Criminal Splatterings!

According to Deadline.com, both Tom Hank s and Ron Howard will return as star and director in the Dan Brown novel Inferno.  Sony, which has film rights to the franchise, has just set a December 18, 2015 release date.  It also looks as if Hanks will reprise his role as symbologist Robert Langdon in The Lost Symbol but it looks as if it will not be Ron Howard who will direct it and The Lost Symbol is currently on the backburner.  More information can also be found here and here.

According to Book2Book Jade Chandler, Commissioning Editor for Sphere has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Lance Fitzgerald at Simon & Schuster US in Face Off, an unprecedented collaboration between twenty-three of the world's bestselling crime writers in which the authors' series characters meet in eleven co-written stories.  More information about the deal can be found here.  The collection will be published in June 2014.

According to The Guardian Ben Affleck is set to star as Nick in the lead role of the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

Congratulations go to the brilliant Jason Pinter who has according to Book2Book launched   a new digital publishing venture called Polis Books.  The company will be publishing e-book editions of new and backlist fiction in three genres: crime, under an imprint called Vice; science fiction/fantasy, under an imprint called Elysium; and romance/erotica/commercial women's fiction, under the Crave imprint.  The website www.polisbooks.com will go live in around a month.

Former MP Chris Mullin’s thriller The Year of the Fire Monkey has according to the Telegraph been optioned by Paul Greengrass, who directed two of the Jason Bourne movies.  The thriller, about a CIA sleeper in Tibet, is set against the backdrop of the meeting between Chairman Mao and President Nixon in 1972.  It was first published in 1991 and has long been out of print.

Sam Mendes is set to return to direct the next James Bond film.  The next (yet unnamed) instalment is due to be released on 23 October 2015.  More information can be found here.

Another addition to Christopher Fowler’s Invisible Ink: No 181 – Saved From Obscurity can be found here.

Interesting article in the Independent about the rise of French Noir.