T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Faking it

Once, on a Friday afternoon in the mid-1980s, the Sunday Magazine editor of the paper I was working for at the time ran into the usual problem: at 4 pm a regular contributor cried off at the last minute and she was left with a huge blank to fill on the page.

Her cabin was next to mine and the walls were just five feet high. When I heard her genteel but nevertheless forceful expletives, I leaned across and told her I was an expert on Mills & Boon novels.

I could, I told her, write 800 words for her in an hour. She was clutching at straws and agreed.

After all, Mills & Boon novels were as perfect an example of product differentiation as any. Only toothpaste and soap do better on that score.

Eureka!
Messrs Gerald Mills and Charles Boon, who were the original inventors of the idea of (if I may indulge in an oxymoron) differentiated cloning in fiction, had clearly stumbled on to something.

The formula was simple. You basically told the same story over and over again but you dressed them up differently, thus fooling the reader into thinking she was reading a different novel. That, as it turned out, was not hard to do.

Then, in the mid-1950s, this little marketing trick was adopted for star novelists who had crossed the Great Divide. Frederick Christian did a Sudden novel after the creator, Oliver Strange, died in 1952. The books were moderately successful.

The idea is simple: someone else writes the novel but the book is sold as, say, a Sudden, a Sidney Sheldon or a Dick Francis or a P G Wodehouse or a Douglas Adams - or even an Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys thing. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn't because it is hard to get the flavour just so. Besides, times change.

For example, a writer called Sebastian Faulks has just written a "Wodehouse" novel - and not just any Wodehouse novel but a Wooster-Jeeves thing. It didn't work for me, though it may well have done for other Wodehouse fans.

On the other hand, about a year ago I became an admirer of one Tilly Bagshawe, who writes "Sidney Sheldon" novels. She has done four or five of them and although all of them were not of the same quality, they have worked for me.

Then there is Felix Francis, who has been writing Dick Francis novels for some years now, first along with Dick and then, after daddy passed on, solo. Dick's 40-odd novels sold around 80 million copies over 40 years. Felix's books work better than any of the others I have read, but the plots tend to be less compelling than the ones his father thought up.

Even Sherlock Holmes has been resurrected by Anthony Horowitz, who has written several successful murder mysteries for television, including the excellent Midsomer Murders and, of course, Poirot. The book didn't appeal much to me, but it had its moments and was certainly very readable.

(Talking of serials, have you ever wondered why some novels are adapted to television and others are not? For example, anyone who has read Colin Dexter would not have chosen Inspector Morse for the serial which, as it happens, was so immensely successful that they went on to make one on his sidekick Sergeant Lewis as well!)

Tough calls
It is hard to tell what leads an author of fiction to become a brand. Is it the style, as in, say, a Wodehouse? Is it the uniqueness of the characters, as in a Sudden or a Holmes? Or is it their genre, as in Francis or Sheldon?

There doesn't appear to be any consistent pattern. This must pose a problem for publishers and perhaps even the families of the deceased authors looking to make a quick buck.

But even if they are able to choose one or some or all from Hercule Poirot, Morse, Smiley, Perry Mason and so on, they'd still have the problem of treatment: should they tell the new writer to stick as closely as possible to the original or should they allow some latitude?

They can learn some lessons from music because books are not alone in this form of replication. The same songs are sung by many singers and the question always is: which is preferred more - the version that sticks faithfully to the original or the one that changes the arrangement completely but is nonetheless recognisable as a variant of the original?

We don't know simply because individual tastes play such an important role. And it still leaves unresolved the problem of which author to resurrect. Robert Jordan anyone? Or Henry Cecil? His books were reissued by Rupa some years ago for just Rs 125 a throw.

The answer, as economists would say, would have to be discovered by a process of tâtonnement, which is French for groping towards a solution (and not what just crossed your mind).