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Ghostly Writer
(editorial) Source: The Nation, 25 March 1991, v252 n11 p363(2). Most writers, even hacks, hope their books will live on after they've gone to literary Valhalla. Now a big publisher has come up with a scheme not only to keep a dead author in print but to keep her writing new books as well. Novels bearing the byline of the popular V.C. Andrews continue to issue forth even though she died in 1986. This miracle is not accomplished by spirit writing. The only ghost involved is the living person who, under an arrangement with the publisher and the author's heirs, concocts ersatz V.C. Andrews novels. A buyer of her latest best seller, Dawn, can learn that V.C. is no longer at her VDT only by reading a coy, ambiguous letter from "The Andrews Family" reproduced opposite the copyright page. Dawn was actually written by Andrew Neiderman, but his name isn't on the cover. Just because this subterfuge involves a book rather than a cure for psoriasis doesn't make it any less a consumer fraud. Nor is it the same as the practice of hiring a writer to compose sequels about popular characters after their creator's demise, as in the case of L. Frank Baum, Ian Fleming, Margaret Mitchell and others. The retreads are usually inferior to the originals, but at least their buyers know who wrote them. In the Andrews case even readers who parse the fine print inside can't be entirely sure. The letter says that during her last illness Andrews worked furiously "hoping to finish as many stories as possible so that her fans could one day share them." After she passed on, the family says, it carefully selected a writer "to organize and complete Virginia's stories and to expand upon them by creating additional novels inspired by her wonderful storytelling genius." Is the Andrews affair a unique case of commercial necrophilia or the beginning of a trend? None of the industry spokespersons quoted in a New York Times story seemed fazed by the scandal. Indeed, it was ensconced in a bland business section story about the success of posthumously published books. That this incident aroused so little protest is a sad commentary on the state of the arts, although perhaps it is to be expected in a conglomerated culture where marketing is the test of success. Authors are demeaned when publishers regard them as something to be canned and sold like peas after they're dead. Readers are demeaned when they are exploited as a manipulable mass of glazed-eyed page-turners. And the entire culture is degraded when publishers care more about their balance sheets than the integrity of the written word.
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