B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 4

Quote of the Week

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Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Lonelyheart 4122

Colin Watson (1920-1983) was a British author who started out in life as a journalist, first as a reporter for the Boston Guardian and later as an editorial writer, theater critic, and book reviewer. In 1958, while still working for newspapers, Watson published the first Flaxborough novel, Coffin, Scarcely Used, a book that Cecil Day-Lewis (who also wrote mysteries as Nicholas Blake) called "a great lark, full of preposterous situations and poker-faced wit."



Following the publication of the second book in the series, Watson retired to write full time and published a dozen mystery novels between 1958 and 1982. His mystery series came to known as The Flaxborough Chronicles, set as they were in Flaxborough, a fictional East Anglian city, population 15,000, loosely based on the Lincolnshire area of Boston where Watson worked as a journalist. The lead character in the series is Inspector Walter Purbright, assisted by his somewhat naive sidekick, Sergeant Sidney Love, and the Chief Constable, Harcourt Chubb. Watson's third book in the Chronicles, Hopjoy Was Here, won him a Silver Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association in 1962, and five years later he won a second Silver Dagger with Lonelyheart 4122.



Jeffery Ewener, a fan of Watson's work, wrote for the Mystery Magazine Web that in Watson's fictional world, "you find this...combination of superficial blandness deceptively concealing an uproar of animal spirits - like a hymn book hollowed-out to hold a hip flask. Watson gives us geriatric gentlemen patting bottoms, matronly housewives jumping into orgies, MI5 agents running up huge unpaid bar bills for reasons of National Security, austere solicitors blackmailing the local gentry."



As an example of what Ewener is referring to, take this excerpt from Lonelyheart 4122:

"Well, they didn't seem very pleased to see me, sir. Singleton wouldn't come out of the garden. He was going up and down with a lawn mower all the time. I had to ask each question as he went by one way, and try and catch the answer when he passed on the way back."



"Very trying for you, Sid."



"Not really. The answers were all very short. And him being so busy made it easier to get the writing samples. I just pinched three or four of the labels on his rose bushes. Of course," Love added, nodding at the file,  "I trimmed them down a bit and mounted them properly."



"So I noticed. Most neat. Now I understand why I couldn't make much sense out of "Peace Mrs. Pettifer Brevvitt's Pride Lancashire Ascending."

Lonelyheart 4122 introduces us to the character of Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who subsequently appeared in all Flaxborough novels save one. In this outing, Inspector Purbright's investigation into the disappearance of two respectable middle-aged women leads him to a matrimonial bureau where he meets another client, Miss Teatime, whom Purbright fears may also be in danger. But Miss Teatime doesn't want anything to do with his protection, and neither Miss Teatime nor her shady beau, a retired naval officer, are what they appear to be.



Four of The Flaxborough Chronicles were filmed for the BBC's  "Murder Most English" program, including Lonelyheart 4122.

         Related StoriesFriday's "Forgotten" Books: Blue OctavoFriday's "Forgotten" Books: Trent's Own CaseFriday's "Forgotten" Books: Old Sleuth's Freaky Female Detectives 

Mystery Melange

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The Australian Crime Writers Association announced finalists for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction Award: Down the Rabbit Hole by Shaeden Berry; A Town Called Treachery by Mitch Jennings; The Chilling by Riley James; All You Took From Me by Lisa Kenway; Everywhere We Look by Martine Kropkowski; and Those Opulent Days by Jacquie Pham. The shortlists were also released for Best True Crime and Best International Crime Fiction. Winners in all categories (Best True Crime, Best Debut, Best International, and Best Crime Fiction), will be announced in September.

The longlist for the 2025 Petrona Awards, honoring Scandinavian crime fiction in translation, was released today, with a mix of newer and more established authors including previous Petrona Award winners Pascal Engman, Malin Persson Giolito, Jørn Lier Horst, and Gunnar Staalesen. The shortlist will be unveiled on September 18. The Petrona Award was established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries. The winner of the 2024 Award was Dead Men Dancing by Jógvan Isaksen translated from Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Norvik Press.

