Some years ago, I got what I thought was a pretty good book idea.
Two ghostwriters, strangers, happen to meet in a Key West bar. Both are fairly successful, meaning they’re scraping by without a day job. But both are regarded by their publishers as one-trick ponies. One does Mafia memoirs, the other cranks out detective stories under the names of bestselling authors who have died. So they get the same sorts of assignments over and over again, and both are bored stiff.
After a couple of drinks, they fall prey to a subversive but giddily liberating notion. What if they swapped gigs and didn’t tell anyone? They were anonymous anyway; why not just pretend to be each other? Could they bluff their way through the entire process? Might the change of turf bring back some of the joy they used to take from writing? And, by the way, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, the idea tickled me but I quickly decided I would never write that book. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about writers; there are other professions and other types of characters, after all. Also, telling the story truly (and amusingly, let’s hope) would require some less than flattering commentary about the publishing business, and I was concerned about crossing the line between fair-game comedy and mean-spirited snark, of which there’s more than enough in the book world without me piling on.
So I put the notion aside and moved on to other projects. But the book-swap idea wouldn’t go away and, five or six years later, it has finally taken the form of the eighteenth Key West Caper, Sunset Bluff. Now that I’ve actually written the book, I think I understand why the concept tickled me in the first place and why I couldn’t shrug it off: It turned out to be a natural way, cockeyed but resonant, to approach the theme of authenticity—by which, in this connection, I mean writing in your own true voice.
Which, of course, is exactly what ghostwriters are paid not to do.
It’s a poignant situation. You spend a decade or so honing your style, finding your particular cadence, learning to write like no one but yourself, and then the world tells you, basically, Nice try, kid. Your stuff won’t make you a living, but you do have some chops. Maybe you have a future as a fake.
Admittedly, there are worse fates for a writer, such as having to get a real job. And it’s not that ghostwritten books can’t sometimes be quite good. But what they can’t ever be is entirely honest or trustworthy or owned. There’s always a whiff of fraud about them, a queasy doubt about whose work they actually are, a coy dance about who deserves the credit. I’ve been there, so trust me; it can get pretty demoralizing.
But here’s the twist that finally convinced me it would be worth the trouble to write Sunset Bluff: In this story, the ghostwriters fight back! Sick and tired of writing the same old inauthentic stuff, they grab a last opportunity, at the risk of their careers and maybe their lives, to write something genuine and fresh. True, the gambit requires a lot of fibbing and faking and a bit of counter-fraud to pull it off. But hey, that’s how the world works, right?
I’ll leave it at that for now rather than drifting into spoiler territory. But I can tell you I was rooting for these knuckleheads from page one. I hope you’ll be rooting for them, too.