the literary
magazine Tin House. I'd been approached by an editor there to write something
for their themed "The Mysterious" issue, and I'd long contemplated
why it seemed that a fair number of female crime writers working around or
after World War II through the mid-1970s weren't really part of the larger
critical conversation. They weren't hard boiled per se, but they weren't
out-and-out cozy, either. Hammett and Chandler and Cain, yes; but why not Marie
Belloc Lowndes and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Vera Caspary? Why Ross
Macdonald but not his wife, Margaret Millar, who published books before he did
and garnered critical and commercial acclaim first? I knew after writing the
essay that I wasn't done with the subject, and when I had lunch with an editor
at Penguin on an unrelated matter and started going on, rather
enthusiastically, about this widespread neglect, he said, "sounds like
there's an anthology in this. Why don't you send me a proposal?" It took a
while to organize, but eventually I did, and Penguin bought the anthology.
Publishing being what it is, it's taken a little less than two years from
acquisition to release date.

To answer your other question, I had
just started putting the anthology together when it became clear that GONE GIRL
was going to be a massive hit, and that I had a very easy one-sentence pitch
for TROUBLED DAUGHTERS: “If you loved GONE GIRL, here's an entire generation of
writers who helped make that book possible, and who deserve to be rescued from
the shadows.” Flynn clearly tapped into contemporary anxieties about marriage, identity,
high expectations, and whether we can really be true to ourselves and the ones
we profess to love. So it's fascinating to explore an earlier time when many of
the very same anxieties women had manifested itself, even as the very concept
of independent womanhood was perceived to be a great threat.

Q: What is “domestic suspense”? What relationship does it
have to other kinds of crime fiction?

A: Domestic
suspense is a catch-all term for work largely published by women and describing
the plight of women -- wives, daughters, the elderly, spinsters, the
underserved, the overlooked, and many other phrases used then but thankfully,
not so much now -- as World War II was coming to a close and the feminist
movement dawned. Without domestic suspense you couldn't have contemporary
psychological suspense. Conversely, the work of people like Gillian Flynn,
Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Sophie Hannah, Tana French, and many more would
not be possible without the likes of Hughes, Jackson, Millar, Highsmith, and --
though not included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS for reasons outside the scope
of this interview -- Ruth Rendell, Mary Higgins Clark, Mignon Eberhart, and
more.

Q: Which one of the authors in your
collection would you like to see get more credit?

A: Bear in mind my answer will change
daily, but right now, I'll say Joyce Harrington. She won an Edgar Award for her
very first short story – “The Purple Shroud”, included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS – but she spent most of the 70s and 80s writing
stories of equal if not greater excellence. Harrington also published three
novels: No One Knows My Name (1981),
set in a summer stock theater troupe; Family
Reunion (1982), a very creepy Southern Gothic with quite the toxic family;
and Dreemz of the Night (1987), a
terrific mystery set in the then-contemporary New York City graffiti world. I
love that book of hers the best because of the window it unexpectedly opened on
a nearly unrecognizable version of the five boroughs.

Q: What was the first domestic suspense
you ever read?

Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are The Children?, back in
eleventh grade. That book scared the hell out of me, and only later did I
realize what a pivotal book that was.

Q: What is the difference between
“classic” domestic suspense and the writing of the new generation (Megan
Abbott, Laura Lippman, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, etc.)?

A: Largely the sensibility afforded by
contemporary times. But there are many more similarities. For example, Lippman’s
most recent novel, And When She Was Good,
was about a suburban madam, and the way in which the suspense unfolded and she
depicted Heloise’s nose for business and growing internal tensions could have
been written by Margaret Millar sixty years ago (albeit with more dated
references to technology.) When I first read Megan Abbott I thought immediately
of Dorothy Hughes’ In A Lonely Place.
The DNA of so many of these earlier writers inserted themselves into those
writing today, whether they realize it consciously.

Q: Do you think women write better
domestic suspense? If so, why or why not?

A: I'm a big fan of Harlan Coben and
Linwood Barclay’s work, both of whom certainly work in the domestic suspense
field. Ira Levin’s books work so well because he knew exactly what domestic
anxiety buttons to push – Rosemary’s Baby
and The Stepford Wives absolutely
count as domestic suspense (and, to a certain extent, A Kiss Before Dying.) That said, women are still struggling with
the work/life balance, if I may drop in some cliches like “having it all” or
“leaning in.” So there are more of them exploring these themes in a fictional
universe, and that means more of them are doing so with great success and
acclaim. I'd like to see more men write domestic thrillers and more women write
traditionally “male” subgenres so that we can blur the lines once and for all.
But forty, fifty, sixty years ago, there weren't as many options.

