Ghosts in the White House

Features How does something immaterial like music fill a room? Italian graphic and motion designer Federico Piccirillo considers how music can breathe beauty into a place in this art installation titled Filling Spaces. Dig into music-inspired poetry, stories, interviews, and more in the Music & Lit section starting on page 39. PHOTO: FEDERICO PICCIRILLO WORLDLIT.ORG 9 PHOTO: RICHARD BURGER/FLICKR G iven the years of apprenticeship that most professional writers put in, it is not surprising that notable persons in sports, politics, and other fields rarely have the time or ability to be competent authors as well. Yet a celebrated name on a book jacket has been one of the primary ways to attract readers since ancient times. Modern scholars can never really know why some ancient scribbler might want his hard work attributed to Aristotle or someone else, but in many cases they are certain that Aristotle never wrote it. We know the score, however. Follow the money. A book by an author of considerable talent but no renown will simply not sell as well as a book with a famous name on the jacket. An old joke in publishing is that “J. K. Rowling” or “Stephen King” on the cover could make the Manhattan phone directory a best-seller. On the other hand, most holders of famous names can’t write well enough and require the services of a discreet pro. In the romantic view of writing, in which the writer suffers in a quest for her soul, this seems a bit immoral, taking credit for work you haven’t really done, but the practice is more common than you might think. Calvin Trillin once remarked that he had barely gotten used to doing interviews with “authors” who hadn’t written their own works when he—on air, midinterview—realized he was interviewing a man who hadn’t read his own book. Ghosts in the White House by J. Madison Davis crime & mystery 10 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 I have occasionally thrown the sheet over myself and played ghost. A very well-known creative person (motion pictures, television) had an interesting idea for a novel, I was told, and had put a writer on the job who did a poor job, which was then poorly redone by another. The famous man got me on the phone and asked me, “Can you fix it, kid?” The fact that I had not yet seen a page of the manuscript tells you much about how all this works. Plucky Jim promised he would namelessly do his best. I scrapped the original drafts and was pretty happy with the finished result. It was published, translated into Italian, and I got paid. Some weeks later, the famous man was on Fresh Air, promoting the novel. After all his other creative achievements, Terry Gross asked, how did it feel to publish his first novel? “It was hard work,” he said without hesitation. I doubt he got writer’s cramp from composing my check—not enough zeros. But at least he was content to leave me to my work. I got nowhere trying to work with a celebrated crime expert who fought for every ill-phrased, inexplicable wording he had presumably dictated while stuck in a traffic jam on the LA Freeway. His book did eventually come out, though I suspect not even his mother read it. As I write this column, the surprise thriller of the year seems to be The President Is Missing by former president Bill Clinton and James Patterson. Clinton has long been a fan of mystery fiction, and when he was in office, the reading of a special note of appreciation from the White House was a highlight of the annual Mystery Writers of America’s awards banquet. Asked about his favorite thrillers by the New York Times, Clinton had a long list of the usual suspects, including Lee Child, David Baldacci, Jacqueline Winspear , Lisa Scottoline, James Lee Burke, Walter Mosley, Louise Penny, Sara Paretsky, and others, adding, “I also look for writers whose works are not that well known yet, like David Pepper. And I sure miss Sue Grafton.” (Grafton passed away last December.) Of course he also mentioned

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