Mick Herron's Slow Horses on AppleTV+: April 1

Apple TV+  announced today the premiere date and first look at the espionage series “Slow Horses,” starring Academy Award winner Gary Oldman, which will make its worldwide debut on Friday, April 1, 2022. The six-episode drama, adapted from CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning Mick Herron’s first novel in the "Slow Horses” series, will premiere globally on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday.

“Slow Horses” follows a team of British intelligence agents who serve in a dumping ground department of MI5 – Slough House. Oldman stars as Jackson Lamb, the brilliant but irascible leader of the spies who end up in Slough House due to their career-ending mistakes. Joining Oldman is a decorated ensemble cast including Academy Award nominee Kristin Scott Thomas (“Darkest Hour”), Academy Award nominee Jonathan Pryce (“The Two Popes”), BAFTA Scotland Award winner Jack Lowden (“Dunkirk”), and Olivia Cooke (“Sound of Metal”).

The series is produced for Apple by See-Saw Films and adapted for television by Will Smith (“Veep”). Graham Yost executive produces alongside Smith. Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Gail Mutrux and Douglas Urbanski also serve as executive producers on the series. James Hawes directs all six episodes and executive produces.

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 HAPPY CATURDAY!

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WRITING ABOUT WOMEN IS WRITING ABOUT SUSPENSE: Guest Post by Emilya Naymark

Emilya Naymark: Writing About Women is Writing About Suspense

I always felt that truly great women’s fiction was great suspense fiction. When I set out to write my crime novels, I knew I’d write them about women, and about the things we do to protect those we love. 

Whether you’re in the nature or nurture camp, there’s no denying women face both societal and internal pressures to be caretakers. Women are more likely than men to become the stay-at-home parent, and if not, they are more likely to adjust their careers to fit child rearing and elder care. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly 28% of all mothers do not work outside the home, vs. about 7% of all fathers. These numbers have barely changed in the past thirty years. Women also make up 58% of all caregivers in the United States, with 30% of that number providing more than twenty hours of care per week. That’s usually unpaid work, often done alongside childcare and paid work. 

Women face both external and internal pressures to give up their time for the health and happiness of others, and they do it, mostly with positive results for all involved. Now, in fiction, this is an endless goldmine with a kaleidoscopic range of conflict. 

Threaten a child or a marriage, unearth a destructive secret from the past, endanger the family home, and now you have a perfectly suspenseful conflict for a novel. Push it a little and you have a crime novel. 

In Hide in Place, the first in my Laney Bird detective series, Laney has to accept that her past might have provoked her teenage son’s disappearance. And then she must find him. Does she always follow the law? Eh… 

In the second book, Behind the Lie, a wife and mother is so consumed with safeguarding her family, she cannibalizes her own wellbeing and sanity. Breaking the law is a minor price to pay to keep everyone she loves happy and healthy. Isn’t it? 

There is a certain insanity built into being a modern, first-world woman. We are told we can do it all—enjoy a fulfilling and well-paid career, raise smart, decent humans, cook gourmet meals, take our parents to their doctor appointments when they age, attend every sports activity, play, and PTA meeting, and, above all, remain charming and entertaining whether we’re hosting a dinner party or a play date. Advertising tells us that if we’re heavier than we want to be, more wrinkled, flabbier, sadder, sicker, it’s really our fault. We haven’t tried the diet, or the lotion, or the mindfulness routine, and why have we still not bought that bottle of organic cider vinegar? 

And I thought, let me take a woman who desperately wants success at being the perfect wife-mother-sister-daughter-friend, etc., and throw impossible challenges at her. How crazy would she get? How far would she go to sustain all those balls in the air? How many crimes would she be willing to commit? Well, the answers are: kinda crazy, pretty darn far and quite a few. 

Even so, I wanted my characters to be relatable. I’ve known women who worked ridiculously hard at their paid and unpaid jobs and were still depressed because they thought they were failing. Showing this internal pull toward an unattainable ideal became extremely interesting. In Behind the Lie, this pull affects all three of the female characters whose lives intersect one blistering July night. The pull is different for each—one wants to hold her family perfectly insulated from life’s cruelty, one wants to live agelessly, forever, and one just wants to keep up. 

