All right, this will be my last fraud-related post of the week. Probably. On Media Assassin, Harry Allen has video of Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones (Love and Consequences, 2008), explaining what her upbringing was like:

“We used to say, growing up, ‘I’m not from America, I’m from South Central L.A.’”

Ouch!

(Via.)

A great detective story, starring journalist and author Robert Fisk. From The Independent (”The curious case of the forged biography,” by Robert Fisk):

Needless to say, I noticed one or two problems with this book. It took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn’t seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja - and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe. “After the American rejection of the Iraqi weapons report to the UN,” ‘Robert Fisk’ wrote, “the beating of war drums turned into a cacophony…”

Dare I suggest to readers that this kind of cliche doesn’t sound like Robert Fisk? The only war drums I could hear were those of my own astonishment. For I never wrote this book. It wasn’t plagiarism - a common practice in Cairo, which is why I ensure that all my real books are legally published in Arabic in Lebanon. No, this wasn’t plagiarism. This was forgery.

A long but interesting piece on author anonymity–and pseudonymity–in the Guardian (”The great unknown“). The proudly bylined John Mullan examines the reasons that writers, from Sir Walter Scott to Joe Klein, have chosen to hide in plain sight. His conclusion? That writers don’t do it because they’re afraid:

Indeed, in these cases as in many others, the authors did not really expect to remain hidden. If you follow in any detail the use of anonymity by literary writers - satirists, poets, dramatists and novelists - you will find that only rarely was final concealment the aim. Provoking curiosity and conjecture - highlighting the very question of authorship - was more often the calculated effect.

Or, more succinctly:

The main lesson is a simple one: that anonymity is most successful when it provokes the search for an author.

Luke Harding had an interesting piece (”Move over Tolstoy“) in the Guardian yesterday about Boris Akunin (aka Grigory Chkhartishvili) author of the Erast Fandorin novels (The Winter Queen, 2003; The Turkish Gambit, 2005; The Death of Achilles, 2006; Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, 2007). Described as “the country’s most successful contemporary author and in those terms the closest Russia has to JK Rowling,” Akunin got his start by the employing one of the classic principles of business: identify a need.

Akunin began writing in the 1990s for Russia’s new middle class. At the time, post-communist Russians had two choices of reading: classical masters such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or pulp fiction.

Akunin spotted the gap. Realising, as he puts it, that every class needs a “literature it can read and enjoy”, he invented a new kind of detective genre set in imperial Russia. 

Sure to be anthologized in the Russian edition of Writer’s Market, if such a thing exists.

The Turcotte family has settled their lawsuit against Augusten Burroughs and St. Martin’s, reports the Boston Globe (”Family settles with ‘Running with Scissors’ author, publisher,” by Rodrique Ngowi):

Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, agree to call the work a “book” instead of “memoirs,” in the author’s note and to change the acknowledgments page in future editions to say that the Turcotte family’s memories of events he describes “are different than my own,” and expressing regret for “any unintentional harm” to them, according to Howard Cooper, an attorney for the family. He said financial terms of the settlement are confidential.

Publishers Lunch, however, is reporting that Burroughs and St. Martin’s crossed their fingers.

But in a subsequent statement released this morning, St. Martin’s takes the opposite view. They call it “a very favorable settlement” and say they see it “as a complete vindication of the accuracy of the memoir.” They note the text of the book remains unchanged “other than a few trivial changes to the front matter” and underscore that the book can still be described as “memoir” on the cover and elsewhere.Burroughs says in the statement in part: “Running With Scissors is still called a memoir. It always has been a memoir, and the family expressly agreed that it will continue to be called one…. Not one word of the actual memoir itself has been changed or altered in any way. The text is exactly as I wrote it, intended it, and lived it.” 

 

People often use sports as a metaphor for real life, but in sports, both sides can’t claim victory. Oh well. Two minor details jumped out at me. First, the Turcottes’ claim that:

“This settlement is the most powerful vindication of those sentiments that we can imagine.”

Or, translated: we clearly weren’t going to get what we wanted, so we adjusted our imaginations accordingly.

Also, I had somehow missed the fact that the name Augusten Burroughs is itself a fiction. (Real name: Christopher Robison, by A. A. Milne.) I should have known: all the really cool author names are made up. So perhaps the clew was there all along.