Australia's Bad Sydney Crime Writers Festival announced the 2025 Danger Awards Shortlist in the categories of Crime Fiction, Debut Crime Fiction and Crime Non-Fiction, for books honoring featuring Australia as a setting for stories about crime and justice. Plus, the People's Choice Award is back, with all titles across the three categories eligible. Fans can vote for their favorite before the poll closes on Monday, September 1. All the winners will be revealed at the conference on September 13th.

The shortlists were also announced for Australia's 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the richest literary prize in that country. Two crime authors made the lists: in the Fiction category, Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Fiona was also shortlisted for Sisters in Crime's Davitt Awards); and in the Young Adult category, My Family and Other Suspects by Kate Emery.

Registration are now open for ShortCon 2026, the premiere conference for writers of short crime fiction. Hosted by Michael Bracken, ShortCon 2026 will held at Elaine's Literary Salon in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 6, 2026 and feature: Gary Phillips leading “Blueprinting Criminal Behavior,” a three-hour writing workshop; Michele Slung presenting “Every Moment is a Story,” a behind-the-scenes look at putting together annual best-of collections; Art Taylor presenting “Linked, Intertwined, or Seamless: The Curious Case of the Novel in Stories”; and Stacy Woodson leading “Everything You Forgot to Ask,” an end-of-day panel featuring all the day’s presenters. This one-day conference includes two full meals (breakfast and dinner), a full day of presentations, the opportunity to interact with other short-story writers, and a Noir at the Bar Friday. Registration is limited to 50, and ShortCon 2025 was a sellout, so interested participants are encouraged to snag a spot early.

Lou Armagno tells us that members of The Charlie Chan Family Home head to Warren, Ohio to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Author Earl Derr Biggers’ literary and film creation, Detective Charlie Chan. Two public events are scheduled for Friday, August 15th: a three-person panel discussion on “A Century of Charlie Chan,” followed by a Q&A at the Warren-Trumbull Country Public Library; and the historic Robins Theatre will be the venue for one of the most intriguing of the 40-plus Chan films, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, starring Sidney Toler, Cesar Romero, Pauline Moore, and Victor Sen Yung.

Noir at The Bar – A Night of Crime Fiction heads to the National Centre for the Written Word, a the Market Place South Shields, United Kingdom on September 19th. Authors scheduled to read from their works include Matt Wesolowski, Iain Rowen, Eileen Wharton, Alys Cummings, FE Birch, Pam Plumb, Alan Parkinson, Sarah Wray, and Neil Broadfoot.

That same night on the other side of The Pond in Columbia, Maryland, there will be a Noir at the Bar at the Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity conference, with participating authors to include Chris Chambers, Rob Creekmore, Ef Deal, Carol Gyzander, Alice Loweecey, Debbie Mack, Jeff Markowitz, Tom Milani, Roberta Rogow, and Ann Stolinsky.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, has put out a call for articles for a themed issue on "Transportation and Mobility in Crime Fiction." Contributions should explore how crime narratives—from classic detective stories to contemporary thrillers, from global noir to genre-bending narratives—engage with both literal and metaphorical forms of movement, consider transportation as a backdrop, a plot device, and/or as a lens through which to examine broader cultural, social, and psychological dynamics. Submissions, which should include an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief bio are due March 1, 2026. Full manuscripts of 5-6,000 words based on the accepted proposal will be due September 1. 2026.

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Breaking News" by Peter Gregg Slater.

In the Q&A roundup, Shots Magazine chatted with Quentin Bates, a prolific author, translator, publisher (he recently founded a publishing company called Corylus Books) and even a fisherman; and Deborah Kalb spoke with Walter B. Levis, a former New York City crime reporter and author of the new novel, The Meaning of the Murder.

