WRITERS QUIETLY OR SECRETLY HIRING OTHER WRITERS TO WRITE FOR THEM

An author who hires ghosts to do the actual writing under his name makes a statement about himself, his work, the publishing industry and readers who accept the practice.

James Patterson (who reportedly assembles novels in this fashion) isn't Hemingway any more than genre writing is great literature. Still, pure genre writing has different standards than classic literature and arguably a different purpose.  Higher?  Lower?  Depends on your point of view.  Is the man who paints a house any less noble than the man who paints an oil of a pot of swirling sunflowers?  Some might say so, seeing the sunflowers are worth millions while the painted house is, well, sitting there fading in the sun.  You pick; it's your POV.

Publishing, regardless of what you've heard, is a business, and house painters generally make lots more than struggling novelists.  So, again, who is more noble?  And since publishing is a business, just how does nobility apply in the first place?

Patterson is popular and successful, so whether or not he writes by assembly line, paint by numbers or connect the dots, I don't read him, so I don't care how he manufactures his novels.  He's found his way just like Henry Ford; it works for him, it works for his publishers, it works for his readers.  As a scribbler myself, doing it his way would make me uneasy, but that doesn't tell you much because I don't collaborate well.  I find it too crowded for more than one at the keyboard.  You too, maybe?  My partner barely taps a sentence in and I'm struggling to get past his or her elbow to the delete key.

That said, have you read Vincent Lardo's attempts to write "Lawrence Sanders" Archy McNally detective novels?  I place the name Lawrence Sanders in quotes because poor (rich) Lawrence is dead and yet the publisher has put the deceased author's name huge on the covers, as if LS actually wrote the new books.  Then, in small white type at the bottom, the tiny disclaimer, "An Archy McNally Novel by Vincent Lardo."  The first problem I have is with the grossly misleading presentation, presumably some sort of quiet arrangement between enterprising publishers, ambitious Lardo and the Sanders estate.  Readers certainly weren't asked, or they might well have advised that Lardo had not mastered Sanders' plotting or his style.  Yet my opinion on this is a little unfair; the McNally novels are so deftly wonderful that maybe nobody could ever do them justice.  

I'll give you another example: Robert B. Parker trying to write Raymond Chandler novels. Parker had (he died recently) a marvelous style of his own and several firm narrative voices. Spenser first and foremost, principled and yet laconic, thuggish and yet aristocratic, a master of taut, haiku-sparse narration laced with humor. You'd think Robert B. would be perfect to continue Chandler's sparse tough guy style.  But he wasn't. 

The real problem--and it folds neatly into our original discussion, if in a somewhat back-door way--is that ghosting is tough stuff, friends.  Let's show a little sympathy here.   Let's set aside Patterson in favor of his unsung deck-o-scribblers.  My hat is off to the scribes themselves, the lonely journeyman craft-persons who can plow and weed and hoe and harvest popular tales flavored by the wealthy master and somehow keep their spirits alive while sharecropping in the shadows for peanuts.  To them one and all, I doff my cap and say You're a better man (or lady) than I am, Gunga Din. 

best,

John K.