(Read Booklist’s review of Running with Scissors, written before all this argle-bargle and foofaraw.)

Ghosttown, the third novel in Mercedes Lambert’s trilogy featuring L.A. attorney Whitney Logan, comes out from Five Star this month. Lambert was the pen name of Douglas Anne Munson, who died of cancer in 2003. The first two Logan books, Dogtown and Soultown, will be reissued by Stark House next spring. All three were written in the 1990s.

The L.A. Times this week profiled Munson, who apparently came across as “a tough chick” until one noticed that “she was painfully soft-spoken and so fragile her hands would tremble”:

“Like a lot of noir novels, the career of Douglas Anne Munson, a hard-boiled Los Angeles writer who once seemed like one of the city’s bright new lights, just gets murkier and more confusing the closer you look. …

“…despite her early success that included rave reviews and anchoring a sizable magazine article on L.A.’s then-nascent noir revival, she never quite arrived as a writer.

“In fact, after some early success, she spiraled downward when the conclusion to her trilogy was rejected by her publisher. Health problems, severe depression, a stint of homelessness in Santa Monica, an escape to Prague and death by cancer in 2003 followed. …

“Her advocates describe her as a potentially major figure, ahead of her time for her hard-bitten female protagonists and her portrayal of multicultural L.A. in love and squalor.  …

“…her key inspiration was probably Raymond Chandler, and Munson was acutely conscious of dressing Chandler’s work in drag: Each of the detective novels includes an epigraph from his work…”

As LA Observed noted, Munson “has champions in Michael Connelly, Carolyn See, John Rechy and Jonathan Kellerman. Also in Denise Hamilton, the editor of L.A. Noir…”

Here’s an excerpt from the hot-off-the-presses Booklist review of Ghosttown:

“Much of Ghosttown is superb, diamond-hard noir, but mimicking the late author’s life, it devolves into surreal meanderings.”

Sounds like one of those books that’s better if you’re immersed in the back story. And reading that back story is enough to have any mystery author reaching for a stiff drink.

Another blog book (I’ll never type “blook,” no blook references here so look elsewhere if you like the look, sound and mouthfeel of blook) made headlines over the weekend, as the New York Times outed the Forbes technology writer behind the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog after following the trail of breadcrumbs contained in then-anonymous scribe Daniel Lyons’ book proposal:

“In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, ‘Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.’

“Unlike the off-the-cuff ramblings on his blog, ‘Options’ is a well-plotted satire that imagines Apple’s chief executive grappling with his real-life stock option backdating troubles and getting help, and bad advice, from friends like Larry Ellison, Bono and Al Gore.

“The book, in part, led to Mr. Lyons’s unmasking. Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine. The New York Times found Mr. Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of ‘Fake Steve’ to a blog Mr. Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point.”

 The last entry in Lyons’ personal blog dates back to April. Guess it must be more fun–and profitable–to be Fake Steve Jobs, off-the-cuff rambler and lampooner of Mr. iPod…

Yet another why-don’t-publishers-recognize-good-writing story (”The author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers’ pride and prejudice,” by Steven Morris, The Guardian). I’m shocked, shocked that contemporary publishers don’t want to publish something that seems as if it was written 200 years ago. Even if they didn’t recognize that it was Jane Austen, they may have realized that it was Jane Austen-like, and therefore something that had already been done.

(And they may not have recognized it because the people who open the mail are probably 22 years old. But anyway, is it truly a crime if people haven’t read Jane Austen? If so, I guess the police are coming for me – I always preferred Dickens.)

I’d write more, but I think the best response was written by Grumpy Old Bookman (”Notes from a long weekend“):

Ho hum. This is, frankly, very boring. The last time someone did this, I wrote about it at excessive length, giving, in a footnote, full details of several other occasions on which exactly the same thing was done with the same results.

This time I think I’m going to ignore it.

If you follow the link to his earlier post, he does indeed go on at some length, entertainingly (and, of course, grumpily), about why the story doesn’t matter — and why it says more about newspapers’ need for recyclable stories:

Well, we could go on all day about this. But let me say that my sympathies are entirely with the agents and publishers whose time was wasted in this futile exercise. Secondly, I want to make it clear that the experiment does tell us some useful and interesting things about publishing, but not the things that the Sunday Times reporters seem to think it does.