         Related StoriesMystery Melange 

Author R&R with Tim Chawaga

[image error]Tim Chawaga is a writer and playwright whose short fiction has been featured in Interzone and Escape Pod and whose work has been performed in New York and Philadelphia at many venues that have either closed or been converted into gyms. He has a BFA in Drama from the Tisch School of the Arts, is a 2019 graduate of Clarion West, and is the recipient of George R.R. Martin's Worldbuilder Scholarship. He works in tech and lives in a co-op in Brooklyn with his partner and dog.

[image error]In his debut novel, Salvagia, Triss Mackey is flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that lets her live quietly aboard the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient Cabana Boat. In exchange, she dives for recycling, recovered from the flooded area of formerly-coastal cities known as the yoreshore. If she happens to find some salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the past—well, that’s just between her and the highest bidder.

But when the federal government begins withdrawing from Florida entirely, Triss must buy the Ghost outright or lose her loophole. Meanwhile, the corporate mafias are poised to seize power, especially Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America luxury hotel. Triss needs a score big enough to keep her free from both the feds and corporations, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.

In pursuit of such a score, she stumbles upon the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz, and winds up with more than she bargained for, including a partnership with Ortiz’s hotshot space-racing son, Riley. If she can help Riley solve the mystery of his father’s death, it may lead them to a valuable piece of salvagia and with it, the hope of a sustainable, free way of Florida living.

Tim stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the novel:

SALVAGIA is a science fiction mystery inspired by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, about a freelance salvage diver living along the future flooded South Florida coast.

I would divide my research for it into two categories: structure and content.

STRUCTURE

SALVAGIA is a mystery novel, and it was mostly useful for me to try to adhere to some of the “rules” of a traditional mystery, or at least check in with them every now and again when I got stuck. So I read a lot, particularly the Travis McGee series, including his debut, The Deep Blue Goodbye. John D. MacDonald’s prose style is uniquely efficient. He can craft a whole character in a sentence, and his descriptions are beautifully specific while remaining unbelievably sparse.

I also consulted the somewhat famous but unsourceable 12-Chapter Murder Mystery structure just to get a general idea of what a satisfying mystery arc might look like.

At one point, my now-agent told me that things felt a little unfocused. The book was in first-person, but it’s science fiction, and that’s a particularly challenging combination; science fiction benefits from a lot of world-building description; how thing work and what their history is. First person limits the reader to what a single person in that world knows and experiences. But I thought that first-person was right for the mystery aspect of it, so the push and pull, of when to get in the world-building weeds (rarely) and when to stay on the plot tracks (usually) was something that I had to get a hold of. He recommended a few 1st person POV mysteries with female protagonists, like Charlaine Harris’ Shakespeare’s Landlord. After internalizing John D. MacDonald’s style and structure it was really useful to begin to look at other authors and how they approached questions like information delivery, twists, descriptions, and character backgrounds.

And then, at some point in my next draft, I just entirely forgot about any sort of structure and tried to make sure that I was still engaged upon re-read.

CONTENT

The benefit of science fiction is that I can often make up whatever I want, but the downside is that once I do, I really have to own it, and be willing to devote words to describing it in greater detail than existing things drawn from our collective knowledge. I was very conscious of this because of the push and pull of sci-fi vs. first-person I described above.

And there were a few things that I really wanted to devote a lot of attention to that were outside of my own personal experience. The first was the particulars of scuba diving. I am not scuba-certified myself, and am actually somewhat terrified of deep water. But my protagonist, Triss, dives a lot in the book, in some particularly claustrophobic places. The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury was an incredibly useful resource. It specifically outlines the dangers and thrills of shipwreck and cave diving, while telling a gripping non-fiction tale about father-son diving team the Rouses. The author is a diver himself, and that level of knowledge made this book an indispensable resource.

