From my Inbox

A couple of pieces of news from recent emails:

1. From Publishers Lunch, deal news;

Julia Phillips' DISAPPEARING EARTH, about two sisters who go missing on a remote volcanic peninsula in Kamchatka, as clues to the crime lie in the lives -- and stories of violence and loss -- of twelve women in the girls' rural Russian community, to Knopf, in a two-book deal; UK/Commonwealth rights to Scribner UK.

And a new one from Eleanor Catton:

Booker winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's third novel, BIRNAM WOOD, a psychological thriller, set in a remote area of New Zealand where scores of ultra-rich foreigners are building fortress-like homes in preparation for a coming, following the guerilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a ragtag group of leftists who move about the country cultivating other people's land, whose chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events which questions how far each of us would go to ensure our own survival--and at what cost, to Farrar, Straus (US); McClelland & Stewart (Canada); Granta (UK/Australia); and Victoria University Press (NZ).

2. A press release from Harvill Secker re Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10:

CBS Films announced that it has secured the rights to bestselling author Ruth Ware’s latest psychological thriller THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10. Hillary Seitz (Eagle Eye, Insomnia) is set to adapt the novel for the screen with The Gotham Group (The Maze Runner) serving as producers.

Published by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage, THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10 follows journalist Lo Blacklock who is given the travel magazine assignment of a lifetime: to spend a week on a boutique ultra-luxury cruise ship with only a handful of unimaginably wealthy travellers. Lo’s dreamlike experience could not be more perfect until late one night she witnesses an unspeakable act culminating with a woman being thrown overboard. The following morning all of the passengers remain accounted for and the ship sails on as if nothing has happened.

THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10 is a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback and paperback in the UK, a New York Times bestseller for nineteen consecutive weeks, and it is currently enjoying its tenth week at the top of the Canadian bestseller chart. The rights to the book have been acquired by thirty international publishers.

The film rights to Ware’s debut psychological bestseller, In a Dark, Dark Wood, have already been optioned by New Line Cinema and the film is in development with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Pacific Standard.

The hotly-anticipated new psychological thriller from Ruth Ware – The Lying Game – will be published by Harvill Secker in the UK on 15 June 2017.

Film News: The New Girlfriend

A new French film, The New Girlfriend, is based on a Ruth Rendell short story of the same name from 1978. I'm not including the trailer as apparently it gives too much away.

IMDB keeps it short and sweet: "A young woman makes a surprising discovery about the husband of her late best friend."


Nice to see the poster name-checking Ruth Rendell.

Film News: The Gunman

The Gunman which is released 20 March is based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman and stars Sean Penn as Martin Terrier. It's been a while since I read and reviewed the book but I remember it packed a punch.

If you've read it more recently than I, see if you recognise the story in this trailer (the shorter of the two I found):



The film also features Wolf Hall's Mark Rylance - he is in the longer trailer.

Film News: The Family

The Family is out today in the UK. It's based on Tonino Benaquista's Badfellas and is about an American mob family in witness protection in France.

Official blurb: A mafia boss and his family are relocated to a sleepy town in France under the witness protection program after snitching on the mob. Despite the best efforts of Agent Stansfield to keep them in line, Fred Manzoni, his wife Maggie and their children Belle and Warren can't help but revert to old habits and blow their cover by handling their problems the "family" way, enabling their former mafia cronies to track them down. Chaos ensues as old scores are settled in the unlikeliest of settings.

The reviews haven't been terribly good but don't let that put you off reading the source material, translated into English by Emily Read.

Film News: Easy Money released in the UK

The film Easy Money based on Jens Lapidus's book of the same name was (finally) released in the UK on Friday. Easy Money is the first book in the Stockholm Noir trilogy and the second and third books have also been filmed.

The series stars Swedish-American actor Joel Kinnaman, from the US remake of The Killing.

Read Laura's review of the book.

Film News: The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson

Catching up with my Kermode and Mayo film review podcasts, the last but one was filmed at the Edinburgh Film Festival with special guest Robert Carlyle.

It transpires that Robert Carlyle is to star and direct The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson based on the book by Douglas Lindsay.

The book is currently free to download on UK Kindle and at Kobo, and is only £1.99 as a print book.

Official Blurb: Barney Thomson — awkward, diffident, Glasgow barber — lives a life of desperate mediocrity. Shunned at work and at home, unable to break out of a twenty-year rut, each dull day blends seamlessly into the next.

