Ron Howard currently has an extraordinary 24 future projects listed as "in development" on the IMDb. We can now make that 25, since he and his Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer have just nabbed the rights to the bestselling novel **The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair. Howard is set to direct as well as produce.
The book is by the Genevan Joel Dicker, and has already been a breakout worlwide smash hit, with its English translation incoming shortly. The story is set in America, and revolves around a struggling author (the title's Harry Quebert) who once had a crush on 15-year-old Nola Kellergan. 33 years later her body is discovered in his garden, along with a manuscript copy of his first published work.
Understandably finding himself pretty much the only suspect in the case, things are looking bleak for Quebert. But his younger protege, Marcus Goldman, resolves to unravel the mystery, shaking off a nasty case of writer's block as the salacious story grips the nation. The truth, of course, turns out to be stranger than fiction.*
Howard has just finished filming Heart Of The Sea, based on the Nathaniel Philbrick book, and he and Grazer are also working on a third Dan Brown film based on Inferno. It's not yet clear whether that or Harry Quebert (or something else) is at the top of Howard's immediate agenda, but we'd have to cross our fingers for Quebert over any more Robert Langdon...
The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair will be published in the UK by MacLehose Press on May 1.
*But it does not involve changing all the colours of the blocks making up an isometric 3D pyramid{