Q: You mention in your intro to TROUBLED
DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES that the World Wars, particularly WWII, shaped the
lives of domestic suspense writers, and consequently, what they wrote. Is there
a similar “seismic event” that might have shaped the new domestic suspense, in
your opinion?

A: I think these forces were at work
already, but I hope that, twenty years or later from now, someone looks back at
the current generation of women writers and edits a fabulous anthology
explaining just how much the 2008 Great Recession changed everything. Which is
to say, I think it did, and we still don't know by how much.

Q:
If this kind of fiction grew out of post-war culture, particularly the
idealization of women’s role in the domestic sphere and the anxieties and
yearnings hidden behind that glossy picture of the happy home, is there
anything analogous being written today?

A: Would that these anxieties could
disappear entirely! But it’s pretty clear that any day’s headlines shows how
far we still have to go. (Case in point: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.) I do think it’s why Gone
Girl was such a massive hit, and why publishers are now on the hunt for
that “next Gone Girl” (best current
candidate: ASA Harrison's debut The
Silent Wife, just published as I write this, and released more than two
months after her premature death from cancer.) Now we have domestic suspense
mixed with the anxieties associated with technology, and there's a great deal
of terrain to explore there. I also don’t want to exclude men unduly here; Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay
also write very gripping domestic suspense tales.

Q:
At your companion website, domesticsuspense.com,
the tagline is “celebrating an overlooked generation of female suspense
writers.” Why have they been overlooked? What influence do you think these
women writers had, both on the genre and on culture as a whole?

 A: The author Tom
Bissell wrote an excellent essay for the Boston Review back in 2000 about his
time as an assistant editor at Norton, discovering, and then republishing, the
work of Paula Fox, and the tremendous responsibility (and related fear) of
being responsible for a writer's renaissance. Fate has a tendency to be cruel
and quixotic about who merits posthumous recognition and who does not. I feel
much the same way about the 14 writers included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS.
So many of them won or were nominated for awards (like the Edgar), sold many
thousands of copies, and were well-reviewed. But it's hard not to think that
because their subjects were primarily "feminine" and
"domestic" they weren't taken as seriously as the men, even though in
many cases, the women wrote with less sentimentality and more subtlety.

Some of the
writers included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, like Patricia Highsmith and
Shirley Jackson, may not need my editorial assistance. But looking at
Highsmith’s first-published short story "The Heroine" or Jackson's "Louisa,
Please Come Home" in the broader context of what was going on over this
three-decade period is what's key, as is seeing the importance of domestic
concerns to female noir giants like Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and
Margaret Millar.

What I really
hope is that the anthology allows readers to sample and be introduced to
writers who have fallen by the proverbial wayside. Raymond Chandler held up
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding up as his equal. Helen Nielsen is something of an
enigma to me, but “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree” demonstrates the anxiety of
being the other woman-turned-new wife and how it never recedes.  Nedra
Tyre was both an avid mystery fan  and passionate about social justice and
the poor, stemming from a previous life as a social worker; it’s why “A Nice
Place to Stay” packs the punch it does. Barbara Callahan never published a
novel during her lifetime, but "Lavender Lady", published early in
her career, has the sense of depth and feeling of an experienced practitioner
of prose and of emotional stakes.

For more more information about the book, the included authors, promotional events and ordering details, check out the anthology's official website.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Black Caesar's Clan: A Florida Mystery Story

Albert Payson Terhune (1872–1942) had several careers, eventually settling into journalism and writing. He and his wife also bred collies at their Sunnybank Kennels in  New Jersey, and Terhune based most of his writing in the 1920s and 30s on dogs. His first published works were short stories in magazines about his collie Lad, and he collected a dozen stories into the novel Lad: A Dog. That 1919 work has been reprinted over 80 times and was made into a feature film in 1962.

Although not known for writing mysteries, he did pen the novel Black Caesar's Clan: A Florida Mystery Story, published in 1922. The title comes from the 18th century African pirate Black Caesar, who raided ships around the Florida Keys and served as a chief lieutenant for Captain Blackbeard. One of the only surviving crew from Lieutenant Robert Maynard's attack on Blackbeard in 1718, Caesar established a base on Elliot Key.

