According to The
Bookseller, publishers Century have acquired two thrillers by US author
Neely Tucker. The first set in
Washington DC in the 1990s is based on the
Princeton Place murders in DC in 1998. The
book is entitled The Ways of the Dead. More information can be found here.
Congratulations
go to Cathi Unsworth whose novel Weirdo
has had the film rights snapped up. More
information can be found here. Weirdo was
published in July 2012 by Serpent’s Tail
Interesting
news! Swedish husband and wife duo
better known as crime writer Lars Keppler have launched a literary agency. According to The Bookseller, the venture will be headed up by Head of Zeus rights
director Elisabeth Brännström.
Debut
crime novelist Luke Delaney’s novel Cold
Killing has been optioned as the basis of a multi-part TV drama. More information can be found here.
According
to Booktrade.info Bitter Lemon Press have acquired the rights to a literary crime novel
set in Bangalore. Cut Like Wound by Anita Nair will be published in May 2014 and will
be the first in a series featuring Inspector Gowda.
For those of you missing Dan Stevens, the late, lamented heartthrob of the wildly
popular Downton Abbey, he is slumming
it these days, portraying a drug trafficker in a new film currently being shot
in Brooklyn. Stevens
stars in the film, A Walk Among the Tombstones, with Liam Neeson, who portrays
a private investigator Stevens' character hires to uncover who murdered and
kidnapped his wife. The film, which will
be released next year and is being written and directed by Scott Frank, is
based on a Matt Scudder crime novel by Lawrence Block. Scott
Frank is well versed in the crime genre having writing credit for Get Shorty, Out Of Sight and an episode of Karen Sisco.
Interesting article on the BBC website where
writer and philosopher John Gray talks about Tom Ripley and the meaning of
evil. This was discussed on BBC Radio 4’s
A Point of view. The podcast can be
heard here for a limited
amount of time.
The BBC is to have a new season of drama and
documentaries exploring the Cold War. Staring
off the season will be the film Legacy,
which is based on the novel by Alan Judd and is set during the height of the
Cold War in 1970s London. More
information can be found here.
Bill Nighy is set to reprise his roll as MI5 spy
John Worricker in the second and third parts of the Worricker trilogy. Unfortunately, the BBC have not yet said when
it will be shown on BBC2. However, more
information can be found here. Turks & Caicos and Salting The Battlefield follow Page
Eight, which was shown back in August 2011.
As a result of
winning the Best Single Drama at the recent BAFTA awards for the drama, Murder the BBC have commissioned a
series based on it. More information can
be read here.
In more drama news
from the BBC, it has been announced that BBC3 have acquired Orphan Black a suspenseful thriller from
BBC America. In Orphan Black, Sarah Manning, an outsider and orphan finds her life
changing dramatically after witnessing the suicide of a woman who looks exactly
like her. She assumes her identity, her
boyfriend and her bank account. A second
series of Orphan Black has already
been announced by BBC America.
ITV have also
announced that there is to be a second series of the well received The Bletchley Circle. Set a year later in 1954 the ladies are reunited for their second case in
the first two-part story when former Bletchley
Park
Fans of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple will be pleased to learn that filming
has started on Endless Night. Once
again, featuring Julia McKenzie playing Miss Marple, Endless Night is the third Agatha Christie Marple adaptation
following A Caribbean Mystery and Greenshaw’s Folly to be commissioned by
ITV.
Still on a Miss Marple roll, if you have not seen it yet then it is well
worth seeing Murder, Marple and Me which
got rave reviews whilst having its run at Edinburgh Fringe last year and has
now transferred to London and is being shown at Ambassador Theatre for a very
limited run. CWA Short Dagger Winner
Stella Duffy directs murder, Marple and Me.
My review of the preview can be found here. Murder,
Marple and Me will have a run at The Ambassador Theatre from 11 June 2013
until 19 June 2013. Contact The
Ambassador Theatre for tickets.
Brilliant Twitter fiction by Sabine Durrant in the Guardian!
Interesting interview with Mark Billingham can be found in the Independent. His latest novel is The Dying Hours. The Independent
also have an interview with James Runcie whose second novel in the Grantchester
mysteries Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night has just been published. The series has already been optioned for
television by ITV. A recent interview with James Runcie can also been found on
the Shotsmag.co.uk
website.
Russ Litten also talks
about the day he saw his double in Prague
According to the Daily
Record, Ian Rankin has for the first time revealed the home address of
his famous fictional detective John Rebus.
Rankin had previously revealed his most famous character
lived in Arden Street in Marchmont, Edinburgh but this time he has gone further
and actually named identified the flat number.
Over in The Daily Mail, Ian Rankin has named his
top ten greatest literary crime novels.
The full list can be found here
and includes such names as Crime and
Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brighton Rock by
Graham Greene and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. The Daily Mail also has a list of top
ten criminal mastermind crime writers.
The list includes some well-known names such as Patricia Cornwell,
Harlan Coben, Ian Rankin and Lee Child.
The rest of the list can be found here.
According
to The
Scotsman Ian Rankin is joining Mark Thomson, artistic
director of Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, in writing the stage play Dark Road, which will premiere at the theatre during its 2013-14 season. The play explores the disturbing world of
serial killers. It will be Ian Rankin's
first foray into the playwriting.
According to publishers Allen &
Unwin, Norwegian bestselling author Anne Holt’s novels are being developing as a series.