Further character inspiration work came from reading Driver #8, the autobiography of Dale Earnhardt Jr. There’s a sport in the book called atmo-breaking, which is basically a drag race to space. One of the characters, Riley Ortiz, is an atmo-breaker and the son of a famous atmo-breaker, so I thought that someone like Dale Earnhardt Jr. would be a good inspiration for what a person like that might be concerned about.

Lastly, SALVAGIA is a novel set in a climate-changed world, specifically the area around Miami. Out of all the many resources I drew inspiration from, including the work of futurist Kim Stanley Robinson, the book Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza was most instrumental, because it outlined the threats to Miami specifically in the coming years—not just sea level rise but also the contamination of the aquifer, its history of unsustainable over-development, its urban planning policies and its politics.

 

You can learn more about Tim Chawaga and his writing by visiting his website, and follow him on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Goodreads. Salvagia is now available via all major booksellers.

         Related StoriesAuthor R&R with Baron BirtcherAuthor R&R with N.L. HolmesAuthor R&R with Mike Cobb 

Media Murder for Monday

[image error]It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Actor Timothée Chalamet and director James Mangold, who teamed up for the Academy Award-nominated Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, are joining forces once again for High Side. The project is based on an original, unpublished story by Jaime Oliveira, who is also adapting the screenplay. The story follows former MotoGP racer Billy, haunted by a career-ending crash and a family legacy of abandonment, who is making do caring for his addict father and the family business. He’s blindsided when his estranged older brother Cole resurfaces—just after their father’s death—with a proposition to use Billy’s talents for something bigger: robbing banks. Cole assembles a mismatched crew, including a woman who becomes Billy’s lover, and they begin knocking over small-town desert banks with speed and precision. But as the stakes rise, Lennox, an FBI agent who has a complicated history with Cole, closes in as the crew preps its biggest score: a bank job timed with a big motorcycle parade.

Djimon Hounsou and Halle Berry are set to star in the Africa-set trafficking thriller, Red Card, taking its protagonists on a journey from the rolling grasslands of Kenya’s Maasai Mara to the Moroccan port city of Casablanca. Joel Souza will direct the movie from a screenplay written by Bad Boys creator and Midnight Run writer, George Gallo, as well as Oscar-winning Green Book screenwriter, Nick Vallelonga. Hounsou will star as Max Elmi, a veteran ranger battling poachers in Kenya who joins forces with Dane Harris (yet to be cast), a tenacious special agent and part of a team led by FBI supervisor Amanda Bruckner (Berry) working with international law enforcement to fight trafficking rings abroad. When Max’s son, a talented soccer player, falls prey to a deceitful sports agent and disappears into the criminal underworld of North Africa, Max will stop at nothing to find his child, and Dane will have to decide how far he’s willing to go.

TELEVISION/STREAMING

Stephen Colbert will guest star on an episode of the CBS series Elsbeth next season, playing a fictional late night host named Scotty Bristol, who hosts "Way Late With Scotty Bristol." It’s unclear exactly when Colbert’s episode will air, but the new season of Elsbeth premieres on October 12, and he has already filmed his appearance. Colbert's Late Show on CBS was recently cancelled ostensibly due to financial reasons, although critics say the move was purely political. Elsbeth is a murder mystery series starring Carrie Preston as the titular crime-solver, an unconventional attorney who ends up working as a de facto detective.

The crime drama, Killer Class, is in development at ABC, created by showrunners Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt (God Friended Me) and Joe Webb, with veteran Ken Kwapis set to direct. Based on true events, Killer Class is adapted from Keith Sharon’s article of the same name about a Tennessee high school social studies teacher who created an after school forensics class. The students in the class were given cold case files and, remarkably, they managed to crack a few.

