Criminal Splatterings!

According to the Bookseller, publishing house Quercus is up for sale!  This is despite less than a week after c.e.o. Mark Smith saying that a merger was not on the cards for the firm.

According to Booktrade.info Harlequin Mira have won the rights to three crime novels by Death in Paradise creator and writer Robert Thorogood.  More information can be read here. Harlequin will publish the first novel in hardback in January 2015, with the paperback edition following in June 2015.

One should not be surprised, but according to USA Today Dan Brown’s novel Inferno was the bestselling novel of the year.  The full article can be found here.

Really good article in the Guardian by Anne Cleeves on crime books in translation.  She talks about her favourite ones which include Simenon and Camillieri. The full article can be read here.

The British Library are to host the biggest British Comic Exhibition this year.  Comics Unmasked Art and Anarchy in the UK is due to take place at the British Library from 2 May until 2014 until 19 August 2014 and will feature some of the biggest names in comics, including Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), Neil Gaiman (Sandman), Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum), the British comics tradition stretches back to the Victorian era and beyond.  More information can be found at the BBC and in the Guardian and The Telegraph.  The British Library are also due to host Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination between 3 October until 27 January 2015 an exhibition that will examine how Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 influenced the likes of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker.  Coinciding with the exhibition will be a BBC Four season on gothic literature, due to be broadcast in the autumn.

Laura Wilson’s round-up of crime fiction in the Guardian includes the final book in Malcolm Mackay’s Glasgow trilogy, Eva Dolan and Willey cash.

And if you missed this news in between Christmas and New Year a legal ruling has given film-makers and authors the right to create their own Sherlock Holmes stories in the US without having to pay a licence fee. The article in the Guardian can be read here.

Interesting article in The Telegraph by Jon Stock on what is supposed to be the latest book craze “Chick Noir”. He talks not only about Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl but also Season to Taste by Natalie Young which has just been published by Tinder Press.

According to the BBC and Deadline it appears that the plug has been pulled on the planned remake of Murder, She Wrote.  The new version was due to star Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. 

According to the BBC the hugely successful Father Brown series based on the stories by GK Chesterton, has been recommissioned for a third series by BBC One Daytime in collaboration with BBC Worldwide.

Also for the first time in 20 years Michael Palin is to head the cast of a supernatural thriller.  Remember Me is due to be shown on BBC One and Palin will play Tom Parfitt, a frail, old Yorkshire man seemingly alone in the world, whose admittance to a nursing home triggers a series of inexplicable events.  More information can be found here.

 

Deutscher Krimi Preis have announced the winners of the thirtieth Deutscher Krimi Preis with the German-language prize going to M, by Friedrich Ani, with second place going to Robert Hültner’s Am Endes Des Tages ( At the End of the Day) and third place going to Matthias Wittekindt’s Marmormanner (Marble Men).  The translated prize going to Ladrão de Cadáveres by In Praise of Lies-author Patrícia Melo.  Second plac went to John Le Carré's  Delicate Truth  whilst Jerome Charyn’s Under The Eye of God took third place.

 

According to Booktrade.info Northern Irish crime fiction writer Anthony Quinn's The Blood-Dimmed Tide his first historical crime thriller, featuring W.B. Yeats, to Ion Mills at No Exit Press, in a three-book deal, for publication in 2014, by Paul Feldstein at The Feldstein Agency