Terhune's novel is set in and around what is now known as Caesar's Creek, where the descendants of Caesar and his crew chase off treasure hunters looking for Caesar's lost fortune. It was part of a wave of treasure-hunting fiction around the Great Depression, when desperate times called for desperature measures. The plot starts off with a fight between Gavin Brice and a beachcomber over a homeless collie (yes, this wouldn't be a Terhune novel without a collie).

Gavin Brice at first appears to be a down-on-his-luck transplant to Florida looking for work. However, he has a hidden agenda for "accidentally" getting himself attached to the shady Rodney Hade and his employee Milo Standish (defending him from an attack with his 'jui-jutsu' skills), in their hideaway plantation. Brice is close to succeeding in his quest until the innocence of Milo's younger sister, Claire, makes him question the secrets he's been hiding.

Terhune infuses his tale with quite a bit of humor, including this statement by Brice to a young woman who pulled a gun on him in a case of mistaken identity:

"Oh, please don't feel sorry for that!" he begged. "It wasn't
really as deadly as you made it seem. That is an old style
revolver, you see, vintage of 1880 or thereabouts, I should
say. Not a self-cocker. And, you'll notice it isn't cocked.
So, even if you had stuck to your lethal threat and had pulled
the trigger ever so hard, I'd still be more or less alive.
You'll excuse me for mentioning it," he ended in apology,
noting her crestfallen air. "Any novice in the art of slaying
might have done the same thing. Shooting people is an
accomplishment that improves with practice."

Terhune apparently was conflicted about the mystery genre, as indicated in his Foreword where he talks about "mystery and romance and thrills to be found lurking among the keys and back of the mangrove-swamps and along the mystic reaches of sunset shoreline," but then adds, "Understand, please, that this book is rank melodrama. It has scant literary quality. It is not planned to edify. Its only mission is to entertain you and—if you belong to the action-loving majority—to give you an occasional thrill."

Terhune is sometimes criticized by contemporary critics for his racist depictions of minorities and "half-breeds." In Black Caesar, Brice even refers to his former Japanese martial arts instructor as "monkey faced." But Terhune was a product of his time, and still has many fans of his dog-based stories, while Sunnybank, the estate he shared with his wife and Lad and all the other Collies he raised and trained, is now a state literary monument attracting thousands of visitors each year.

Mystery Melange

 

Book sculpture by Brian Dettmer


This year's Killer Nashville Conference wrapped up with a dinner where the annual awards were handed out. Congratulations to Sara J. Henry upon winning the Silver Falchion Award for best novel of 2012 for A Cold and Lonely Place, and to Terri Coop, who won the Claymore for best unpublished manuscript for Dial 1-Pro-Hac-Vice.

The Pop Culture Nerd announced the winners of his annual Stalker Awards, celebrating the "best" in categories such as "Novel You Shoved Most Often" and "Lead Character You Most Want as Your Friend." For all the stalk-worthy categories, check out the website link above.

The Bloody Scotland conference announced the finalists for the 2013 Short Story Competition. You can read each story on the festival's website and vote for your favorite.

Patti Abbott has another flash fiction challenge on her blog, this one prompted by the headline she spied, "Michigan Man's Tastes Get Him Into Trouble." You are to feel free to change Michigan to whatever state or place you want (meaning the title of every story will be the same except for the locale). Each story should be 1000 words or fewer. If you have a blog, Patti will post the link. If not, she can post the story ro you. The deadline for all links to be posted is September 26th.

This week's Beat to a Pulp featured fiction is "Stringtown Road" from Richard Prosch, and the newest crime poem over at the 5-2 is "Crime Story" by Alan Catlin.

Criminal Element is offering a chance to win the entire 9-book Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson.

Author Cleo Coyle, a regular contributor to Mystery Lovers' Kitchen, offered up her take on how to make your own log peanut butter cookies and paired it up with a contest at Goodreads connected with her Coffeehouse Mystery Series.

This week's Q&A roundup includes Margaret Maron, who is Ed Gorman's latest "Pro-File"; Sheila Quigley is the subject of Paul D. Brazill's Short, Sharp Interview; Ruth Rendell chatting with The Guardian and noting that "a very well-known person once said he threw my book out of a taxi window"; and James Lee Burke was interviewed for Men's Journal about crime, marriage and how one of his manuscripts was rejected 111 times.

If you're big into the photo-sharing world of Instagram, you may be familiar with "selfies," or self-portraits people post via that popular app. One Tumblr blog twisted that concept around and created a page for "bookshelfies," where people can share photos of  themselves and their bookshelves.