It’s not a spoiler to say none of them attain their goals because the goals themselves are unrealistic. But I found watching them try deeply compelling, and I hope my readers will as well. 

***

EMILYA NAYMARK is the author of the novels HIDE IN PLACE and BEHIND THE LIE, out February 8, 2022 (available for pre-order). Her short stories appear in A Stranger Comes to Town, edited by Michael Koryta, Secrets in the Water, After Midnight: Tales from the Graveyard Shift, River River Journal, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and 1+30: THE BEST OF MYSTORY. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family. 

Find her online here: 

Author website: www.emilyanaymark.com/author 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ENaymark/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/emilyanaymark 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emilyanaymark

 

Cartoon of the Day: The Hierarchy of Humor

A Pen Name for Your Thoughts: Guest Post by Molly MacRae

Molly MacRae: A Pen Name for Your Thoughts

New news on the pen name front! Did you know that I also write books under the name Margaret Welch? I do, and she has two new books coming out in 2022. They're books 4 and 11 in the Museum of Mysteries series from Annie's Fiction—a continuity series sold through a subscription book club. If you’re not familiar with the term continuity series, think Nancy Drew—a series with a strong thread of continuity running through multiple books written by multiple authors. The difference between Nancy Drew and a series from Annie’s Fiction is that Nancy’s authors all used the name Carolyn Keene. Annie’s authors use their own or pen names. 

So why did I choose the name Margaret Welch? She’s the main character in my Margaret and Bitsy short stories that first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and are collected in a volume called My Troubles. Margaret and Bitsy, not entirely compatible sisters, also appear in the novel Lawn Order. Margaret owns and runs a bookshop and I figured she’s probably always wanted to write books, in addition to reading and selling them, so now she does. Margaret also appeared in someone else’s book. Jessica Fletcher—yes, that Jessica Fletcher—chose Lawn Order for her bedtime reading in Murder, She Wrote: Domestic Malice, written with Donald Bain. Margaret and I are both thrilled by that. 

But why use a pen name? My agent and I had a long discussion of the pros and cons. The major con is that after building a loyal readership with my own name, why take the chance those readers won’t find and follow Margaret? Why build a brand and then ignore it? The answer, we decided, is because the books for Annie’s are a different brand. Under Molly MacRae I write cozy and traditional mysteries that have occasional blood, a bad word or two, and sex (off the page). The books for Annie’s Fiction are super cozy. In these books a cat will not even cough up a hairball. (I tried and the editor took it out.) And yet the books are mysteries with villains and the righting of wrongs. It’s a balancing act of writing, and Margaret and I both like a challenge. 

Will I continue writing under my own name? Yes! In fact Argyles and Arsenic, book 5 in my Highland Bookshop Mystery series, is out March 1st. Will there be a book 6 in that series? That’s where financial reality sets in. If there are enough pre-orders for Argyles and Arsenic, then the publisher will ask for more. If there isn’t another book, then I feel that I’ve left the four women and their Scottish bookshop and tearoom in good fettle. On the other hand, I worry about Geneva, the ghost in my Haunted Yarn Shop mysteries. She’s not the most stable personality, but she’s dead so it’s hard to find fault. Crewel and Unusual, book six in that series, came out several years ago with no news about more on the way. I’d like to check in with Geneva, though, so maybe Haunted Yarn Shop short stories? 

Will there be more books from Margaret, too? Yes! I just signed a contract to write a book in a new continuity series. The Whistle Stop Café Mysteries, coming in 2023, will feature amateur sleuths solving contemporary mysteries at the same time they reach back to clear up WWII era mysteries. 

So why reveal a pen name? Because there’s definitely crossover between the Molly and the Margaret brands, and in the end, books and stories are meant to be read. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

***

The New York Times says Molly MacRae writes cozies “in which the drama is tempered with humor.” She’s the award-winning author of the Highland Bookshop Mysteries and the Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries. As Margaret Welch, she writes for Annie’s Fiction.

Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on Twitter or Instagram.