B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 242

Nancy Drew is Still a Draw

 

Today at noon at the American Women Writers National Museum, Elizabeth Foxwell will moderate a panel titled "Derring-do and Nancy Drew Us In." The panelists include Leona Fisher,  associate professor emeritus at Georgetown University with a book in progress titled Was Nancy Drew a Girl Scout?; Kathy Harig, owner of Mystery Loves Company bookstore in Oxford, Maryland; and Ann Hudak with the University of Maryland-College Park, who is also the curator of the "Nancy Drew and Friends" exhibition at UMD. According to Foxwell, the panelists will discuss the genesis and enduring appeal of Nancy Drew and other beloved girl sleuths, and some lucky attendees will receive a Nancy Drew door prize.

The UMD exhibition was put together in 2005 to celebrate the 75th year of publishing of Nancy Drew books. It highlights girls' series books in the Rose and Joseph Pagnani Collection in the University of Maryland Libraries, with over 300 books from 33 different series published from 1917 to 1980.  Although Nancy Drew is the star of the exhibit, other series heroines such as Vicki Barr, Sue Barton, Judy Bolton, and the Dana Girls are also included. You can read more via a virtual online display, complete with resources and photos.

 

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Academy Award-winning actor passed away yesterday at the age of 95. He appeared in over 200 films and TV shows over the course of his career. Borgnine was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Screen Actors' Guild in 2011.

The Criminal Element has occasional "Crimes Against Film" reviews by its stable of writers. The latest is "Shoulda Been Called 'Cut My Throat Island'!" by Robert Lewis. Even bad films can have entertainment value.

Spinetingler posted an official trailer for Jack Reacher, the star-vehicle film is based on Lee Child's novels. Fans of the books continue to weigh in, not always in a positive vein.

The producers of Lawless posted an official trailer (actually two, an original and an amended version). The film is set in Franklin Country, Virginia during the Great Depression where a bootlegging gang runs into trouble with gangsters and the law. The all-star cast includes Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jason Calrke, Gary Oldman, Shia LaBeouf, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska

Channing Tatum confirmed that a sequel to 21 Jump Street is in the works. The original movie was a comedy based on the '80s cop drama about two undercover narcs posing as high school students.

TV

TNT's new crime drama Perception debuts tonight at 10 p.m. ET. It revolves around Dr. Daniel Pierce (Eric McCormack), a brilliaint college professor specializing in the brain who is also secretly schizophrenic. Kate Moretti (Rachael Leigh Cook) is an FBI agent and former student who brings him in to consult on special cases. The show is preceded at 9 p.m. by the first of the final six episodes of The Closer. (Hat tip to Ominmystery News.)

BBC America has posted an extended trailer for its new crime drama Copper, with some behind-the-scenes footage.

Netflix continues its development of original programming as it adds Wass Stevens to the its political thriller House Of Cards. Stevens joins Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in the cast. Netflix also added Aaron Douglas (Battlestar Galactica, The Bridge) to the series Hemlock Grove, playing Sheriff Sworn, the local lawman investigating a young girl’s gruesome murder in a Pennsylvania steel town.

PODCASTS

Author Mark Billingham talked with NPR's Linda Wertheimer and shows off some of the places that inspired his dark, twisted thrillers set in London.

CBC Sunday Edition hosted authors Robin Spano, Hilary Davidson, Deryn Collier and Ian Hamilton, who have been participating in a book tour they dubbed, "The Crime Tour: Three Hip Chicks & One Old Fart."

THEATER

Writer-director Stuart Gordon is developing the play Taste for the theatre, based on the true (and gruesome) story of the Rotenburg Cannibal who became famous for killing and eating the willing victim he solicited on the internet. Gordon also has plans to shoot a feature film version after the play's first run.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Monkey Puzzle

(This is a classic "rebroadcast" from January 2011.)

Paula Gosling was born Paula Osius in 1939, the daughter of an inventor in Detroit, Michigan. She tried her hand at poetry at Wayne State University and later at a Detroit advertising agency, but wasn't happy. In 1964, she headed to England in search of romance, intrigue and adventure, eventually meeting her husband, Christopher Gosling, whom she married in 1968.

Although divorced after only nine years of marriage, she kept the Gosling surname as she started writing her books. Perhaps she felt she owed him her literary start, because it was loneliness when he was away working that led her to start writing to pass the time. The result was A Running Duck in 1974, which won the CWA's John Creasey Award for the best first novel of the year and was named in 1990 as one of the CWA's Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.

Many books followed, mostly standalones at first, including one paranormal book penned under the name Ainslie Skinner. Eventually she created her first series, with Detective Chief Inspector Luke Abbot, and another, the Blackwater Bay series, she set near the Great Lakes with Sheriff Matt Gabriel as protagonist. A third series, which she also set in the U.S., was launched in 1985 with Monkey Puzzle, a police procedural centered around homicide Lieutenant Jack Stryker, which won the 1985 CWA Gold Dagger Award.