Actor Jasper Cole and director Lillee Jean Trueman have boarded author and producer David P. Perlmutter’s planned TV series, Write to Kill. The drama follows an aspiring author, cursed with writer’s block and saddled with debt, who is offered a huge amount of money to commit a heinous crime. Charlotte Kirk has signed on to star. Also in the cast are Billy Hayes (Midnight Express), Elena Sanchez (Hunger Games), Sean Cronin (Mission Impossible), Rich Graff (Making Of The Mob), Amber Doig-Thorne (Winnie The Pooh – Blood and Honey), Brooke Lewis Bellas (Sinatra Club), Vanessa Eichholz (Hellboy), David Kallaway (Blacklist), and Jack Hudson (Accomplice).





PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

On Crime Time FM, author Mark Ellis chatted with Paul Burke about his new historical crime thriller, Death of an Officer, and Boom Time, an account of crime in WWII London.

Debbi Mack's latest guest on the Crime Cafe podcast was the award-winning author of the Detective Parrott and Quinn McFarland Mystery Series, Saralyn Richard.

Authors on the Air spoke with Edgar Award nominee, Samantha Downing, about her fifth novel, Too Old For This, featuring a seventy-five year old retired serial killer, Lottie Jones, who changed her name and is living a quiet normal life until she's forced out of retirement.

Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed books for Women in Translation Month on Read or Dead.

         Related StoriesMedia Murder for Monday 

Quote of the Week

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Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Bait

Before there was Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell, even before Joseph Wambaugh, Dorothy Uhnak was patrolling the streets of New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s as a New York City Transit Authority policewoman, with 12 of her 14 years as a detective. She later hinted she left police work due to sex discrimination, officially resigning to finish her college degree at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.



Uhnak had also been interested in writing since she was a child, and was the one who typed up reports for the male police officers because she knew how to type quickly and accurately. She initially had problems getting her autobiographical memoir Police Woman published until editors began to recognize her from newspaper articles as the real-life 125-pound female officer who knocked down and arrested an armed mugger.



[image error]Police Woman ushered in Uhnak as the first woman officer to write a police-lady procedural (and was later used as the basis for a series by the same title starring Angie Dickinson), and the book's success led to the first in a trilogy featuring Detective Second Grade Christie Opara, titled The Bait, which won the Edgar Award as the best first mystery novel of 1968 (in a tie with E. Richard Johnson's Silver Street). It later became the basis for the Get Christie Love series, although Uhnak's protagonist was changed from a blond white female to an African-American female, the first time an African American woman was the sole star of a TV series.



The Bait was followed by the other two books in the trilogy featuring Christie Opara, The Witness (1969) and The Ledger (1970), but at the urging of her editors, Uhnak switched to writing a sweeping police novel Law and Order about three generations of a police department family, published in 1973. The latter was her breakout book and became a television move in 1976, with Uhnak helping write some of the dialogue. More fame followed after her 1977 novel The Investigation served as the basis for a 1987 television movie, Kojak: The Price of Justice.



Uhnak says she began notes and doing character sketches for The Bait while still in uniform, with the protagonist, Christie Opara, largely based on the author. She also took characters from her experiences such as the "great bunch of guys" in her squad and the antagonist, Murray Rugoff, who was patterned on a suspect she remembered arresting who had no hair. Her last assignment with the D.A.'s Special Investigations Squad may have been given her the most story fodder, where she "found out the dirty little secrets about the police department."



In The Bait, 26-year-old Christie Opara is on her way to an undercover drug bust when she makes an unexpected arrest of a hairless man who's exposing himself to schoolgirls on the subway. After a female dancer who has been receiving anonymous phone calls is murdered and Opara herself begins to receive similar phone calls, she realizes her suspect and the killer may be one and the same. Realizing there's only one way to prove it, she offers herself up as bait. Her boss, Supervising Assistant District Attorney Casey Reardon, who finds Opara getting under his skin in more ways than one, reluctantly agrees to her idea even knowing that part of Opara's determination to go through with the plan is based on her desire to exorcise demons left behind from the on-duty murder of her cop husband five years ago.