BBC1 is due to start with her novel 1222, which sees Detective Hanna Wilhelmsen looking
into the mysterious deaths of survivors from a train crash, which took place
high in the Norwegian mountains. In more Anne
Holt news, Yellow
Bird production company have bought the film rights to Anne Holt’s three crime
novels What is mine, What never happens and Madam President. The books are centred on
inspector Yngvar Stubø and Inger Johanne Vik – a psychologist and lawyer with a
previous career in the FBI. They cooperate
to solve different kind of crimes, such as kidnappings, murders and terrorist
conspiracies. Yellow Bird is best known
for such films as the original Girl With
The Dragon Tattoo, the original Wallander
series and Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters.
Yellow Bird are also according to Deadline.com
producing a 10 part original series based on
an idea by bestselling Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbø. The political thriller will be entitled
Occupied and is
described as a political thriller set in a not so distant future where Russia
has staged a "silk-glove" invasion of Norway to officially secure the
oil import for the rest of the world.
Deadline.com
also reports that Stephen King's next thriller, Joyland, due to be published next month by Hard Case
Crime, has been optioned for film, with Tate Taylor adapting the book and directing. The project deals with a murder in a
small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973.
And, if you are not already fed up with all
things Dan Brown and his latest novel Inferno,
here is a quick set of links to various things a lá Dan Brown or Inferno.
Jake Kerridge review of Inferno
for the Telegraph can be found here. One of course cannot ignore the article
by Michael Deacon imploring us not to make fun of Dan Brown. James Legge reports
that with the publication of Inferno
Dan Brown’s publishers aim to have the biggest sales since the Harry Potter
series. Boyd Tonkin’s review of Inferno in the Independent can be found here. A nice round up of a number of reviews can
also be found here. John Crace in the Guardian has reduced Inferno
to an easily digestible 600
words! And if you still haven’t got
anything else to do and would like to test your knowledge of Dan Brown, you
might want to take the quiz
on all things Dan Brown!
John Dugdale has an interesting article
in the Guardian where he writes about the fact that bestselling writers know
that image counts when it comes to wanting to have a memorable character. Rachel Cooke in the Guardian reviews
the Murder Mile by Paul Collicutt, an
illustrated detective novel where a murder takes place as the race to break the
four-minute mile is happening.
According to the Guardian,
Channel 4 have announced an eight part series which is set in a "crumbling
Victorian cop shop on the wrong side of Manchester. Entitled No
Offence it promises to be a police procedural with a difference.
Fans of 24
will no doubt welcome the return of the series.
Fox Entertainment have announced the return of the thriller featuring
Keifer Sutherland as Jack Bauer.
However, it will be as a different format. Renamed 24:
Live Another Day it will return in a new 12 part series. More information can be found here.
According to Cinemablend,
the producers of James Bond have approached James Nolan to direct the next Bond
film. It is not however, a forgone
conclusion that he will accept.
According to the Hollywood
Reporter LA based British filmmaker Trevor Miller is set to direct Mark
Boone Jnr of Sons of Anarchy in a
contemporary film noir, which is set around the story of a surveillance
contractor who drifts through Los Angeles at night photographing "cheating
couples" and their illicit sexual acts.
He finds himself involved in intrigue, murder and deception when he sees
the husband of the woman that he has fallen in love with burying the body of a
woman in the desert.
USA network have also announced a number of
drama projects as well. These include The Arrangement, which is based on a
short story by Elmore Leonard.
In Bank
after an unconventional act of heroism, a young FBI agent decides to the
surprise of many to work in the bank crimes division in Los Angeles. It takes a special kind of person to confront
such an unrelenting tide of crime, leaving her peers suspicious of her intent.
Shadow
Counsel
is a legal thriller centered on Ethan, a former Army JAG attorney who is now
working as a criminal lawyer in NY and is recruited by the FBI to crack an on-going
investigation. Ethan serves as a shadow counsel
that is a secret lawyer who operates behind the scenes and completely off the
record to circumvent existing roadblocks (hired attorneys, interrogators, etc.)
in classified cases. He finds himself in
trouble and on the run with no one to trust.
According to Deadline.com. Paris-based Backup Media has teamed up
with Memento Films International to finance Cold in July an adaptation of the Joe Lansdale cult novel. Cold in
July tells the story of Richard Dane, who wakes up during a home
invasion and kills his intruder in self-defence. As if that was not bad enough, the intruder’s
father is a badass ex-con with plans to avenge his son’s death in the Old
Testament way, by killing Dane’s own son.
According
to The
Hollywood Reporter Simon Beaufoy
is set to adapt Len Deighton’s spy novels for television. He is developing
an 18-part series based on Deighton’s
classic Cold War novels featuring spy Bernard Samson.
And in more news about book adaptations, according to TV Guide.com,
TNT have ordered 10 episodes of the drama Legends, which is based on
the novel by Robert Littell of the same name, is about an undercover
agent named Martin Odum who works for the FBI's Deep Cover Operations division. Martin can transform himself into a
completely different person for each job, but starts to question his own
identity when a stranger suggests that he is not the man he believes himself to
be. It will feature Sean Bean who
can currently be seen in Games of Thrones. The series will be shown in 2014.
According
to The
Hollywood Reporter, Blair Underwood is set to star as Raymond Burr in
the remake of Ironside. It has been picked up by NBC. The remake of the 1960s
series stars Blair Underwood as a tough, sexy but acerbic police detective
relegated to a wheelchair after a shooting who, hardly limited by his disability,
he pushes and prods his handpicked team to solve the most difficult cases in
the city.