 

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

ImageMovers bought film rights to The Execution of Noa P Singleton: A Novel, the best-selling debut by author Elizabeth L. Silver. The plot follows a twenty-something college dropout who sits on death row for murder in Pennsylvania until a powerful attorney, the victim's own mother, tries to get his sentence commuted.

DreamWorks Studios acquired a book proposal by Paul Kix titled Noble Assassin, based on the true story of French aristocrat turned anti-Nazi saboteur Robert de la Rochefoucauld, described as "being James Bond before there was a James Bond."

Olivia Munn (of the Newsroom) is in negotiations to join Johnny Depp in David Koepp's Lionsgate movie Mortdecai, based on Kyril Bonfiglioli's comedic crime novel The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery. The story follows Charlie Mortdecai (Depp), a wealthy art dealer and part-time rogue who often gets himself involved in strange cases of crime and espionage.

Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks will co-star alongside Charlize Theron and Chloe Moretz in Dark Places, the big screen adaptation of Gillian Flynn's best-selling mystery novel. Dark Places is one of two novels by Flynn being adapted for the big screen, along with Gone Girl, which is under the helm of director David Fincher and producer Reese Witherspoon.

Several trailers were released recently for films coming up later this month and in the fall, including the thriller Getaway, in which former race car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) is pitted against the clock trying to save the life of his kidnapped wife; Ridley's Scott's The Counselor, based on a script by Cormac McCarthy about anattorney (Michael Fassbender) who finds himself in over his head after he gets involved with the drug trade; and the crime thriller Mission Park set in San Antonio, TX, where a drug syndicate has taken control of the region. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Here are a couple of publicity stills, one from the upcoming Foxcatcher with Steve Carell, who will take on a new type of role playing a killer, and the other for the WWII thriller The Monuments Men about a platoon sent into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

TELEVISION

As many mourned the death of author Elmore Leonard last week, Graham Yost, the showrunner for FX's Justified (based on a character from one of Leonard's stories), offered up a remembrance.

In more sad news, production on Rizzoli & Isles was shut down following the suicide of cast member Lee Thompson Young, who played the role of Detective Barry Frost. Warner Bros TV and executive producer Janet Tamaro said, "Everyone at Rizzoli & Isles is devastated by the news of the passing of Lee Thompson Young. We are beyond heartbroken at the loss of this sweet, gentle, good-hearted, intelligent man."

Director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) is turning to television with Channel 4 pilot Babylon, said to be a contemporary police drama. BAFTA winners Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong have been hired to pen the script.

ABC has ordered a pilot from Shondaland, that company's fourth project during the current development season. How To Get Away With Murder will be written by by Grey's Anatomy supervising producer Peter Nowalk and is described as a "sexy, suspense-driven legal thriller about a group of ambitious law students and their brilliant, mysterious criminal defense professor who become entangled in a murder plot that will rock their entire university and change the course of their lives."  (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Sylvester Stallone is in talks for a Rambo television series, participating on a "creative level," with a new actor brought in to play the main character.

Marg Helgenberger will return as Catherine Willows for the 300th episode of CSI. The episode will center on a cold case that takes the characters back to the beginning, partly in the form of flashbacks, interspersed with new material.

Fox put in development a secret service dramedy titled Kill Zone, written by Todd Harthan (Psych) and produced by 20th TV. The buddy show is built around "an intense, edgy, humor-laced relationship between Dole Green, a 10-year vet of the Secret Service, and his rookie partner, Chad Burke, as they protect the President of the United States from a very credible death threat."

Melanie Griffith has signed on to play the mother of Danny Williams (Scott Caan) on Hawaii Five-0 for the upcoming season.

The Chicago Fire spin-off, Chicago PD, added Sophia Bush (One Tree Hill) and Patrick Flueger (The 4400) to the cast that already includes Jason Beghe, Jon Seda and Jesse Lee Soffer. The new show will follow the department's Intelligence Unit that combats organized crime, drug trafficking, and high profile murders.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The latest installment of NPR's "Crime in the City" series features author Ben Winters and his apocalyptic novel series based in Concord, NH.

As part of Open Road Media and MysteriousPress.com making the iconic stories from Black Mask available as ebooks, they released a video featuring Mysterious Press' Otto Penzler taking us back to 1920s and the creation of the iconic Black Mask magazine, where mystery greats Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Carroll John Daly got their start.

Jason Matthews, retired CIA officer and debut author of the spy thriller Red Sparrow, joined NPR's Diane Rehm Show to talk about his book and his career.