The Bait debuted to mixed reviews when it was published, but it's filled with realistic characterizations and interactions, as you'd expect from someone who walked the walk:

Christie looked from face to face, admiring them; this was all by-play, yet it was essential. An establishing of lines of communication, of reading and responding. No one really knew what story Marty was about to tell, yet each would help him filling in, building on it. It was more than time-passing, it was an interacting on a light and unimportant level: it was a rehearsal.

and



Johnnie Devereaux had a fantastic acquaintance with people in all areas of the city...He could blink his eye and tell in which section of the city, which small, hidden, unknown pocket, you could find a particular group of people, what the ethnic makeup was three blocks to the west or one block to the east. Where to eat authentic Cantonese food, not the American chop suey junk; where to get real Northern Italian cooking or a non-commercial, absolutely pure Kosher meal like someone's Grandma used to put in front of someone's Grandpa. People and their strange quirks of behavior and the fascinating customs and remnants of blood-culture were Johnnie's hobby and a knowledge he enjoyed sharing.

The Bait is an entertaining insider look at police work, especially through the eyes of a woman cop at a time when there weren't many women cops, without getting bogged down into overly technical slang or extraneous procedural details. (One bit of Uhnak/Bait trivia: In 1973, a pilot more faithful to the book, titled The Bait, was filmed. Despite an all-star cast that included Donna Mills, Michael Constantine, William Devane, Arlene Golonka, June Lockhart, it was never produced into a series.)



Sadly, Teresa Graves, star of Get Christie Love, died in a house fire in 2002 at the age of 53, and Uhnak herself died in 2006 of a deliberate drug overdose that may have been suicide, according to her daughter.

          

Mystery Melange

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Book sculpture by Cara Smith

Stella Rimington has died at the age of 90. Rimington was the first female director of MI5 and the first head of the domestic spy agency to be publicly named (and also widely seen as the model for Dame Judi Dench's "M" in the James Bond films). After leaving MI5, Rimington principally became a writer, with her first book the memoir, Open Secret, which was controversial at the time. A series of crime novels followed, including ten with Liz Carlyle, an MI5 officer as the lead character, and two more with Manon Tyler, a CIA agent.

The full program was revealed for the 2025 Agatha Christie Festival taking place from September 13-21 across the English Riviera. The festival kicks off with the popular Fringe Festival, which offers a host of unique experiences that celebrate Christie’s legacy in the very places that inspired her work, including walking tours and mystery-solving events. From September 18th onward, the festival transitions into its Literary Festival slate, with such highlights as Lucy Foley and Sophie Hannah discussing their work continuing the stories of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot; authors Janice Hallett, Vaseem Khan, and broadcaster Steph McGovern exploring how modern writers are reinventing Golden Age detective fiction in "The Never-Ending Golden Age"; Tony Medawar discussing "Agatha Christie and the Occult"; and Icelandic crime fiction star Ragnar Jónasson discussing his new novel Death of a Crime Writer alongside Kelly Mullen, followed by an interactive murder mystery game.

BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival, running September 11–13 in Sydney, Australia, has launched its 2025 program. Among the headliners are Michael Robotham, Candice Fox, Jane Caro and Gary Jubelin. The program will feature writing workshops, including the festival’s first offering of manuscript feedback sessions, and industry pitching opportunities across both fiction and nonfiction genres. For the first time, this year’s festival will include young adult crime and mystery writing in the program with authors Amy Doak (Eleanor Jones is not a Murderer) and Troy Hunter (Gus and The Missing Boy), who will both run workshops for high school students.

Noir at the Bar heads to British Columbia on August 28 at Victoria's Caffe Fantastico. The event is hosted by Magnus Skallagrimsson, with authors scheduled to read from their works to include Jean Paetkau, Ardell Holden, Shane Joaquin Jimenez, Jim Bottomley, Christine Cossack, John Farrow, and Judee Fong.

