Canongate Acquires BLACK MASS by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill

Publishing Director at Canongate, Francis Bickmore, has acquired Black Mass, the American true crime bestseller by Pulitzer prize-winning journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. A major big screen adaptation, starring Johnny Depp, Benedict Cumberbatch, Joel Edgerton, Sienna Miller, and Dakota Johnson, and written and directed by Scott Cooper, will be distributed by Warner Brothers worldwide in autumn 2015.

A gripping true tale of violence, double-cross and corruption, Black Mass exposes one of the greatest ever cases of corruption within the FBI: that of James 'Whitey' Bulger, the head of the Boston Irish Mob, and John Connolly, an FBI agent. Black Mass is the chilling true story of the pact between them over the course of two decades and the drug dealing, racketeering, and murder that it led to. The story is now legendary in the States, where Black Mass has already sold over 250,000 copies.

Bickmore says, "The film adaptation with Depp and Cumberbatch should take the story of Black Mass to a massive audience in late 2015 but we also want to establish this brilliant book, written by two Pulitzer-shortlisted journalists, as a modern true-crime classic."

Bickmore bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Isabelle Bleecker at Perseus. Canongate will publish as a stand-alone trade paperback in March 2015 followed by a film tie-in edition in summer 2015. Rights have also been sold to Rizzoli in Italy and Hugo et Cie in France.