Sleuth

Playwright Anthony Shaffer's murder mystery "Sleuth" opens Friday at Irvine Valley College's Forum Theatre. Performances will be Thursdays through Sundays through March 2. "Sleuth," one of the longest-running plays in the history of London theater, was a winner of the Drama Critics Circle Award. The theater is on the college's campus, 5500 Irvine Center Drive. Performances Thursday through Saturday begin at 8 p.m., while Sunday matinees are at 2 p.m.

Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara published her first Mas Arai mystery in 2004; the series starring the Japanese American gardener and crime solver is now on its fifth novel, "Strawberry Yellow. " She visited our video booth at the L.A. Times Festival of Books to talk with staff writer Carolyn Kellogg about the character and its connection to her heritage. Japanese gardeners were iconic in Southern California in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, Hirahara explains. But detectives -- not so much.

SURELOCK lost his biggest single bet of the meeting, $200, when Exbourne was third in the ninth race, but finished with an $88 profit Sunday after hitting the exacta in the seventh. SURELOCK's Sun. Bankroll: $1,586 Sunday's Profit: $88 Current Bankroll: $1,674 Bob Mieszerski, who had taken the lead over the computer Saturday, dropped behind again when Bray Bay finished far back in the sixth race. Bob's Sun. Bankroll: $1,767.20 Sunday's Loss: $100 Current Bankroll: $1,667.

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes. Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it. Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and...

After Swedish author Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels became beloved detective stories but before Kenneth Branagh starred in English-language TV versions of the books, two series of television episodes featuring the character were made in Sweden. One of these 90-minute installments, translated in English as "The Revenge," has been released theatrically in America, although its enjoyment level remains strictly that of something you'd cozy up to at home on the couch: hardly cinematic but economically steered by director Charlotte Brandstrom.

It goes without saying in detective fiction that the hero will always be the smartest person in the room, though lately on television there has been a rage for the super-gifted, even supernaturally gifted (and usually female) sleuth, whose powers of observation and intuition are insisted upon as part of the premise. (See "The Closer," "Medium," "Cold Case," "Bones," "The Inside" and "Criminal Minds."

Mysteries and thrillers are two distinct forms of the crime fiction genre. The former revolve around the investigation of a crime by a professional or amateur sleuth; thrillers usually pit a hero against a villain whose diabolical plot is uncovered as the story progresses. Thrillers are particularly distinguished by their sense of urgency, placing the reader in the middle of the action, sometimes alongside the perpetrator. Sometimes mysteries and thrillers get their literary DNA scrambled and give rise to memorable hybrids like Thomas Harris' "The Silence of the Lambs" or Michael Connelly's "The Poet.

One of the hardest tasks a crime writer faces is how to keep a long-running series fresh. The worst-case scenario is when authors let their detective run amok far longer than necessary, leading to an exasperated fan base that buys new installments out of grudging loyalty. Case in point: The bite and vigor of Robert B. Parker's "Spenser" series has diminished into softened decrepitude, with the Boston private eye more content to sit around and lob gentle sallies at his psychologist lady love Susan Silverman (and marvel at the ones he gets in return)

CBS, which is giving viewers a chance to vote on pilot shows being aired this summer on "CBS Summer Playhouse," got a thumbs up on last Friday night's presentation of "The Saint." With Andrew Clarke starring as legendary British sleuth Simon Templar, "The Saint" received 40,218 yes to 3,715 no votes, the network said Monday. Viewers can cast their votes via a special 900 telephone number. Each call costs 50 cents.

Somewhere along the line--specifically with "Sleuth"--the thriller became the fooler, a naked duel between the playwright and the audience as to who could outsmart the other. "Watch out, she's got a knife!" In a thriller--by the second act, anyway--you could be pretty sure it was a real knife. In the fooler, maybe not. Maybe "she" was the gamekeeper's uncle, the one we thought got killed in the first act. Maybe this wasn't a murder story at all.