Val McDermid is using the same elements and techniques from her mystery novels to revisit one of history’s most enduring whodunnits:  the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe. In her new play, And Midnight Never Come, McDermid explores the controversial circumstances around the death of the brilliant and subversive Elizabethan playwright who was stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern at the age of 29. Officially, Marlowe was killed over a row about a bill. But unofficially, espionage, heresy, and a state-sanctioned cover-up have all been put forth as potential motives.

Virgin Voyages is presenting its first true-crime podcast-themed cruise in partnership with iHeartMedia. Departing Oct. 10 from Miami on the Valiant Lady, the one-time five-night itinerary sails to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic and Virgin’s Beach Club at Bimini in the Bahamas. The cruise focuses on popular titles including Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know, Betrayal, and Buried Bones. During the special voyage, guests can experience live podcast recordings of their favorite shows, attend "how to podcast" workshops, find meet-and-greets with top hosts, participate in giveaways, and enjoy themed cocktails and bites.

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Another N-Word" by Tony Dawson.

In the Q&A roundup, J.T. Ellison, author of the Taylor Jackson and Dr. Samantha Owens series and more, applied the Page 69 Test to Last Seen, her most recent thriller; Vicki Delany, Canadian author of several cozy mystery series including the Lighthouse Library series and Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, also took the Page 69 Test to Tea with Jam & Dread, her newest Tea by the Sea mystery; Shots Magazine interviewed Caroline Fraser, author of Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, and also Travis Kennedy, author of the thriller, The Whyte Python World Tour; and Writers Who Kill spoke with Ellen Byron about her Golden Motel Mysteries.

         Related StoriesMystery Melange 

Media Murder for Monday

[image error]It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Lee Isaac Chung (Twisters) is in talks to direct an Ocean’s Eleven prequel for Warner Brothers Pictures, based on a script by Carrie Solomon (A Family Affair). Plot details haven't been revealed, but the new film is known to be set in Europe in the 1960s. The 2001 film followed Danny Ocean, a gangster, who rounds up a gang of associates to stage a sophisticated and elaborate casino heist which involves robbing three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously during a popular boxing event.

Britton Webb has joined the thriller Don’t Forget Me Tomorrow, replacing Jesse Kove, who was previously announced for the project. The story, based on author A.L. Jackson’s novel of the same name, follows Dakota Cooper (Charlotte Kirk), a single mother trying to rebuild her life in a small town when a mysterious figure from her past returns, forcing her to confront old secrets, rekindled love, and new danger. Webb plays Ryder Nash, the enigmatic ex-con whose return threatens to unravel and ultimately redefine Dakota’s carefully rebuilt life.

Max Martini (Pacific Rim) and Brianna Hildebrand (Deadpool) are starring in the thriller Bethesda, the directorial debut from Andrew and Isaac Lewis (aka The Lewis Brothers), from a screenplay by Matt Black. Bethesda is described as "a neo-Western thriller set in desolate West Texas in the early ’90s that centers on a dying ex-Texas Ranger with a violent past and the young woman he rescues from a life of drugs and forced prostitution." After killing the brother of a border-town crime lord, the two broken strangers go into hiding from the pseudo-philosophical assassin hired to kill them. While on the run, "they find redemption within each other in this dark and violent land where the line between good and evil is blurred, where the only rule is that of survival."

NOIR CITY returns to Chicago's Music Box Theatre, September 5-11. Screenings from Friday, September 5, through Sunday, September 7, will be hosted by Film Noir Foundation president and founder Eddie Muller, while screenings Monday, September 8, through Thursday, September 11, will be presented by FNF board member Alan K. Rode. The series kicks off with The Grifters (1990), based on a book by Jim Thompson with a screenplay by Donald Westlake, which stars John Cusack as a young grifter blithely scamming his way through sunny Southern California, until he gets trapped in a battle of wills and wiles waged by the women in his life: mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) and girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening).