However, there is no life so tedious that it cannot be spiced up by inadvertent murder, a deranged psychopath, and a freezer full of neatly packaged meat.

Barney Thomson's uninteresting life is about to go from 0 to 60 in five seconds, as he enters the grotesque and comically absurd world of the serial killer…

TV News: The Silence on BBC4

I've mentioned the film, The Silence a couple of times on this blog. It's a German film of Jan Costin Wagner's book, Silence, with the setting changed from Finland to Germany.

The film will be on BBC4 next Saturday night at 9pm:

Media reports of the disappearance and murder of a teenage girl remind Timo of something that he has spent his adult life trying to forget, that he was witness to a similar crime 23 years ago. All this time he has kept his silence, but now, with a wife and family of his own, he must confront the past.

Film News: From Borch to Mørck

The Killing III's Nikolaj Lie Kaas who played Mathias Borch is to star as Carl Mørck in four films based on Jussi Adler-Olsen's Department Q series. Lebanese-Swedish actor Fares Fares will play Assad.

The first film, The Keeper of Lost Causes, [loosely?], based on the first book (published as Mercy in the UK) will be released in Denmark on the 3 October and has been snapped up for the UK by Arrow Films.

From Trust Nordisk:

Based on the first book in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling thriller series about Department Q THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES tells the story of the two policemen Carl Mørck and Assad who become involved in a five-year-old case concerning a missing woman, Merete. Soon Carl and Assad are on a journey through Scandinavia’s darkest corners to find a psychopathic killer.

Mercy, translated by Lisa Hartford, was voted the Euro Crime Reviewers Favourite read of 2011.

Film News: Love Crime

French thriller, Love Crime, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, is released in the UK on Friday. It's already available in the US on DVD.

From the official website:
The final film from director Alain Corneau (SERIE NOIRE, TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE), LOVE CRIME pits the fiery talents of Ludivine Sagnier (A GIRL CUT IN TWO) and Oscar-nominee Kristin Scott Thomas (THE ENGLISH PATIENT) against each other in a deliciously twisted tale of office politics that turn, literally, cut-throat.

When Christine, a powerful executive (Scott Thomas), brings on a naive young ingénue, Isabelle (Sagnier), as her assistant, she delights in toying with her naivete and teaching her hard lessons in a ruthless professional philosophy. But when the protege's ideas become tempting enough for Christine to pass one as her own, she underestimates Isabelle's ambition and cunning-- and the ground is set for all out war. In this devilish, propulsive thriller, Corneau sets up a the scenery expertly and his actors devour it.

Love Crime, from 2010, has been remade in English by Brian de Palma, as Passion and stars Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace however it's by no means a shot for shot remake as this article in the L A Times and the film poster show:

The bones of both stories are by and large the same, as a more senior corporate executive (Rachel McAdams) steals the credit for an idea from a colleague (Noomi Rapace in the remake). Both personal and professional intrigues abound, full of minor humiliations and major flirtations, bringing the simmering connection between the women to a boil as feelings erupt into dangerous actions. The story of who does what to whom and why is at once simple and complicated.

Perhaps De Palma's most notable change — he wrote the script with an "additional

dialogue" credit to Natalie Carter, co-writer with Corneau on the original film — is transforming the relationship between the women from a perverse mentorship in the ways of business and power into a fierce competition by casting McAdams and Rapace in the roles. Where Thomas and Sagnier are separated in age by some 20 years, McAdams and Rapace are barely a year apart. He also repeatedly nudges the audience off-balance with a teasing slippage between the film's reality and the dream life of Rapace's character.

"I saw there were many good things about it, and I saw there were many things I thought I could improve," said De Palma, on the phone from Paris, where he has lived on and off in recent years in addition to New York, of his impression upon seeing "Love Crime" for the first time. "I think it's very difficult to, let's say, remake a classic. This had things that could be made better when you remade it."

Film News: Babycall

Norwegian thriller Babycall starring Noomi Rapace has just been released in the UK

Synopsis:
Anna and her eight year old son Anders are under the witness protection program following a difficult relationship with Anders' father. They move into a large apartment complex. Anna becomes overprotective of her son and even buys a babycall to keep track of him. Soon, strange noises from other apartments appear on the monitor, and Anna overhears what might be the murder of a child. Meanwhile, Anders' mysterious new friend starts visiting at odd hours, claiming that he has keys for all the doors in the building... Does this new friend know anything about the murder? And why is Anders' drawing stained with blood? Is Anna's son still in danger?



