JOIN USHave you noticed how several dead authors still seem to have new titles in bookstores?! I’ve puzzled a bit over this, and concluded perhaps that it was some unfinished book being published posthumously.
How else to explain new books from an author who is long dead? It never occurred to me that they could all be ghostwritten.
Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, Alistair McLean, Jane Austen (!), Arthur Hailey, Douglas Adams, Michael Crichton are the motley crew that come to mind.
They had all become brands, and thus the name was enough to begin a new franchise…a new series. Publishers count on a public forgetting that a writer they have been reading is now dead.
I know several readers who assumed if there were as many as 12 Ludlum thrillers, he must surely be alive and well and writing furiously.
The case of Ludlum and ghostwriting is less straightforward and strange — some recent Ludlum bestseller state on the cover: Robert Ludlum and Eric Van Lustbader.
Apparently, Lustbader and Ludlum knew each other well, and often discussed the craft of writing the perfect thriller together.
When Ludlum died in 2001, his publisher made known to the world that the author had left behind unfinished books, drafts in various stages, and even outlines of plots.
These were to be elaborated by other bestselling authors, and Lustbader was the ideal choice to particularly continue the Bourne series.
What these bestselling authors have in common is an overwrought style that could be easily mimicked. Why, I know the books of Sheldon and company so well, I could dash them off myself…but hold on — the plot: can I plot as cleverly? That requires talent; genuine talent.
Ghostwriters aren’t to be dismissed so easily. Sequels aren’t equals we know, but ghostwritten sequels? Would I read them? I asked myself.
And answered — no. The author still mattered to me, not the book. It could be as good as anything Ludlum turned out in his best days, but I wouldn’t bite. (Ironically, Eric Van Lustbader is a writer I like more than Ludlum, but Lustbader writing as Ludlum leaves me cold).
It’s a personal hang-up, I know. Because I have no problem with sequels in movies. So what if The Empire Strikes Back is not directed by George Lucas, I’ll still run to see it.
Suppose we ask ourselves: would we read a new ghostwritten Harry Potter or George Martin? Probably not, would be most readers’ answer. Rowling’s and Martin’s personality is bound up with the books, and even if some wizard writer conjured a worthy Potter and Game of Thrones adventure, we’d stop at some point to wonder if we were not being taken for a ride.
Would I read a ghostwritten Dan Brown thriller? I probably would. Brown is that kind of writer. You long for more code breaking and juicy conspiracies. And if someone can provide half the kind of thrills he provides, then I’ll be the first to check the new ghostwritten Langdon adventure.
There are, it would seem, all kinds of ghosting. Take the even stranger case of James Patterson. He apparently only plots his books, and then a team of writers shape the next bestseller.
His readers (are they really his readers?) know this too and don’t care. What Kaavya Vishwanathan and the book packaging company, Alloy Entertainment, did with Opal Mehta is a kind of ghostwriting, too! If she hadn’t passed all of it as her own writing and taken the huge advance, it could be seen as ultimate homage to the writers who had actually deeply influenced her.
Like plagiarism, ghostwriting is also a form of homage. To mimic an author’s style so well that you can’t tell the original from the imitation.
For some years now it has been a tradition with the literary estate of Ian Fleming to invite a literary — not just bestselling — writer to pen the new James Bond adventure.
Sebastian Faulks’s Devil May Care was published to mark Fleming’s 100 birth anniversary. (An interesting aside here is how Faulks actually discovered Fleming’s books in school through his Indian classmate who urged James Bond on him.
Over the years, Faulks lost contact with him and when Devil May Care had its book release in 2008, he traced his classmate in Mumbai — now working in an advertising agency — and had him flown to London).
This is ghosting with pedigree, and is more commonly observed with literary sequels.
Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett, the sequel to Gone with the Wind, Susan Hill’s Mrs DeWinter, the follow up to De Maurier’s Rebecca, Mark Winegardener’s The Godfather Returns, and the umpteen sequels to Pride and Prejudice.
Tweaking classics took a strange new turn with 2009’s entry from Quirk Books, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies where the Bennet girls, trained in the art of judo, fight the Undead, filling the book with 80 per cent Austen and 20 percent ‘ultraviolent zombie mayhem’.
More such ‘expanded Quirk editions’ of classics (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Jane Slayre, Android Karenina) are already well on their way! This is like real ghosts writing — which of course makes it: ghost writing!