TELEVISION/STREAMING

Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting) is set to play legendary literary detective Sherlock Holmes in Season 2 of the CBS series, Watson. Carlyle will appear in a recurring guest role, working opposite series lead Morris Chestnut, who plays Dr. John Watson. The investigative medical drama is a modern version of one of history’s greatest detectives as he turns his attention from solving crimes to solving medical mysteries. With his eyes fixed on the future, Watson faces an unexpected twist when Sherlock Holmes, who was presumed dead, resurfaces, forcing him to confront a buried secret from his past — one that lies hidden within his own body.

Slow Horses writer and executive producer, Will Smith, will be leaving the drama after Season 5, which will premiere this fall on Apple TV+. Smith has guided the faithful screen adaptation of Mick Herron’s series of spy novels from the beginning and has won an Emmy for writing. Smith is handing over the reins for Season 6 to Gaby Chiappe, and Ben Vanstone for Season 7. Slow Horses follows a group of reprobate MI5 rejects that have been sidelined at Slough House, a forgotten outpost far from MI5’s Regent’s Park HQ. Led by Gary Oldman’s sardonic Jackson Lamb, the "slow horses" of Slough House prove weirdly effective, often confounding MI5’s Second Desk Diana Taverner (Kristen Scott-Thomas) and, as of Season 4, its First Desk Claude Whelan (James Tallis). Series regulars include Jonathan Pryce, Saskia Reeves, Jack Lowden, Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Tom Brooke, and Ruth Bradley.

The new adaptation of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley bestselling novels from BBC One issued an official release date and trailer for the upcoming reboot. The crime drama follows police detective Tommy Lynley, an outsider in the force, mostly because of his aristocratic upbringing, and his ill-matched partner, Barbara Havers, a maverick sergeant with a working-class background with whom he seemingly has nothing in common. Nevertheless, the incompatible duo become a formidable team, bonded by their desire to see justice done. The series will premiere on Thursday, September 4, on BritBox in the U.S. and Canada.

Netflix’s Untamed has been renewed for Season 2, shifting what was planned as a limited series into an ongoing show as Eric Bana’s National Parks Service investigator heads to a new park after solving a mystery in Yosemite. Season 2 will pick up after Bana’s character has already been working at different parks, so the location for Season 2 won’t be the exact next destination after Yosemite.

NBC announced its fall premiere dates, which includes one small surprise: the three-hour Law & Order Thursday lineup will be back on NBC's fall schedule as of September 25. Law & Order: Organized Crime, which moved from NBC to Peacock ahead of its fifth season a year ago, will return to the broadcast network. Its fifth season, which recently wrapped its run on the NBCUniversal streamer, will get a second viewing on NBC, airing in its old Thursday 10PM slot behind Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. Peacock has not made a renewal call on Organized Crime yet, with the show’s performance likely to inform NBCUniversal’s decision whether to pick up Season 6 of the drama for Peacock — or NBC.

Fox has unveiled its premiere dates for the 2025-26 season, which includes the season 2 premiere of the Canadian series, Murder in a Small Town, set to air Tuesday nights at 8pm ET.





PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

Dan Fesperman chatted with Paul Burke on Crime Time FM about his new spy novel, Pariah; Eastern Europe; fiction as the second draft of history; facades of democracy; comedy and Hollywood; and The Baltimore Banner.

The latest Murder Junction featured thriller writer Nick Harkaway about his latest novel, Karla's Choice, and following in his father John Le Carré's footsteps by bringing George Smiley back to readers.

Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Ty Hutchinson, known for his high-concept, fast-paced novels, to talk about his latest book, DarkBright.

Authors on the Air spoke with Polly Stewart about The Felons' Ball, her new Southern thriller with secrets, suspense, and small-town danger after a moonshine empire, a forbidden romance, and a murder on a houseboat collide.

On the Pick Your Poison podcast, Dr. Jen Prosser investigated which dictator's autopsy was published on the front page of the newspaper, why he hated doctors, and what that had to do with his death; as well as what leeches were used for in 1950.

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