THEATER

Kenneth Branagh will make his New York stage debut in the U.S. premiere of Rob Ashford and Branagh's staging of Macbeth, featuring Branagh in the title role. The production is scheduled to open in June 2014 at Park Avenue Armory's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall and feature Alex Kingston (River Song in Doctor Who) as Lady Macbeth.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Malcolm Sage, Detective

English author Herbert George Jenkins (1876-1923) spent several years as a journalist and then worked for the publishing company The Bodley Head, before founding Herbert Jenkins Ltd., which published many of P. G. Wodehouse's novels. His most popular fictional creation was the Cockney Mr. Joseph Bindle, who first appeared in a humorous novel in 1916.

Jenkins also wrote a number of short stories about Detective Malcolm Sage, which were collected into one book in 1921. The stories feature Sage, with his bald, conical head, "determined" jaw, and protruding ears, who worked first as an account, but after uncovering shady practices at high levels of the British civil service, he was appointed to the mysterious "Department Z." After the end of the First World War, his old chief from division Z (whose life Sage once saved) set Sage up in his own private detective agency.

Sage has been compared to Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes for his style of detective work, with his methods fairly high tech for the time, using such newfangled tools as telephones, photography, and medical evidence. However, as the detective himself notes, he is often more interested in setting traps for the villain, than in detecting his original crime. Jenkins also doesn't necessarily play fair with the reader, introducing clues at the end that weren't shown during the story.

Mike Grost at GA Detection notes that the techniques and traps Sage uses often involve considerable social comedy. Although Sage is also a bit on the haughty side, his staff of a secretary, an assistant, a chauffeur and an office boy (himself a devout reader of detective fiction) also provide comic foil to Sage's overbearing attitude.

Since the Malcolm Sage, Detective is in the public domain, it's not easy to find in print, but there are several eBook versions you can read online, including Google Books.

Mystery Melange

"Sitting on History" book sculpture by Bill Woodrow


By now, most of you probably know that the great crime fiction author Elmore Leonard died yesterday, at the age of 87. The obits and tributes are pouring in, including those from CNN, the Los Angeles Times , and the New York Times , and there will be plenty more to come. You can also listen to two half-hour-long interviews he had with Don Swaim at the CBS Radio studio in New York, talking about his life, his career, and his books.

Janet Rudolph, edtior of Mystery Readers Journal, put out a call for submissions for an upcoming themed issue, "Murder in Transit." If you have written a mystery that involves transportation—boats, autos, trains, planes, hot air balloons, etc—in some way, consider writing an author! author! essay (first person, 500-1500 words). The deadline is September 15. For more information, check out the journal's website.

The featured poem at the 5-2 this week is "High School Memory" by Casey Zella Moir, while the featured pulp of the week at Beat to a Pulp is "Verbal Warning" from Stephen D. Rogers.

Couldn't make it to St. Hilda's Crime and Mystery Conference in the UK this year? Ayo Onatade over at Shots Magazine has a very nice recap of last Saturday's festivities, including PD James, Frances Fyfield, Martin Edwards, Peter Robinson, Andrew Taylor and Val McDermid.

Hopefully, you're headed for Boucheron 2013 in Albany, which is less than a month away. The schedule was posted last week (on the website or as a PDF) and is packed with enough authorial starpower and intriguing panels to make your head do an Exorcist head spin.

The Q&A roundup this week includes authors Chuck Wendig (who also runs the Terrible Minds blog) and Stephen Blackmoore who visited Whack Magazine for a tongue-firmly-in-cheek interview to answer the kind of sexist questions normally targeted at women; and Dorothy Cannell, best known for her lighthearted traditional mysteries featuring Ellie Haskell and her husband Ben, chats with the Maine Crime Writers. Ed Gorman also has a couple of "Pro-Files" on his website, with Dave Zeltserman and Libby Fischer Hellman.

Another reason to wish we had more extensive train service in the U.S.: UK train operator Virgin Trains is planning a series of highspeed book signings. Travellers will be informed over the on-board announcement system and invited to buy a book before meeting authors including Scandinavian crime writer Jo Nesbo in a book-signing car. Fans can check out schedules via the train company's Facebook page.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Lionsgate has acquired the film rights to Kate Atkinson's stand-alone Life After Life, about a woman and her apparently infinite number of lives and the choices made when you have the chance to live all over again. A pair of TV writers have been tapped to write the script, Semi Chellas of Mad Men and Esta Spalding of The Bridge.

