By which I mean, after a writer’s death, who - usually avaricious next-of-kin - has the most badly sullied the original author’s literary memory by turning out crap under his or her good name? Usually under the guise of “continuing his/her creative vision”, of course, but always a shamefully transparent grasp at one last pecunious suck at the teat.
So many contenders - Dr. Seuss, H. A. Rey - but my vote has to go to Frank Herbert: I was never a huge Dune fan to begin with, but I can at least appreciate why many like him. Jesus, though, the prequels “written” by his son and some SF hack or other are just awful: I got about one page into House Harkonnen before encountering the sentence “You nervous coward!” and it got worse from there: how three simple words can be simultaneously a tautology and an oxymoron is beyond my feeble grasp.
And yet the prequels continue, and, against all odds, worsen: makes you feel all warm and fuzzy about Christopher Tolkien, who at least limits himself to publishing his father’s waste-paper bin.
I’ve never read her (his?) stuff, but V.C. Andrews has my vote – I can’t really believe that so many books were left unpublished, or even in outline form, at Andrews’ death. Yet they seemed to just keep pumping them out.
But for sheer volume of pimpage, I don’t think you can beat L. Ron Hubbard. The Scientologists have resurrected old ooks of his you could buy in the 25 cent bin at the library sale and re-issued them as new hardcovers,with high prices and accompanying audio editions. Not to mention “new” books co-authored by living writers.
That’s not to say it doesn’t go on with other writers – in the past few years I’ve read resurrected editions, undiscovered works now published, and works completed by the hands of others by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, and others. But the Andrews and Hubbard stuff seemed to go on way too long.
Yeah, V.C. Andrews was going to be my contribution, but **CalMeacham **got here first. I actually liked Flowers in the Attic, gawd help me, but didn’t she die, like, 200 years ago? There have got to be more posthumous than…uh…humous…works with her name on them.
Good lord, that was literally true (not the 200 years ago part - she died in 1986)! She wrote 6 books all on her own, left 5 unfinished, and her “ghost writer” (was there ever a more apt use of the term?), after finishing the 5 she left undone, wrote 51 using her name. So far. wiki cite
Elliott Roosevelt, the son of FDR, has been doing a series of mysteries with his mother Eleanor as the detective. Since he never wrote any of the books while he was alive it was no problem for his ghost to continue writing the books after Roosevelt died.
But for sheer number, violations of the original concept, and basic chutzpah, there is nothing in literature to rival the output of Sherlock Holmes books and stories. There are hundreds if not thousands, of all types, concepts, quality, and faithfulness to the original. Holmes books outnumber every other dead author’s output mentioned in this thread combined.
Most of the other authors don’t claim to be the original writers, though. Certainly other writers have written stories with other people’s characters. I’ve got a whole bookshelf of these, asnd I know that my collection barely scratches the surface. Holmes books are an industry in themselves, but every one that I have lists the real autrhor’s names (or else they list them as “editor” and “John Hamish Watson” as author). I don’t know of anyone who published faux Holmes as “Arthur Conan Doyle”.
But all the “V.C. Andrews” books are published as by “V.C. Andrews”, even long after it was obvious that that was a fraud. Thet’s gotta get some sort of prize.
It depends on how you define “Posthumous pimped”.
That last Douglas Adams book was pretty putrid: sometimes stuff is unpublished for a reason, and tipping out the contents of a dead author’s hard drive, editing it up and calling it a book is a pretty poor show.
Oh, yeah, that’s the worst. Because the book we call the Bible is actually a rewrite created under the sleaziest of conditions. Apparently, the original was written by some Bronze Age nutjob and it got a certain amount of play among the locals and was doing real well so some New Agey type guy did an extensive rewrite that mostly consisted of adding a whole bunch more chapters full of “love they neighbor” this and “the meek shall inherit” that, which went over gangbusters in early Roman times. But I gotta say, penalties for copyright violation were really harsh in those days, and when the law finally caught up with the New Agey guy they laid some serious whupass on him. His followers tried to make it into some big religious/political persecution thing, but I’m pretty sure it was just copyright violation because a couple of garden-variety thieves got the exact same punishment the New Agey guy did.
Ever since then it’s been every man for himself with the riots. I understand some english king got in on the act. What a spectacle!
Dixon was not a real person- he was a pseudonym used by the Stratmeyer Syndicate, who did a number of books such as The Rover Boys and Tom Swift all written under pseudonyms. One of the most famous besides Dixon is Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew series.
I work at a library, and I was suspicious about V.C. Andrews once I saw that her name has a trademark symbol after it. If the author’s name is trademarked, the actual person is usually dead.
And I’m not sure why Scissorjack mentions the Reys and Dr. Seuss in his OP- many of the new Curious George books which came out in the 1980s were adapted from short films co-written by Margaret Rey, and of the four books written by Dr. Seuss that were published after his death, two were unpublished works, one was adapted from a cartoon he wrote, and the other was an unfinished manuscript completed by Jack Prelutsky.
There are a whole host of “educational” books which use Seuss’s characters - usually the Cat In The Hat, the two kids and Thing One and Thing Two - and imitate, rather poorly, his drawing and writing style.
I honestly don’t know what the ratio is, but a fair number of living authors have had their name trademarked. It’s certainly not close to a guarantee that the author is dead. Not these days.
