There is life after death, for authors. Thirteen years after her death at the age of 98, Dame Barbara Cartland is to live again. Not quite but 160 of her so far unseen novels are.
The prolific writer is credited with writing over 700 books, none of which I concede to have read. Cartland’s novels sold over 750 million copies. One can likely quadruple this figure as her books will have been passed from hand to hand. It is said that her prodigious output saw 23 of her novels published in just one year.
Cartland’s son, Ian McCorquodale, who by happy coincidence is a publisher, plans to market the series titled The Pink Collection. Money attracts money. Dame Barbara Cartland was Princess Diane’s step-grandmother. It is all good public relations.
The Dame’s novels will almost certainly be ghost-written. It is not rocket science. The production line assembly of so many novels, especially 23 in just one year by one writer, is stretching credulity to its limits. The best I achieved was one 80,000-word book from start to publication in one month. It was not an achievement I would care to repeat.
The trend is for famous authors to scribble their novels’ plots. These are then passed to ghost-writers. Called ghosts because their names never appear on the cover, ghost-writers add content, flair and flow. As an example of this, I doubled the content of a 40,000-word memoir to the complete satisfaction of my client. Is it cheating? Decidedly not.
I cooperate with authors through each chapter. What a good ghost will do is express the author’s thoughts and recollections truthfully. This is not done by cheating. A comment I often hear is, “that is exactly how it was but I cannot express myself as well as that.“
Those ghosts placed with specific authors, like Steven King, Geoffrey Archer, Cartland and many others of their standing, meticulously study the style of their employer. Ghost-writers will assiduously insinuate the author’s ‘fingerprint’ into the stories as they unfold. I hope that you the reader will not spot the fake. In truth, they are all fakes.
MICHAEL WALSH. A published author and professional writer-journalist, Michael Walsh may be Mediterranean Spain’s best known ghost-writer. Titles completed include Still Running, Mickey Finn’s memoirs of a child convict. The Sins of the Father, Cynthia Paddick. Dieter Rudolph’s Farewell To Hamburg. Swedish author Britt Arenander chose Michael Walsh for her great fiction Lux Divina. Chris Nand’s Return to Devil Island is likely to be filmed. Other titles completed include A Matter of Trust, Swinging Doors, Rutter’s Raj, The Perfect Murder, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, The Golden Triangle