Trailer



Should you have difficulty tracking it down in your local cinema, it will be available on DVD on 4 June 2012.

Film News: Switch

Switch, a crime drama starring Eric Cantona and co-written by crime writer Jean-Christophe Grangé has just been released in the UK:

Synopsis from IMDB:
In Montreal, the unemployed fashion designer Sophie Malaterre is summoned by Claire Maras to show her work to her boss. When Sophie arrives in the company, Clare apologizes and tells that her boss is on vacation and will return only two months later. Clare invites Sophie to have lunch with her and tells Sophie about the website switch.com, where it is possible to switch houses with a stranger for vacation. Sophie seeks an apartment in Paris nearby the Eiffel Tower that belongs to Bénédicte Serteaux and they change apartments. Sophie arrives in Paris on Saturday morning and has a dream day riding a bicycle through the tourist area. However, on the next morning, policemen break in the apartment and arrest Sophie while she is having a bath. Detective Damien Forgeat interrogates Sophie believing that she is Bénédicte and she learns that a beheaded body was found in her room. Further, all the evidences of her life has been deleted and she can not prove that she is Sophie.



However in the unlikely event that Switch is not shown in your area...then it will be out on DVD on 9 April with the tag line:

"The Fugitive meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"...

Film News: Reykjavik - Rotterdam & Contraband

Two versions of the same premise are now available to UK viewers. The original Icelandic film from 2008, Reykjavik - Rotterdam, has just come out on R2 DVD and the US remake, Contraband opens in cinemas this week. Interstingly the star of the former is the director of the latter, Baltasar Kormákur,

An Icelandic crime thriller with the gloss stripped away - leaving a bleak, sad and despairing narrative - director Oskar Jonasson's Reykjavik-Rotterdam hones in on a down-and-outer at the very end of his rope. For Kristofer (Baltasar Kormakur) life has been little more than a never ending series of failures and disappointments. Among other things, he made the colossal mistake of smuggling alcohol during his tenure as a shipworker - a little stunt that promptly landed him behind bars. Now, following release, he struggles to pull his life together while working as a security guard and continually attempts to support his family. Then the opportunity arises for Kristofer to do one final tour on a freighter running from Reykjavik, Iceland, to Rotterdam, Holland. Kristofer initially embraces the opportunity to work with his old friends once again - little foreseeing the malestorm of crime into which this move will plunge him.

vs


Chris Farraday long ago abandoned his life of crime, but after his brother-in-law, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), botches a drug deal for his ruthless boss, Tim Briggs, Chris is forced back into doing what he does best-running contraband-to settle Andy's debt. Chris is a legendary smuggler and quickly assembles a crew with the help of his best friend, Sebastian, to head to Panama and return with millions in counterfeit bills.

Things quickly fall apart and with only hours to reach the cash, Chris must use his rusty skills to successfully navigate a treacherous criminal network of brutal drug lords, cops and hit men before his wife, Kate, and sons become their target.

Film News: Carancho

Just released in the UK is the Argentinian film Carancho (Vulture):

Trapero's sixth feature is a knife-edge thriller set in the murky legal quagmire of accident insurance scams. Sosa (Ricardo Darín) is an unlicensed lawyer who chases down road accident victims, representing them against insurance companies, but knowing that his clients will receive only a fraction of the financial reward. When he meets Luján (Martina Gusman), a paramedic, he sees in her hope of a new life. But to escape, he must cross his ruthless boss.


UK Trailer




For some splendid Argentinian crime fiction, I recommend Ernesto Mallo's Needle in a Haystack and Sweet Money and Claudia Pineiro's less crime, more satire Thursday Night Widows.

Headhunters - Trailer

Jo Nesbo's standalone novel, Headhunters, translated by Don Bartlett has been made into a film which will be released in the UK on 6 April.

Included below is the official UK trailer.

The paperback release (featured left) has a film-tie in cover and is published on 29 March.

A review of the book should soon be up on Euro Crime but here is Euro Crime reviewer Maxine's excellent review at Petrona.