Darren Aronofsky is in early talks to direct Red Sparrow, an adaptation of the Jason Matthews espionage novel, which 20th Century Fox bought after a 7-figure deal. The book was published in June by Scribner.

Although Fox 2000 Pictures has been hoping to adapt a film based on Patricia Cornwell's series character Kay Scarpetta, the possibility looks even more likely now that Cornwell has jumped ship to publisher Harper Collins; both Fox 2000 Pictures and Harper Collins are owned by News Corporation. (Hat tip Omnimystery News.)

Australian actor Sullivan Stapleton (seen in HBO's action series Strike Back) has signed to star in Kill Me Three Times, the Krive Stenders-directed crime thriller described as "a story of murder and blackmail in an Australian surfing town."

Warner Brothers has hired James Gray to write and direct White Devil, the story
of a white orphan adopted into a Chinese family who rises
to the top of the Chinese Mafia in Boston.

TELEVISION

Omnimystery News reported that author Daniel Stashower's novel The Hour of Peril has been optioned for a TV mini-series by The Weinstein Company. No word yet on production details for the project, which tells of a secret plot to murder Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War.

ABC placed a script commitment plus penalty to Limelight, a drama project from writer-playwright Kelly Masterson (Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead). The story follows a murder trial turned into a national media obsession where the lives of everyone involved are thrust into the public spotlight.

ABC won a bidding war for the "high-concept crime drama" project, Forever, from former Chuck executive producer Matthew Miller and Lin Pictures. The premise is focused on Dr. Henry Morgan, a 200-year-old pathology associate who spends his days in the New York City Morgue trying to find a key to unlock the curse of his immortality, while partnering for investigative work with hard-nosed NYPD detective Jo Martinez. As Deadline notes, Forever draws some parallels to the short-lived 2008 Fox series New Amsterdam starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a 400-year-old NYPD homicide detective with a female partner.

In another bidding war, NBC landed The Mysteries Of Laura, based on the popular Spanish series Los Misterios De Laura. It follows the life and relationships of a female homicide detective "who can handle murderous criminals — but not her evil twins."

NBC also ordered a pilot for the prison drama Paradise, based on a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. The story is set in the late 21st century where Las Vegas has been turned into the world's largest maximum-security prison, known as Paradise. A wrongly convicted inmate is desperate to get back to his family and prove his innocence, but first he has to somehow be the first to escape from Paradise.

Lifetime is working on a backdoor pilot from Nicholas Sparks Productions and Warner Horizon Television. The story is set at the end of the Civil War and a woman pushed into becoming an outlaw when a
corrupt bank threatens her family's land.

TNT has renewed four of its summer series including Rizzoli & Isles, Major Crimes, Perception and Falling Skies. All four shows will return for new seasons starting in 2014.

USA announced the fall premiere dates for its shows NCIS: Los Angeles, Covert Affairs and White Collar.

Acorn TV, a streaming service focused on the best of British TV in North America, is adding at least six shows each month, including: the exclusive U.S. premiere of Jack Irish, a new, ongoing detective series starring Guy Pearce (Iron Man 3, Memento), the brooding antihero of Australian writer Peter Temple's award-winning novels; Season 6 of hit period detective series Murdoch Mysteries; the newest episodes of Foyle's War, the day after they premiere on MASTERPIECE Mystery! on PBS; and new episodes from the final series of Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Tana French, author of Broken Harbor, joined NPR's Diane Rehm Show to chat about how she had dreams of becoming an archaeologist and fell into writing by accident.

Sue Grafton was the latest Crime in the City featured author on NPR about her series set in Santa Teresa, a fictional town based on Santa Barbara, California.

Web-only dramas are still in their infancy, but beginning to expand. A case in point are three current series based on the Sherlock Holmes canon, with two more in development. The current shows include No Place Like Homes, which has been around since 2009; The Great Hiatus Years, which envisions Holmes and Irene Adler adventures; and The Mary Morstan Mysteries, a mini-series that follows the tales of the rarely mentioned fiancee and later wife of Dr Watson. Coming up, 221B , with an emphasis on the home-life of the classic "odd couple" and another project yet to be named.

GAMES

The Novelist, a video game that will be available for PCs by the end of the summer, was "created not to satisfy primal bloodlust, but to tell a story about a single family's struggles," in which players guide an author named Dan Kaplan and decide how he will spend his days. Players will get a story that presents the same fundamental question in nine different ways over the course of the game.