Money Puzzle takes place primarily around Grantham University in Ohio, when one of the English professors, Aiken Adamson, is murdered and his tongue cut out. The professor was despised by all of his colleagues for collecting and hoarding secrets about them like the human equivalent of a thieving magpie. Hours before his death, all of the department members were with Adamson at a sherry reception, giving each of them opportunity for murder, in addition to the various motives they had—personal and professional rivalries, envy, sexual intrigue and blackmail.

As Detective Stryker digs deeper into the case, he realizes he has secret ties of his own to one of the professors, Kate Trevorne and starts to fall for her, despite the fact her boyfriend and fellow English prof is the prime suspect. Although at first, the murder is considered a crime of passion (the victim was a homosexual), the case soon takes a different turn when the Chairman of the Department is attacked and his ear cut off. Stryker, recovering from pneumonia, is doggedly determined to nail the culprit no matter what it takes, but when Kate is attacked and the murderer attempts to gouge out one of her eyes, the case becomes personal.

Gosling does a good job of portraying the sometimes cut-throat world of academia with its petty squabbles, jockeying for position and inter-departmental feuds. The characters are also relatively well drawn, although some might find a few cliches that date the book, i.e., the sleazy homosexual (complete with mirrors on the ceiling), an alcoholic Vietnam vet and a cop-hating young professor who participated in campus riots in the 70s. The writing carries you along at a suspenseful clip, but it can also show hints of Gosling's poetry background, like this excerpt following a snowfall that is appropriate for the recent winter weather we've been having:

He loved the city like this, hushed and briefly upended in it headlong run to destruction, mantled with a transient beauty that hid all the dirt and slowed all the hate. In two miles he passed only four cars, and the drivers smiled as they edged past one another in the rutted, twinkling streets. The snow made them momentary partners in adversity, witnesses of that fleeting moment in time when nobody had spoiled anything. Yet.

As a side note, Gosling's novel A Running Duck, written in 1974 (also published as Fair Game), was adapted into two separate films, one starring Sylvester Stallone, titled Cobra, and the second starring Cindy Crawford, titled Fair Game. Unfortunately, like a lot of books-to-film, the results were less than Oscar-worthy; the Stallone version was nominated for a Razzie in 1986 for worst screenplay and Metacritic listed the Cindy Crawford flick as one of its five worst movies based on a novel.

Not that Gosling was particularly worried. In a People interview, she noted she had optioned the film to Warner Bros, for a "mid-five-figure" sum and almost forgotten about it when a friend of her son's alerted her to the fact Gosling's name was in the Stallone film' credits. At the time, she said "I haven't really taken it in yet. It's all very exciting."

Everything Old is New Again

The explosive growth of digital books has spurred a lot of interesting trends, both in digital and print. One such trend is that many books previously out of print or with limited print runs are being made available again. Open Road Media is at the forefront of this particular trend, such as their new rerelease of Larry Beinhart’s No One Rides for Free, which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The timely work takes brash, opinionated private eye Tony Cassella into the world of corporate corruption and Wall Street crime. Two of Beinhart's books, Wag the Dog and Salvation Boulevard were made into films, and he received the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award.

The Mysterious Press recently partnered with Open Road Media to release classic crime, mystery and suspense titles in digital reading formats. They've just reissued four of hard-boiled author Joseph Koenig's books in digital form: the Edgar-nominated Floater; Little Odessa; Smugglers Notch and the groundbreaking Brides of Blood, a police procedural set in Islamic Iran.

It's also nice to see publishers taking advantage of new global online book channels to reissue works as paperbacks. Soho Crime just announced it's publishing Stuart Neville's Irish noir Belfast Trilogy  (The Ghosts of Belfast, Collusion, and Stolen Souls), which have won or been nominated for just about every major crime fiction prize. Each book will include new bonus material such as interviews, alternate scenes, never-before-published short stories, and previews of Neville's new series. Plus, the author is undertaking a rare U.S. tour in October, with a stop at Bouchercon. 

Hard Case Crime also comes to mind, with a who's who list among its print reissues, including Harlan Ellison's first novel, Web of the City, and recently discovered unpublished gems from James M. Cain (The Cocktail Waitress) and Donald Westlake (The Comedy is Finished). As an interesting tie-in to the note about Joseph Koenig above, Hard Case Crime will release his newest novel, False Negative, a rollicking mystery about a journalist who, like Koenig once did, writes for true-crime magazines.

There are certainly plenty more where these come from, and if you know of noteworthy upcoming reissues, feel free to post them in the comments or drop me an e-mail.