Thanks to Sherlock Holmes and his Doctor Watson, we are used to detectives coming in asymmetrical pairs: Your Batman and Robin (superheroes, you say, but their career began in Detective Comics), your Poirot and Hastings, your Morse and Lewis, your Lewis and Hathaway. Your Doctor and his current companion. The hero and the protégé, the genius and the occasionally inspired sidekick. More satisfying to my sensibility is another sort of crime-solving unit: the cooperative team, with or without leader, in which each brings to the table a necessary specialty, the Scooby Gang, as it is often short-handed nowadays.

Guns in hand, groups of camouflaged hunters trudged through the Florida Everglades on Saturday hoping to bag a giant Burmese python and a cash prize. Florida's Python Challenge began Saturday afternoon, a monthlong event officials hope will help end the terror the invasive species has inflicted upon the environment. Nearly 800 people from more the 30 states have signed up for the challenge. Two competitions will be held. A small fraction of the contestants are professional python slayers who will compete among themselves.

Will Adam Lanza's genes help answer the incomprehensible? Connecticut's chief medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, has said that he has asked a geneticist at the University of Connecticut to contribute to the investigation of Lanza , the 20-year-old who last week shot 20 children and six adults at a school in Newtown, Conn., and then turned the gun on himself as police arrived. Hope of peering into Lanza's state of mind as he prepared his final act has been dashed by the assailant's apparent destruction of his computer's hard drive.

How many Sherlocks can dance on the head of a pin? At least one more, as it turns out. On paper, Thursday's launch of "Elementary," CBS' update of the world's first and most famous consulting detective, seems absurd. Robert Downey Jr. has given Holmes an ironic, rakish twist and action-figure potential on the big screen, while Benedict Cumberbatch dials him down to icy and vulnerable brilliance on the BBC's "Sherlock. " But David Shore's "House," which started the whole Holmesian renaissance, is notable in its absence this fall, leaving space for a straightforward police procedural accessorized with characters that evoke familiarity while projecting a thoroughly modern, and American look.

Patients were dying at the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., and the suspect was an elusive and resilient strain of bacteria called Klebsiella pnuemoniae . But how could the infectious disease control sleuths at NIH's research hospital collar the perpetrator and put an end to its reign of terror? The answer, in this most forward-leaning of research institutions, was genomic sequencing. Drug-resistant bacterial infections lurk everywhere in hospitals, with the comings and goings of sick people, tended by an army of medical professionals using common equipment including sheets, plumbing, CAT scanners and infusion pumps.

After Swedish author Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels became beloved detective stories but before Kenneth Branagh starred in English-language TV versions of the books, two series of television episodes featuring the character were made in Sweden. One of these 90-minute installments, translated in English as "The Revenge," has been released theatrically in America, although its enjoyment level remains strictly that of something you'd cozy up to at home on the couch: hardly cinematic but economically steered by director Charlotte Brandstrom.

Tokyo Heist A Novel Diana Renn Viking: 373 pp.: $17.99, ages 12 and up When Japanese culture is fused with teen fiction, the result is usually shojo manga - black-and-white graphic novels with a girlish romantic twist. In "Tokyo Heist," Japanese comics aren't the format but serve as an undercurrent in a globe-trotting, art-themed mystery novel involving missing Van Goghs, Japanese gangsters and a 16-year-old girl on the outs with her father. Violet had no idea how important her interest in all things Japanese would become when she went to live with her artist dad for a summer after years of seeing him every other month for dinner.

This much is clear: It's 1891, a year after their first adventure, and the great English detective and Dr. Watson are facing off with Professor Moriarty, a mysterious, peripheral character from their initial blockbuster. Ask the creative forces behind "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" for more details on the new Robert Downey Jr. movie, due in theaters Dec. 16, and you'll find tight lips. But the set here, a 40-minute train trip west from London, was rife with clues last winter.