# Famous Writers who obsess on another Writer's Book or Characters **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 11, 2007, 12:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626 "2007-04-11T12:17:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 12:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/1 "2007-04-11T12:17:32Z")
I’m not talking about writers who simply extend a series. John Gardner wrote a whole series of James Bond novels because he was paid to, and I get the impression that he didn’t particularly like the character. August Derleth edited and “extended” H.P.Lovecraft’s work, but I’m not sure I’d include him. L. Sprague de Camp rewrote a bunch of Robert E. Howard stories into more Conan stories, and added a few of his own, but it was in large part business, and I don’t think he obsessed over it. No, I mean cases like Jules Verne’s obsession with **Robinson Crusoe** and (even more) **The Swiss Family Robinson**. Not only did he write not just one, but _two_ sequels to Swiss Family Robinson, but elements of the survival-on-a-desert-island story show up in 20,000 Leagues, The Mysterious Island 9of course), The School for Robinsons, and others. He kept coming back to it throughout his writing career. Similarly, Philip Jose Farmer seems smitten by Tarzan of the Apes – he shows up in a thinly disguised form in A Feast Unknown and one of its G-rated sequels, The Lord of the Trees. But the theme shows up in Lord Tyger and other Farmer books. He wrote a series of short pieces and essays on it, many of them collected in Mother Was a Lovely Beast, and he wrote a Tarzan-Holmes pastiche, The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (which is awful). Plus, he wrote the fictional Tarzan bio, Tarzan Alive! That’s not a series, it’s an obsession. Certainly a great many writers have been obsessed by Sherlock Holmes – I’ve got a shelf in my bookcase of Holmes pastiches, and in that case it clearly does go beyond monetary concerns – Holmes fans really are obsessed. Heck, they still have fan clubs for the guy. They’re the original Trekkies. Are there any other cases of a famous writer returning in such a way over and over to a character or situation in which the interest was NOT to simply extend a series (in both the Verne and Farmer cases, the stories are of many and varied types, not all forming a series, and more concerned with the character and situation)? Are there any that aren’t in the science fiction/horror/fantasy genre? ---
**Author:** ![TV\_time](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f17d59/32.png) [@TV\_time](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TV_time)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/2 "2007-04-11T15:34:13Z")
You could say that John Dickson Carr was consumed with Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes for a while. He edited some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s son’s attempts at Sherlock Holmes stories and ended up writing an entire collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (Adrian Doyle was given some credit, but it is generally agreed that Carr did the creating and writing). Carr also ended up writing a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle at the request of the Doyle family. ---
**Author:** ![mrklutz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ebca7d/32.png) [@mrklutz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mrklutz)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/3 "2007-04-11T15:38:21Z")
Not quite what you’re after, I think, but John Ringo is constitutionally incapable of writing a book without incorporating an appearance by one or more characters from _Sluggy Freelance_. It can get pretty jarring and take you right out of the story, given that _Sluggy_ is a very silly webcomic. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/4 "2007-04-11T15:53:38Z")
Kingley Amis, a star in literary British writing, did the first James Bond book not by Fleming. [http://www.klast.net/bond/amis.html](http://www.klast.net/bond/amis.html) > [@](#): > > In 1965, Amis wrote 2 books: the literary critique The James Bond Dossier and The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (under the pseudonym of Bill Tanner), a sort of “how-to” guide. It has also been rumored that Amis wrote part of Ian Fleming’s last book, The Man with the Golden Gun. > > In 1968, under the psuedonym Robert Markham, Amis wrote Colonel Sun, the first James Bond novel published after the death of Ian Fleming. Since Amis knew Fleming’s work well, he was contracted by Glidrose, the copyright-holders of Fleming’s books, to continue the story of 007. This was despite opposition from Fleming’s widow, Ann, who disliked Amis and considered him a “left-wing opportunist” [Lycett, p. 445]. The idea was that other writers would continue the Bond canon, all writing under the same psuedonym, but this was not to happen. August Derleth also wrote the Solar Pons series, which despite the name is not sf but a deadly serious note for note imitation of Sherlock Holmes. Pons lives at 7B Praed Street with Dr. Lymon Parker, his chronicler. He’s the tenant of Mrs. Johnson and has a brother named Bancroft. Some people find these a terrific substitute for the original, but I’m not one of them. Larry Harris wrote _The Pickled Poodles_ as a tribute to Craig Rice’s John Malone mysteries after her [yes, her] death. It was not a success. Ofg course, it’s not just Tarzan who shows up in Farmer. He was besotted with Victorian and