I’m not sure there is one. They’re still publishing new Tom Clancy novels, and he’s been dead for ten years.
The actual authors’ names are on the covers, though not nearly as prominently as Clancy’s, which is almost acting as a brand name now.
Oh man I didn’t think about how Tom Clancy’s name relates to all this. “Tom Clancy” is more than just a book brand, his name is plastered all over military-style video games that have incredibly tenuous connections to anything Clancy ever wrote. Similarly, there have been decades of “Madden” football games despite him having zero involvement with them since the 1990s.
There is no reason why Roald Dahl’s name couldn’t similarly be abused. Imagine a line of “Roald Dahl” books with his name on them, but written by other authors and only sharing the basic ideas of kid protagonists fighting against unjust cruel adults.
Nope, not AFAIK. As kenobi_65 said, from a commercial point of view, the legal holders of the publication rights are entitled to use the author’s name more as a marketing brand than as any kind of guarantee of “genuineness” of the text ascribed to the author.
Looking around for other examples, I see that the publisher controlling publication rights for classic British children’s novels by Enid Blyton, first published in the mid-20th century, launched modified versions of them over a decade ago, with language updates:
But apparently the updated versions were not enthusiastically received:
(If you, like me, were puzzled by seeing the publishers referred to sometimes as “Hodder” and sometimes as “Hachette”, the explanation is that “Hodder & Stoughton is a major publisher within Hachette UK, one of the UK’s biggest publishing groups”.)
Note the remark about even the reissued “classic” versions containing some textual modifications from the midcentury originals. You yourself have probably read some modern reprints of old classic books that contained some such changes, and never even realized it.
If Hodder/Hachette/whoever thought they could make more money out of the Blyton “Famous Five” books by revamping all the characters into Big Bang-style physics nerds or postapocalyptic depressed wizards, I’m sure they’d be happy to do so. What stops them, AFAICT, is not any kind of legal restriction on the publication rights that they own, but simply the fact that readers in general would react badly to such “tinkering”, with adverse effects on sales.
A classic case is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The original title in 1939 was unfortunate indeed and it and the contained rhymes/references in the book were changed in the American edition the next year. However the original title w/book references continued to be published in the UK until 1985, long after Christie’s death in 1976. I have no real issues with those edits.
This reminds me of an early 20th c. Hungarian novel I read not long ago. There was a character, a Duchess, IIRC, who in the course of two sentences used the n-word three times. It was a throwaway comment and completely irrelevant to anything in the book. Those sentences could easily have been edited out with no affect whatever.
I read a lot of older books, and the casual racism is depressingly common and always hits like a slap in the face.
Beau has some thoughts.
vc andrews heirs had a guy writing under her name for almost 25 years after she died the only reason it was uncovered is they weren’t paying the taxes on the income and a bunch of news places exposed who was writing the books …
apparently, there were also lawsuits over the fact they never put the 2nd author’s name on the books and dimwits assumed it was her
I mean, they’ve basically been doing the same thing with J.R.R. Tolkien.
And how many of us would be perfectly OK if Dahl’s heirs and publisher decided that there wasn’t ENOUGH fat-shaming, misogyny, and anti-semitism in the original works? What if the rewrites intentionally made the works significantly more offensive? Twenty years from now, readers could be avoiding Dahl’s work because they are under the impression that he was the most vile human being who ever put pen to paper.
I’m waiting to see what Stephen King’s heirs do to his work when he passes. The group hug that will end Carrie will be inspiring.
Honestly, King’s work could be improved by removing the preteen sewer gangbangs, casual homophobia, implications that all gay men are pedophiles, multiple graphic descriptions of child rape, magical retards, and holy shit did I mention the preteen sewer gangbang.
Aw, how decent of them! It’s a grand standup thing to do AFTER you have safely divested yourself of his tainted work and pocketed the huge windfall gained from so doing! LOL
You forgot the recurring theme of children viciously and horribly murdering adults.
I am always so confused by these arguments. THey go like this:
A: How dare they engage in this process that I hate!
B: I don’t really care that much about the process, the process itself isn’t what’s important to me, it’s the outcome of the process.
A: Oh yeah? What if they used the process to do something you didn’t like?
B: Still don’t care about the process.
To be clear: I don’t care about the process. It doesn’t make me a hypocrite to not care about the process in a hypothetical where they use the process to do something bad. In that hypothetical, I would care about the outcome, and I would oppose the outcome because it was bad.
As OK as if Dahl were still alive and doing that.
Well, if by “us” you mean “the legal system and the courts”, the answer is “all of us”.
Not really, at least IMO, when it comes to books.
Absolutely, his son Christopher made a lifelong career out of pulling together his father’s notes and versions of various stories, and publishing them (sometimes by filling in gaps in the narrative, as I understand it), but I think that any fan of Tolkien’s work understands that that’s what happened.
The new Amazon Rings of Power TV series is another story entirely, being based on very limited notes from the Lord of the Rings novel, and largely being created out of whole cloth.
I agree in general, but using Star Wars as the example? Nope! I’d LOVE to be able to get the original, 1977 Star Wars (no number). But Lucas has shredded, buried, dug up, burned, and reburied the original version.
If I’m reading a book, especially creative writing, I’m engaging with the writer. That’s important to me. If the writer isn’t a great person, I can engage with that. If they’re such an asshole that they make the book unreadable to me, OK. I won’t read it.
I don’t want some editor covering up the obnoxious parts. I loved James and the Giant Peach as a kid. I lost my copy a while ago, but if I want to read it again I want to read Dahl’s words, not some anonymous editors. I love Stephen King and if I read him I want to read his words. Not the words of somebody nervously trying to pretend he never wrote anything problematic.
I think fans are slightly deluded about how many “notes” are actually left after almost 50 years of plunder, and I suspect that the books from the last couple of decades are not much better than fanfic loosely based on a couple of post-its found at the bottom of a drawer.