Criminal Splatterings!!!!

The Broadcast Press Guild Awards have been announced and according to the BBC crime dramas The Fall, Broadchurch and Top of the Lake have all been nominated.  They are all up for four prizes including best drama.  The winners will be announced at a ceremony in London on 28 March.

According to the BBC crime writer Lynda La Plante is writing a prequel to her incredibly successful series Prime Suspect.  The book will be published in 2015 and the TV adaptation will air in 2016, the 25th anniversary year of Prime Suspect and will start when Tennison joins the force in the late 1970s or early 1980s.  More information can be found on the Guardian website.

The BBC Two have also announced that they have commissioned London Spy a new 5 part spy thriller by author Tom Robb Smith.  Shooting will start this year with transmission taking place on BBC Two in 2015.  More information can be found here.  The is also a really interesting interview by Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph with Tom Rob Smith and he explains about writing his latest novel The Farm  off the back of his mother’s serious illness which resulted in her being admitted to an asylum for a period of time.

For those that enjoy watching the legal drama Silk the BBC have announced a third series. More information can be read here.

Shetland the drama series based on the novels of Ann Cleeves is set to return to the BBC for a second series.  The three two part series will be based on the novels Raven Black, Dead Water and Blue Lightning.

The 2014 Northern Crime Writing Competition is open for submissions.  Entry fees for the competition are: £25 for the novels and £10 for short stories. To find out more about the competition go to the Moth Publishing website.  The winning novels will be published in print and as e-books in 2015. The winning writers will receive a standard publishing contract, a £1,000 advance, and support to editorially develop their work. They will also enjoy a marketing and PR campaign to support the publication of their books. Short story winners will get £100 and their story published in the very first Northern Crime Short Story Anthology.

The finalists for the 34th annual L.A. Times Book Prizes were announced on Wednesday 19 February.  The full list can be found here but the Mystery /Thriller nominations are as follows –

Hour of the Red God by Richard Crompton (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Co.)
Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Doubleday Books)
The Rage by Gene Kerrigan (Europa Editions)
The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach, (Viking)

Huge congratulations to (one of my favourite author’s) Italian Crime Writer Andrea Camilleri who was recently awarded the Pepe Carvalho Prize for lifetime work at the BCNegra noir literary festival in Barcelona.  The Pepe Carvalho prize is named after the protagonist of the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s detective novels. Camilleri named his protagonist after Montalbán. See here for more information from the L.A. Times.

The winner of the £5,000 Telegraph Harvill Secker crime writing competition for an unpublished manuscript is Abir Mukherjee. His novel, A Rising Man, is set in Calcutta in the dying days of the Raj and opens with the brutal murder of a British burra sahib. Mukherjee's submission was picked from a pool of 400 submissions.

Crime Story a new festival for crime fiction lovers, is coming to Newcastle at the University of Northumbria on May 31st. The organizers have added a fun twist: they've commissioned author Ann Cleeves to invent a fictional crime which will then be investigated by various experts including forensic scientists, police detectives and legal eagles.  Authors Louise Welsh, Margaret Murphy (A D Garrett) and Peter Guttridge will also be in attendance.  More information can also be found here.

According to Deadline.Com Dennis Lehane is adapting the Douglas Perry's new biography, Eliot Ness: The Rise And Fall Of An American Hero, for WGN America. The project chronicles the two decades of the famed prohibition agent following his take-down of Al Capone.

Jada Pinkett Smith has also signed up to be the villain in the Batman prequel Gotham.  According to Deadline.com Gotham which has a series commitment is based on DC characters from the Batman universe and explores the origin stories of Commissioner James Gordon (McKenzie) as an idealistic rookie detective in Gotham City, along with Bruce Wayne and the villains who made Gotham City famous. Smith will play Fish Mooney, an imposing, hotheaded and notoriously sadistic gangster boss and nightclub owner with street smarts and almost extra-sensory abilities to read people like an open book who is not one to be crossed.

According to Deadline.Com Debra Messing who is best known in the UK for the comedy Will and Grace is set to star in the NBC pilot The Mysteries of Laura which is  based on the popular Spanish series Los Misterios De Laura, The Mysteries Of Laura follows the life and relationships of Laura Diamond (Messing), a female homicide detective who can handle murderous criminals — but not her hell-raising twin children.

Deadline is also reporting that Rose Rollins is set as one of the leads in TNT's legal drama pilot Guilt By Association, based on the novels by former prosecutor Marcia Clark, while Jamey Sheridan, (Homeland) has been cast in TNT's action-drama pilot Agent X, starring Sharon Stone.

ITV has commissioned an eighth series of Inspector Lewis with Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox reprising their roles as Oxford detectives. This series will find Hathaway (Laurence Fox) has been promoted to Inspector after an extended break from the force, with the retired Lewis (Kevin Whately) drafted back to renew their partnership.

In the Independent Boyd Tonkin interviews Eva Gabrielsson about Stieg Larsson’s legacy and the announcement that there is to be a fourth book written by David Lagercrantz.