pulp characters and used dozens of them in various books. He’s like Alan Moore in his _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_ comics. There has been a mini-boom in book publishing for sequels or follow-up books to famous novels. The sequel to _Gone with the Wind_ got the most publicity, but [here’s a whole page of match-ups](http://www.bartlesville.lib.ok.us/goodreads/general%20fiction/classicsequels.htm). Some of those are strictly sequels, which may not meet your criteria, but _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_ by Tom Stoppard and _Was_ by Geoff Ryman are two that I know play with the characters. And that list is not remotely complete. It doesn’t contain older books like [The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis](http://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Modern-Sequel-Touchstone-Paperback/dp/0671202472), for instance. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/5 "2007-04-11T16:03:39Z")
You’re generally missing the point – I’m not looking for cases where someone merely continues a series. There are plenty of those, and I specifically excepted, for instance, Gardner’s extension of the Bond series. Kingsley Amis, as Robert Markham, only did one Bond novel – hardly an obsession. But Gardner came back to Tarzan again and again, and not as continuations to the series. He wrote a book about a rich guy trying to reproduce the bothood of Tarzan as an experiment. He wrote a Tarzan-Holmes pastiche. He wrote a Tarzan bio. He wrote essays about children abducted by animals and how that reklated to the Tarzan mythos. These aren’t extensions to the series – they’re evidence of an obsession with the character of Tarzan. Similarly, Verne was obsessed with the idea of surviving on a desert island. He did write two sequels to SFR, but he wrote about a school for how to survive. He had Ned Land showing his companions how to do it. The entire book The Mysterious Island is an extended story about doing so, unrelated to (but clearly inspired by) Swiss Family Robinson. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for. I thought that maybe Stephen King’s love of Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” might qualify. King clearly loves it – he devotes a lot of space to it in Danse Macabre. He stole the character of the Lightning Rod Salesman in The Stand from it. But that’s only two examples, not an obsession. So – are there others? And are there any that aren’t genre examples – all of these are sf/fantasy/horror or mystery. ---
**Author:** ![saoirse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@saoirse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/saoirse)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/6 "2007-04-11T16:33:47Z")
Nicholson Baker wrote a memoir about his obsession with John Updike, titled _U and I_. And every undergraduate creative writing student is obsessed with rewriting Baker’s _The Mezzanine_. ---
**Author:** ![Alistair\_McCello](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/58956e/32.png) [@Alistair\_McCello](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alistair_McCello)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/7 "2007-04-11T16:56:21Z")
I am not sure if it comes up much in his published writings, but the journals of Søren Kierkegaard made it pretty clear that he was obsessed with Goethe’s version of Dr. Johann Faust. ---
**Author:** ![mobo85](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b19c9b/32.png) [@mobo85](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mobo85)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/8 "2007-04-11T17:33:33Z")
The British author George Fraser took a supporting character from Thomas Hughes’s book _Tom Brown’s School Days_, a bully named Flashman, and wrote numerous books about his experiences as a sort of James Bondish fellow helping the British Empire fight in nearly all of its conflicts in the 19th century. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/9 "2007-04-11T17:34:04Z")
How about the Flashman novels? They feature a character from **Tom Brown’s Schooldays** , but are not sequels to it. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/10 "2007-04-11T17:37:12Z")
Actually, you could say that Kingsley Amis had something of a Bond obsession. Besides writing Colonel Sun under a pseudonym, he also wrote **The Book of Bond (or Every Man His Own 007)** under the pseudonym of Bill Tanner (thye very pseudonym argues for an obsession), but that’s only two examples. I suspect that the guy most recently doing the Bond adaptation, Raymond Benson, is more obsessive, since besides doing movie novelizations and his own original novels, he also wrote and updated **The James Bond Bedside Companion** , and is president of some major Bond fan group. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2007, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/famous-writers-who-obsess-on-another-writers-book-or-characters/399626/11 "2007-04-12T03:28:43Z")
CalMeacham writes: \> But Gardner came back to Tarzan again and again, and not as continuations to \> the series. He wrote a book about a rich guy trying to reproduce the bothood of \> Tarzan as an experiment. He wrote a Tarzan-Holmes pastiche. He wrote a \> Tarzan bio. He wrote essays about children abducted by animals and how that \> reklated to the Tarzan mythos. These aren’t extensions to the series – they’re \> evidence of an obsession with the character of Tarzan. I presume you mean Farmer, not Gardner.