One last thought: if we had a time-travel machine and took a handwritten manuscript of, oh, say, The Road, to Jane Austen’s publisher, would we expect him to recognize the book’s timeless qualities and rush it into print? Or to reject it as being an odd thing not quite right for the tastes of the times? We still read Austen because her books are a part of literary history, not because it speaks to our psyches better than contemporary fiction does.

Galleycat had an interesting take on the Laura Albert/JT Leroy verdict last week (”But What If “JT Leroy” Wasn’t a Fraud?“):

Even if one maintains reservations on the appropriateness of the lengths Albert went to in order to ensure “JT” was the public face of her work - and acknowledging the point that signing a contract under a, let’s say, extra-legal name probably isn’t the most kosher of actions - if we’re going to start finding fraud in authors choosing literary personae at odds with their material realities… well, let’s just say it’s not exactly a healthy precedent.

It’s an excellent point. It would be extremely troubling if authors started getting sued en masse because the way they represent themselves isn’t exactly true. (You mean you’re not really a vampire who wears sunglasses and rides motorcycles?!) Remember that this has to do not with James Frey-like inaccuracies in a memoir – the book in question, Sarah, was a novel — but with the fact that the author whose sensational story helped sell the book did not, in fact, exist.

The particulars of this case, however, are so unique that it seems highly unlikely it could be used as a precedent. (Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer.) Probably the judge should have told everyone to go home before it even went to trial, but I find myself in the strange position of sympathizing with the movie producers who thought they were getting a hot property. After all, art and artist seem inextricably entwined these days. And even if Sarah is a good novel on its own merits, would it have gotten the same kind of attention without the mysterious persona of its author? The meta-movie solution proposed by the plaintiff does have kind of a twisted brilliance, acknowledging the true nature of the original deal: what they wanted was a movie based on a book written by a person of note. And Laura Albert is suddenly far more interesting than JT Leroy.

But all those arguments aside, and as Galleycat notes, it could come down simply to the fact that the name on the dotted line wasn’t connected to a real person. Surely that can’t be a legal contract.

But who knows? Maybe Tucker Max will be sued once it’s revealed that he’s actually a 40-year-old virgin.

Which would leave me conflicted. Certainly someone should sue him for something. But then again . . .

Okay, I’ve completely missed the latest development in this nearly two-century-old controversy. Fortunately for me, Dan Kraus trolls for book news in the unlikeliest places. To be fair, I’m sure it was a saved keyword search that alerted him. Or maybe he found it on Salon first.

Long story short: there’s long been suspicion that Mary Shelley, given her inability to follow it up with another worldwide bestseller, didn’t write Frankenstein. A guy named John Lauritsen, a Harvard-educated independent scholar, has a book about it called The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein.

There’s a nice summary on Suicide Girls (”Who Wrote Frankenstein?“):

Now, however, one scholar is claiming that the story might not be true, at least when it comes to Mary Shelley and her monster. How did a marginally-educated nineteen-year old come up with what is now thought of as one of the first science-fiction novels, and why didn’t she ever write anything of merit again? Perhaps she wasn’t the author at all, according to John Lauritsen, who claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley actually wrote the novel.

They link to an article in Perth Now (”Frankenstein’s fraud“):

Even Mary seemed slightly amazed by the genesis of the monster when she was older.

Nearly a decade after her husband died in a boating accident, she wondered: “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea.”

And both sources cite the ever-citable Camille Paglia, who, on Salon (”Hilary vs. Obama: It’s a drawl!”) is in fine fettle:

This book, which is a hybrid of mystery story, polemic and paean to poetic beauty, shows just how boring literary criticism has become over the past 40 years. I haven’t been this exhilarated by a book about literature since I devoured Leslie Fiedler’s iconoclastic essays in college back in the 1960s. All that crappy poststructuralism that poured out of universities for so long pretended to challenge power but was itself just the time-serving piety of a status-conscious new establishment. Lauritsen’s book shows what true sedition and transgression are all about.

(227 blog reactions — about to be 1 more.)

I’m torn here. On the one hand, I love a good literary scandal, so I want to believe that Mr. Shelley wrote it. On the other hand, the original tale of the book’s origins is so great that I want to believe in Mrs. Shelley.

Maybe they wrote it together?