A couple of weeks ago, thanks to AI the Beatles came out with a "new" song. It was really just cobbled together from a demo tape John Lennon made and some guitar licks of George Harrison and then some new beats and singing(?) by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the only two still alive. Then with computers this whole Frankenstein monster was put together and unleashed on the public.
I didn't really listen to it because I'm too young to care that much about the Beatles. Some people I follow said it was pretty mediocre. Definitely no "Yesterday" or "Hey Jude" or whatever your go-to Beatles hit is. I commented on Al Sirois's Facebook post that it reminds me of books I read that came out after the author died (or were really feeble in the case of Go Set a Watchman) and most of them wound up being bad to mediocre, which is probably why the author didn't publish them in his/her lifetime--or in the case of Go Set a Watchman when she was lucid. Then someone said, "Aaaaactually..." and blathered about demo tapes, which had nothing to do with what I was saying.
Anyway, there really aren't a lot of posthumous books I've read that have been any good. Hard Case Crime released a few by the late Donald Westlake and only one rose to the level of decent. One was called Memory about this guy who like Memento has trouble with short-term memory. This was written in the early 60s and the first third is this whole Walden thing of him saving money to get back to New York City. And when he does finally get there everyone's just a huge dick to him and no one seems to understand that he has a mental handicap. So it's just really sad and depressing and really different from Westlake's other stuff, which is mostly heist thrillers.
Another one was supposed to be a James Bond movie--the one that eventually became Tomorrow Never Dies. Westlake had this idea for a story involving a businessman in Hong Kong when it's about to go from British rule to Chinese. The guy has some scheme to get money that involves drilling underwater or something to set off bombs or whatever. Parts of it were pretty interesting but you can see where it really needed rewritten because characters would drop out for a long time and the focal character seems to change from the first part to the end. Another draft could probably have brought everything together better.
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Probably the best one was Call Me A Cab that wasn't published for some reason until after Westlake's death. I think a lot of it was like Memory it wasn't really his usual heist/crime kind of story, but this was a lot more fun than that one. Other than being dated, since it's from the 60s or 70s, it's a pretty decent story. A woman hires a taxi driver in New York to take her across the country and so he does for a big payday. Some hilarity and mayhem ensue! I actually watched a similar movie years ago that I think was more of a romantic comedy. Anyway, that one was decent but the rest weren't great and you could see why they weren't published before he died.
One good posthumous novel I did think of was A Confederacy of Dunces. But that was sort of a different thing. That wasn't an established author, but someone who had been rejected by publishers. It was only after his tragic death that his mother and author Walker Percy got the book published and people realized it was great. Anyone who's tried to get into the business knows how difficult it can be, even back in the 60s or 70s or whenever. Agents and editors can reject you for a variety of reasons, some of which are pretty ridiculous. Mostly it's just subjective nonsense. It's different from an established author who puts something in a drawer and never gets back to it. And certainly by the time he died, Westlake had the clout to get those books published if he'd wanted to, just as Harper Lee could have published Go Set a Watchman if she'd wanted to. That they chose not to says something--at least to me.
If anyone looked through my drives after I died, they could find bits and pieces of some stories that I never finished. There are probably even some I did finish and didn't self-publish even. Sometimes you just get started on an idea and it doesn't work out like you want. Or you get busy with something else and just never get back to it. To me, if it really was a great story (in my mind) I'd fight to finish it and publish it. If I didn't, then that says I didn't really care enough to do so. If I don't care that much, why should a reader?
Of course there's money to be made from a "new" Beatles song or "new" Prince song or "new" book by some deceased author. Even if they are pretty consistently mediocre--at best--people will always line up to listen or read because if you really like an artist in any medium you always want more. We're just all greedy that way and the even greedier record companies/publishers know that.
2 comments:
It also annoys me when they continue to use the dead author's name to try to capitalize on it even though someone else is writing, like Tom Clancy or how they made sure to include Gene Roddenberry's name as part of those late 90s shows in an effort to make them seem better than they were since they were put together by people after he died and mostly based off notes and unfinished ideas
I'm not a Beatles fan, but I heard the song once and I kinda liked it. I haven't heard it since, and had forgotten about it until now. In general, it's just a way to make money as we know. I don't pay attention to these things because I know it's not really from the author or musician. That it's just a pieced together thing.
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