Wandering around Waterstones in my usual daze of disappointment (why has our Waterstones, as opposed to almost every other one I go in, not got any of my books?), I came across the new James Bond book, written by Sebastian Faulks.
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Imagine my surprise (as they say) to see that Faulks did it writing as Ian Fleming.
Spooky! Did he have a seance, or just get himself into Fleming mindset? I think I will produce my next popular science book writing as Albert Einstein. It seems just as reasonable, and presumably I will sell lots more copies that way.
Now that’s what I call a ghost writer.
Yes, the ‘Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming’ also had me wondering. But what’s the alternative? If it had just been Ian Fleming, people would have wondered, given that Fleming is dead, and would (rightly) suspect that it was someone else wot dun it. But if it had been just Sebastian Faulks, people would have asked whether he should be writing about Bond except as high-class fanfic. The ‘Ian Fleming’ is therefore less a dead author than a brand name, giving a stamp of legitimacy to the exercise, such that Faulks’ Bond would be admitted to the canon. Honestly, the things we do for England.
Sorry, Henry, I don’t buy it.
There have been lots of examples of sequels/extensions to the canon from Sherlock Holmes stories to sequels to Peter Pan and Rebecca, but never this bizarre ‘writing as’ concept. It’s just silly.
I’ve started a novel writing as Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The only problem is that I can’t think of a decent first sentence.
When I read the title of this post, I was reminded of one of those unpleasant experiences for commissioning editors: finding out that the expert that you have chosen is dead.
This is not a terribly good story as I don’t really want to say who the author was, but these are the relevant points:
- he was the author of the largest number of articles in that subject area in 2006
- he had a webpage that said that it had been updated in 2006
- on contacting his secretary, I found out that he had died in 2005.
I really did not intend that first statement to be crossed out.
Note to self: NEVER USE DASHES AS BULLETS
L. Ron Hubbard, the most prolific corpse in history.
L.Ron Hubbard
used to do it in a cupboard
Unfortunately I cannot remember the rest of this (Science Fiction Writers a la The Philosophers song)
Sorry, Henry, I don’t buy it.
There have been lots of examples of sequels/extensions to the canon from Sherlock Holmes stories to sequels to Peter Pan and Rebecca, but never this bizarre ‘writing as’ concept. It’s just silly.
Brian, you have done nothing to address my thesis, except dismiss it out of hand.
So what if there have been sequelae to various franchises written by others than the original authors? Why, there’s even a fragmentary Jane Austen novel called Sanditon completed in the late 20th century by ‘Another Lady’.
My point is that there is no rule to say that these things must follow a set rule outside of which anything else is just ‘silly’. It could simply be that the ‘Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming’ device was a legal condition imposed by the Fleming Estate, for all we know. For similar reasons I very much doubt if there’ll be a Fellowship of the Towering Return of the King by ‘Henry Gee writing as J. R. R. Tolkien’.
NEVER USE DASHES AS BULLETS
No, use asterisks:
* this
becomes
There’s the suggestion of a pseudonym there, but a pseudonym of a real person. I quite like it, even if it does sound odd.
Sounds like someone trying to add respectability to fanfic, personally.
I’m writing my thesis as James Joyce.
Who knows how far this sort of thing could go? We’ll find someone writing a blog as a famous dead scientist next. (Personally, I think Charles Darwin is the Stig.)
I am not interested in James Bond etc, but the crime fiction quarter of the blogosphere has been in a frenzy about this book for ages. I wish I’d read it all in proper detail now, so I could decently (or even usefully) contribute here.
I am pretty confident that my inattentive scanning revealed that Seb F was commissioned by Ian Fleming’s son, who controls his estate, to write the book, so I think you are correct, Henry, that the wording of the author’s name will have been agreed by this contract.
As well as L Ron Hubbard, there are other prolific corpses. Agree with Brian that LRH falls into the pseudonym category, but what about authors such as Virginia Andrews, who a sort of fictional historical (predating the) misery memoir genre? After she died her estate held a competition of sorts and one now sees books “John Higginbottam writing as Virginia Andrews” type of thing. (Pleae note the verb “sees”, I only look as far as the jacket!)