Move over Jane Marple, here comes Precious Ramotswe.

Grammy Award winning singer and actress Jill Scott will star in an upcoming HBO series based on Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling series of mystery novels about a female-owned detective agency in Botswana. The title of both the mystery series and the fictional detective agency is The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Jill Scott plays Precious Ramotswe, and Akika Noni Rose of “Dreamgirls” will also star in the series, as Ramotswe’s quirky secretary.

I love a good mystery series and I especially like women detectives so I’m looking forward to this.

For more info. head over to Black Voices

The movie adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” will air on ABC on February 25, 2008. The smashing cast includes Sean Combs, Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan and John Stamos.

The film has also been selected to be screened at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2008. According to ABC, this will be the first time that a broadcast network film will be featured at the festival. Talk about stellar! This film has blockbuster written all over it.

According the ABC Television Network, the special three-hour television drama portrays a brief period of time in the life of the Younger family, living and struggling on Chicago ’s South Side in the 1950s, as they anxiously await the arrival of a $10,000 life insurance check made out to Lena Younger (Phylicia Rashad, “The Cosby Show”), the family matriarch, from the estate of her late husband, Walter Lee. Everyone in the family has their own ideas about how they plan to use their new-found wealth and are eager for their new lives to start.

Now for a bit of history about this groundbreaking production: “A Raisin in the Sun” was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. It premiered in 1959 with a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett Jr. A Columbia Pictures feature with the same cast followed in 1961.

In a later stage adaptation, Phylicia Rashad won the Best Actress Tony Award, becoming the first African American actress to ever win the Tony in this category. Audra McDonald won the Best Featured Actress Tony Award for her role in the play, and Sanaa Lathan was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress for her performance.

Sean Combs appeared opposite Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball” and made his acting debut in the film “Made.”

The modern popular cast and early acclaim should bring this long-lived production to a whole new generation.

“A Raisin in the Sun” Movie Trailer

Illustration credit: phi2/iStockphoto