Melvin Durai
Among the most popular books in Spain in recent years is a series of ultra-violent crime thrillers featuring the detective Elena Blanco. The books were written by Carmen Mola, which is a pseudonym (or pen name) used by a female professor in her late 40s, a mother of three who wrote the crime novels in her spare time. At least that’s what the publisher led everyone to believe — until one of the novels won the richest literary prize in the world. Who showed up to accept the prize at the glitzy ceremony? Three men!
No, it wasn’t the author’s father and two brothers accepting the prize on her behalf. It was three men who had collaborated on the books and used a female pseudonym to market them.
What a scam! Next, these three men will be wearing dresses, sticking out their tummies and asking for maternity leave.
The three men, Agustin Martinez, Jorge Diaz and Antonio Mercero, are television scriptwriters who will share one million euros as winners of the 2021 Premio Planeta literary prize. The prize is awarded to an unpublished novel on the condition that the publishing house Planeta will receive the rights to release it to the planet. Perhaps Planeta can also release the three men to the mob of angry readers who want to scalp them.
As Spanish media noted, the fictitious author’s life — so different from the characters in the books — seemed to help with publicity for the books.
“It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the idea of a university professor and mother of three, who taught algebra classes in the morning then wrote ultra-violent, macabre novels in scraps of free time in the afternoon, made for a great marketing operation,” Spanish paper El Mundo wrote, according to a report in The Guardian.
The three men denied that they chose a female pseudonym for marketing purposes, but the evidence suggests otherwise, as feminist and activist Beatriz Gimeno tweeted: “Quite apart from using a female pseudonym, these guys have spent years doing interviews. It’s not just the name – it’s the fake profile that they’ve used to take in readers and journalists. They are scammers.”
I can only imagine the disappointment that many readers of the Carmen Mola novels must have felt. That would be like me finding out that Enid Blyton, the British author of numerous books that I loved as a child, was actually a group of men. I would have no choice but to take a flight to Britain and hunt them down, one by one.
I remember how disappointed I was when I found out that The Hardy Boys, a series of books I enjoyed as a boy, was not written by an author named Franklin W. Dixon, but by several ghostwriters. It was all just a gimmick to sell books to unsuspecting kids.
The use of ghostwriters is more common than we think, especially when a celebrity’s name appears on a book. Why sweat over a keyboard when you can just pay someone to do it?
It’s all about ethics, of course. Ghostwriting has its place in publishing, but it’s unethical and dishonest to pose as the author when all you wrote is the cheque. It’s also unethical to write a book and then pretend that someone quite different from you is the author.
Just imagine buying a book on Indian history that has the name “Dileep Kumar” on its cover, but later finding out that the book was written by three Americans — none of them of Indian descent and none of them male.
I don’t know about you, but I’d want my money back. And I’m not accepting any cheques written by Dileep Kumar.