Film News: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The Turkish film, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has its UK release on 16 March according to UK Film dates. There appears to be the odd showing in the UK before then. I can't find a very detailed synopsis (other than: "A group of men set out in search of a dead body in the Anatolian steppes") so here is a sample from the TimeOut review:

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is a crime movie, but not as you know it, and as well as asking us to puzzle together fragments of a murder case, it also offers rich, and sometimes comic, ruminations on city, small-town and village attitudes, on cynical versus more feeling attitudes to life, on our ability to separate the personal and the professional and on the banalities that arises even in extreme, unusual situations. It might be about a murder, but it’s also about the passing of time (and, in a subtly different way, passing the time), and to stress both, Ceylan asks that we share nearly three hours with him and his film.

We follow a group of 12 men in three vehicles – policemen, soldiers, two suspects, a doctor, a prosecutor and two men with shovels – as they trawl the countryside at night looking for a buried body, trying and failing several times before they make some progress. One minute they’re looking for freshly dug earth, the next they’re discussing the merits of cheese or the tell-tale signs of prostate cancer. With two prisoners in tow, they make a pit-stop at a village where we get a naturalistic portrait of everyday relations and where small, endearing differences emerge between the town folk of the investigation and their rural hosts. Back on the road, Ceylan moves around characters, and sometimes leaves them behind altogether for some staggering landscape shots. Night becomes dawn, and only when it’s morning do they return to town and the final chapter of the film unfolds in a police station and doctor’s surgery.

Possible UK posters:

8 Minute trailer for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

An extended trailer has been released for the US remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo which is to be released in the UK on 26 December.

DVDs for your Wish-List

Despite being top of the charts for a while due to its success in Ireland, The Guard was only on for a week in my area and I was unable to get to a showing. However the DVD is released on 16 January 2012.

Blurb: The Guard is a critically acclaimed Irish black-comedy, where Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges) a small-town cop with a rather unorthodox approach to his police work must join forces with straitlaced FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle, Ocean's Eleven trilogy) to take on an international cocaine-smuggling ring.



Fed up with watching the same two Inspector Montalbano episodes on BBC4? Then here's some good news. 5 March 2012 sees the release of the first collection (R2) containing:

"The Snack Thief, The Voice of The Violin, The Shape of Water, The Mystery of The Terracota Dog. In Italian with English Subtitles"

The Silence - Trailer

I was recently invited to an early showing of The Silence, based on Jan Costin Wagner's novel Silence. Unfortunately I couldn't attend but it is now on at a couple of cinemas in London: the Odeon in Panton Street and the Greenwich Picture House. I'm not sure if it's on anywhere else at the moment.

Silence is the second book in the Kimmo Joentaa series but for the film the setting has been moved from Finland to Germany.

It's quite a gruelling read, which you can see from the trailer:

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo & Empire & Clothing

I've very recently read Mark Kermode's The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex in which he devotes a whole chapter (and there're only 6 so it's a good portion of the book) to the plight of films not in the English language and those usually dreadful, misguided English-language remakes. He also asks, when was the last time you saw a "foreign language" film gracing the front cover of a film magazine like Empire. In the book he can't think of an example however he may have discovered once since, I don't know. He also complained how his announcing the BAFTA (for Film Not In The English Language) for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was cut from the BBC's programme as though it was of little interest.

Compare these points with the current cover of Empire and its coverage of "the film event of the year".


Plus I don't know what Dr K will think of Julian Sands' involvement.

Thanks to Petrona for the Empire cover suggestion.

And...just in from the Guardian... H&M have a new clothing range inspired by Lisbeth Salander:

Philip Kerr's non Bernie Project

Philip Kerr's latest and eighth Bernie Gunther book, Prague Fatale will be out later this month. He has another iron in the fire in the shape of writing a script for a Princess Diana bio-pic. From The Guardian:

Producer Stephen Evans, whose previous credits include The Madness of King George and The Wings of the Dove, is planning a $50m film about the princess, and has hired Ken Wharfe, Diana's former head of private security, and her former private secretary, Commander Patrick Jephson, to provide authenticity. No one has yet been cast in the lead role, nor has a director been attached, but Evans has commissioned a script from crime novelist Philip Kerr.

The project has been in development for two years, and apparently will focus on the difficult period of her life during her marriage to Prince Charles and their subsequent divorce in 1996 – but will not tackle her relationship with Dodi al-Fayed.

Read the whole article here.