Happy Independence Day

John Trumbull's painting that hangs in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness....

On Corpses and Cruises

From Ayo Onatade comes a reminder that the Bodies in the Bookshop annual event in Heffers Bookshop Cambridge is being expanded to a full day affair. In addition to rubbing elbows with authors and getting books signed, attendees will be able to enjoy several panels this year, including Crime Through Time discussions about historical mysteries and others on comic crime, traditional mysteries, Scandinavian crime fiction and more.


If you want to combine a writers' conference with a vacation, there's the Fun in the Sun cruise. Although it's sponsored by the Florida Romance Writers organization, the workshops will include Mystery Writing 101 with Nancy Cohen, an address from Keynote Speaker Charlaine Harris, and other discussions about various aspects of writing and publishing. The conference doesn't set sail until January 2013, but you need to reserve a slot by October, and rooms are going fast.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Hugo Weaving, Aaron Pedersen and True Blood actor Ryan Kwanten have been cast in the Australian thriller Mystery Road, written and directed by Ivan Sen. The film is set in an Outback town and follows an indigenous detective who returns home to solve the murder of a teenage girl.

The Sundance Channel and BBC are teaming up to co-produce a made-for-television adaptation of William Boyd's bestselling spy thriller Restless. Boyd wrote the screenplay for the two-part miniseries, which will be directed by Edward Hall. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

CinemaBlend posted a trailer for Richard Gere's star turn in the contemporary thriller Arbitrage that was a hit at the Sundance Festival. Gere plays Robert Miller, a crooked hedge fund magnate who must ally himself with an unlikely partner to save his skin.

True Blood star Stephen Moyer is joining the cast to play prosecutor John Fogelman in Devil's Knot, the feature film about the real-life West Memphis Three. Also recently signed is CSI Miami star Rex Linn, taking on the role of Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell, who led the investigation.

Tommy Lee Jones is apparently going to be joining Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer in Luc Besson's dramedy mob film Malavita. De Niro and Pfeiffer will play the heads of the Manzoni mafia family who enter into a witness protection program in Normandy, while Jones will play a stern FBI agent assigned as the Manzonis' handler to help them adjust to their new lives.

Several studios are circling around Tom Clancy's video game Splinter Cell, which revolves around covert operative Sam Fisher. The six installments of the game have sold 22 million units and spawned several novels.

Dylan McDermott has signed on to the political thriller Olympus Has Fallen about a takeover of the White House (described as "Die Hard in the White House"). The former star of American Horror Story, Dark Blue and The Practice will play a Secret Service agent and joins Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart in the cast.

Here's a trailer to tide you over until the upcoming release of the film Alex Cross, based on James Patterson's homicide detective from his bestselling novels.

TV

The summer crime dramas are doing well. ABC renewed its summer drama Rookie Blue, starring Missy Peregrym and Gregory Smith, for a fourth-season next year. The series follows a group of five rookie cops as they navigate life on the beat. Meanwhile, A&E renewed freshman series Longmire, based on the novels by Craig Johnson, and TNT signed up Rizzoli and Isles for a fourth season in summer 2013.

Speaking of renewals, Matthew Gray Gubler, one of the stars of Criminal Minds, renewed his contract with the show for two more years.

The USA Network ordered 12 episodes of Graceland from the creator of White Collar. The show follows a group of diverse law-enforcement agents from the DEA, FBI and Customs whose worlds collide when they're forced to live together in an undercover beach house in Southern California.

Fox hasn't given an order for the pilot Guilty yet but is extending options on the potential stars, which bodes well. The project stars Cuba Gooding, Jr., as "a brilliant, morally questionable defense attorney who, after being falsely convicted of fraud and stripped of his legal license, uses his unorthodox methods to solve the cases he’s been prohibited from handling and to ultimately exact revenge on the man who set him up."

The official trailer for Breaking Bad's final season has been released amid news the cast will host a large panel at Comic-Con. Also added to Comic-Con: Jonny Lee Miller (Sherlock Holmes) and Lucy Liu (Watson) from the new CBS series Elementary.

Fox is offering a trailer for its fall new medical drama, The Mob Doctor, which centers on young surgeon Grace Devlin (Jordana Spiro) moonlighting as a doctor for the Chicago mafia between hospital shifts.

Although American viewers won't get to see the latest season of Wallender (based on the novels of Henning Mankell) until September, the BBC is releasing a trailer for the upcoming British premiere in July.

PODCASTS

NPR's Morning Edition chatted with author Paco Ignacio Taibo II about his crime novels set in Mexico City. They feature Hector Belascoaran Shayne, a former engineer who got a "certificate in detection" through a correspondence course.

