Illustration by David Galletly
A slew of
deceased (or otherwise retired) writers — from Stieg Larsson to Robert Ludlum —
are digging up major profits with posthumous releases and movie adaptations of
their "latest work."
A version of this story first
appeared in the Nov. 27 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive
the magazine, click here to
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Her 2015 best-seller,The Monogram
Murders, sold 500,000 copies. She's got two film projects underway at Fox —
including one to be directed by The Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum —
and a miniseries in development at Lifetime. Not to mention a new app launched
this month.
You'd never know Agatha Christie
has been dead for nearly 40 years.
Agatha Christie Ltd., which has
been managing the late British crime novelist’s estate since 1955 (she died in
1976), launched a storytelling app on Nov. 12 in the latest effort to keep
Christie’s stories accessible to modern audiences. The app tells Christie’s
short story "The Mysterious Mr Quin" through social media to reach
the "young, app-oriented generation who are used to getting their drama
through their social media feed rather that watching television,” says Agatha
Christie Ltd. CEO Hilary Strong, who runs the estate with James Prichard, the
author’s great grandson.
Christie is considered the
best-selling author of all time with more than 2 billion copies of her books
sold worldwide, but the estate, like many others for iconic authors, is tasked
with preserving her legacy while also introducing her work to younger
generations. To do so, the Christie Estate, which Strong says received around a
dozen calls from Hollywood per week before hiring WME to handle its deals two
years ago, has set up a handful of recent film and TV adaptations, including
the two at Fox.
“It’s about finding people to
work with who are at the top of their game creatively, but also really
understand Agatha Christie,” says Strong, who adds that Hollywood projects are
the best way for Christie’s stories to reach fans around the world. “One of the
dangers when you have a very deep library is to make sure you approach
exploitation in a careful and strategic way rather than just grabbing the
low-hanging fruit.”
Christie is just one of a slew of
literary power players that aren't letting a little thing like mortality get
in the way of their income stream. Stieg Larsson, author of The
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, died in 2004, but in September his
publisher, Knopf, came out with The Girl in the Spider's Web,
selling more than 200,000 hard covers and e-books in its first week (with a
movie in development at Sony). Harper Lee isn't dead, but at 89 she is deaf and
blind and hasn't written a published word in more than 50 years.
Yet this summer,
when HarperCollins released her To Kill a Mockingbird sequel, Go
Set a Watchman, it became the publisher's fastest-selling novel ever (1.1
million copies in less than a week). Dead authors like Robert Ludlum,
Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard and even Dr. Seuss have been cranking out
new material almost as fast as when they were alive — some excavated from old,
never published drafts (like Lee's book), others whipped up out of whole cloth
by literary impressionists (like Larsson's).
This isn't a new practice. Ian
Fleming's publishers have been keeping the author busy since the 1970s, even
though the author died in 1964. So far, 25 posthumous James Bond novels have
been published under Fleming's banner (Kingsley Amis wrote a bunch), while his
name has survived on the credits of five decades of Bond films (including Spectre,
which opened on Nov. 6 with $70 million). The movies, in turn, boost book
sales.
After Daniel Craig's Casino
Royale came out in 2006, for instance, Fleming's 1953 novel began
appearing on best-seller lists (No. 133, but still). "There's a whole
brand awareness [during a film's release]," notes Jeffrey Weiner, who has
managed Ludlum's estate since the author's death in 2001. He's planning to release
a new Bourne novel in June, just in time for the arrival of
the fifth Bourne film (which will reunite Matt Damon and Paul
Greengrass).
"We've kept Ludlum alive in
the public eye," says Weiner. "Most people reading his books today
and seeing the movies have no idea that he's not alive."
Part of the trick of keeping a
dead author's activity brisk is finding just the right voice to take his or her
place. Even well-established writers like Jeffery Deaver (who did one of the
Bond novels) and Eric Van Lustbader (who did one of Ludlum's) were asked to
submit sample chapters and offer extended pitches. But when it's done
correctly, it can be extremely lucrative.
Vince Flynn died in 2013, but his
new Mitch Rapp novel, The Survivor, ghostwritten by Kyle Mills,
debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in
October (and spiked back catalog sales).
Surprisingly few authors plan for
their literary afterlife. "It never came up," says Peter Leonard
about his father Elmore's wishes for his literary estate. The younger Leonard,
the author of six books, is writing a novel based on a character his father
(who died in 2013) wrote about in his Justified series.
"We never talked about me picking up his characters," he says.
"But he knew he wasn't going to live forever."
The Hollywood Reporter by Andy Lewis, Rebecca Ford 11/19/2015
5:00am PST
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