A Breather, In More Ways Than One

 

Patti Abbott is taking a breather from the weekly Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature today. I thought I'd take this opportunity to remind everyone that recent disasters are making it even harder on many folks in this still-recovering economy:

In Colorado, Utah, Montana and Arizona, tens of thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes and businesses, with hundreds of those building burned to the ground, at a cost of untold millions;


Flooding in Montana has caused at least $100 million in damage that could take years to recover from in the 14 counties declared disaster areas;


Tropical Storm Debby forced up to 20,000 people out of their homes in one Florida county alone, and several areas saw 26 inches of rain that led to massive flooding.

It's heartening to see that libraries have been playing a valuable role in helping evacuees, especially in Colorado: the Pikes Peak Library set up a laptop lab and books at the Red Cross Shelter in Cheyenne Mountain High School, Colorado Springs;  and the Poudre River Public Library District set up an area in the Thomas M. McKee Community Center in Larimer County where kids can play with toys, read, watch cartoons and put puzzles together and people can also use laptops to contact family.

Even if you don't have family or friends in the affected areas, consider a contribution to the American Red Cross of either money or a blood donation, both of which are sorely needed.

Mystery Melange

Crime fiction is becoming more global all the time, but I'll bet Israel doesn't come to mind when you think of mystery novels. Peter Rozovsky over at Detectives Beyond Borders offer up a short history of crime fiction in Israel with an article by Uri Kenan in two parts, here and here.

The Q&A roundup includes the Sons of Spade blog chatting with author Sean Dexter, author of the Jackson Burke series, and how he feels that private eyes are so popular ("It's what all men want to be: Tough, wisecracking, and fearless"); and Meg Gardiner stopped by Chuck Wendig's blog Terrible Minds to reveal why she likes writing: "Because holding people’s suspended disbelief in my hands is a beautiful, powerful kick."

Out of the Gutter and NoirCon 2012 are teaming up for Atomic Noir: Four Dark Original Stories Inspired by Post-World War II Crime Fiction. Winners get $50, a copy of the book, and get their work distributed to the biggest names and biggest fans in current crime fiction at the annual noir conference in Philadelphia. Stories should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words, and the first round of submissions is open open July 1 and close July 21.

This was the week for fun auctions: a first edition of Live and Let Die, the second James Bond book written by Ian Fleming, sold for $21,258, while an Agatha Christie novel from 1924, with a rare dust jacket that showed Poirot for the first time, sold for £40,000 ($62,000). Remarkably, the Poirot illustration looks like a double for actor David Suchet, who plays Poirot in the ITV/PBS Mystery dramatizations.

Want some summer reading material? Omnimystery News has a listing of the new crime fiction coming in July.

Janet Rudolph has a tribute to Nora Ephron, who died this week, with a short Stieg Larsson parody Ephron wrote for The New Yorker.

July Conference Extravaganza

July may well be the peak month for crime fiction conferences geared to authors and fans around the globe. Here's a listing, with the note that it's not too late to register for most:

July 3
Crime in the Court
London, England
Close to 40 authors will attend, including Mark Billingham, Christopher Fowler, Sophie Hannah, David Hewson, Peter James, Erin Kelly, S.J. Watson.

July 11-14
Thrillerfest
New York, NY
Spotlight guests will include 2012 ThrillerMaster Jack Higgins; 2011 ThrillerMaster R.L. Stine; 2012 Silver Bullet Award Winner Richard North Patterson; 2011 Silver Bullet Winner Karin Slaughter; and 2012 Spotlight Guests Lee Child, John Sandford, Catherine Coulter and Ann Rule.

July 12-15
Public Safety Writers' Conference
Las Vegas, NV
Special Guests John M. Mills, Herman Groman

July 13
Poisoned Pen Conference
Scottsdale, AZ
Special Guests: Howard L. Anderson, Mark de Castrique, Linda Fairstein, Timothy Hallinan, Alex Kava, Joseph Kanon, Jesse Kellerman, Martin Limon, Francine Mathews and Dana Stabenow.

July 19-22
Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference
Corte Madera, CA
Editors, agents, publishers and panels of detectives, forensic experts and other crime-fighting professionals. The keynote speaker for 2012 in Don Winslow. Author guests on the faculty include Don Winslow, Cara Black, Tony Broadbent, Robert Dugoni, William C. Gordon, Taquin Hall, Jesse Kellerman, Arthur Kerns, John Lescroart, D.P. Lyle, Tim Maleeny, Cornelia Read, Gillian Roberts, Kirk Russell, Sheldon Siegel, Karin Slaughter.

July 19-22
Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival
Harrogate, UK
Programming Chair, Mark Billingham; Special Guests include Harlan Coben, John Connolly, Jo Nesbo, Kate Mosse, Peter Robinson, Peter James and Ian Rankin.