Mariella Frostrup Plays the Mischievous Minx

It all started with the Book Show from Sky Arts turning up at the house to film me waffling about ghostwriting. Pleasant sunny day, guard down, camera running, my questioner enquired if I wouldn't prefer to write "in my own voice", or something similar.
What I wanted to convey was the idea that I wasn't particularly interested in hearing anything I had to say, but I was interested in hearing from other people with more interesting backgrounds. What actually happened was I proferred the opinion that the world had heard enough over the last five hundred years of people like me, ("middleclass, middleaged, middlebrow, male and english speaking"), pontificating and that it was time to give the rest of the world a bit of hearing.
The filmed interviews ended, (Hunter Davies and Kirsty Crawford had also appeared and been very charming), and the viewers were returned to the studio where, to my horror, distinguished novelists Robert Harris and Peter James sat listening to me pontificating, as if deliberately illustrating my own point, (if only I could lay claim to such subtle powers of irony). Mariella Frostrup, armed with her most disarming of smiles, then suggested to them that they were the under attack as "middleaged, middleclass, male and english speaking pontificators", (mercifully she let them off the "middlebrow" accusation).
Eek. These two were most defintely not who I had in mind. Most of Peter James's books of crime and policework are very much not set in the world of the middleclass etc etc, and Robert Harris tells tales on the very rich and very powerful, who are just as colourful and interesting as the underdogs of society. To make it worse, I know them both. Peter is a chum of long standing and Robert very sweetly quoted my "Ghostwriting" book at the start of every chapter of his novel, "The Ghost".
Both of them, mercifully, did not rise to the bait that the Mischievous One was dangling and doled out only the mildest of reprimands before saying very forgiving things. I felt a little like I had been hauled into the common room and told off by two much admired teachers for some piece of smart-alecry which I had meant for other staff members. Yet another illustration of why it is infinitely preferable to stay behind the scenes as a ghost and let other people do the media pontificating.

A Triumph for Fine Ghostwriting

The announcement from New York that Keith Richards has won the Mailer Prize for Distinguished Biography is a wonderful endorsement for the writing skills of Mr Richards' ghost/collaborator/whatever-you-like-to-call-him, James Fox.
The whole project illustrates perfectly the joys, (and doubtless frustrations), that the process of ghostwriting for an interesting subject can provide. Mr Richards has led the most interesting and entertaining of lives. Spending time with him and then speaking in his voice must have been fun. To then be awarded a "distinguished" prize would be a very jolly cherry on top of the cake.
Mr Fox is, of course, a highly established writer, (and author of the very famous "White Mischief"), so I am sure he has no problem with Mr Richards picking up the prize and the attendant publicity which will help to keep the royalties flowing.

Professor Sutherland Among the Ghosts

Coming across a witty article in The Spectator by Professor John Sutherland entitled "Among the Ghosts", reminded me of the last time I heard him speak on the subject on Radio Four's Today programme, when John Humphreys and his production team were obviously hoping the Professor and I would fall out on the subject of whether ghost-writing is a "capital crime" - even the Professor had to admit that it was not that, although I think he said he found it a bit "iffy".

He seems to have been giving the subject a bit more of a ponder since then. He's obviously still not our greatest fan, but he now seems to be giving us little more than an old fashioned and kindly meant professorial cuff around the ear. He seems more saddened by the low motives of those who hire us than he is with us the ghosts.

When we were set to spar with one another by Mr. Humphreys, a reluctant pair of pit-bulls, the Professor did say in a rather despairing tone that in ghosting the motive was "always commercial".

I can't argue that that is not true, I'm just wondering if it is such a terrible thing. Most writers earn virtually no money at all from their books and have to rely on other ways to pay their mortgages, feed their children and put something aside for their old age. So they turn to journalism or they teach or they have some other expertise which they write about, (John Mortimer and the law, for instance, or the many "gurus" and "experts" on everything from medicine to gardening who fill our media).

If you want to be a professional writer of books, but do not want to rely on a university, the BBC or Rupert Murdoch for a pension, then you have to look for ways to be paid for your daily labours. We are scribes in the marketplace, selling our wares to anyone who cares to hire us in just the same way as artists might sell their skills for painting portraits. Undoubtedly the motive we have in selling our skills is commercial. The alternative, I think, would have been to have seen my children starve.

Ghostwriter - Film Star

The first cut of a short film made about me by a particularly charming and professional group of students from Farnham University of the Creative Arts is now on view at www.vimeo.com/17529822

A Despised and Secretive Breed

Feeling crushed today upon reading in the Daily Mail that Chris Tookey, the esteemed newspaper’s film and theatre critic, believes ghostwriters are “a despised and secretive breed”.

It must be wonderful to belong to two breeds as adored as theatre critics and Daily Mail journalists. Note to self, must try harder to break into a more revered circle of folk.

Ghostwriter as Scurfy Recluse

Oh, the hubris of it all. In the very same week that the great Horace Bent celebrates the sex appeal of the ghostwriting fraternity in the equally great trade organ, The Bookseller, Terence Blacker writes in The Author that in publishing now scurfy recluses "put the words on paper", while well-scrubbed celebrities "appear on the cover and do the chat show circuit". From “sexy” to “scurfy”, how mortifying.

The eminent Blacker, however, goes on to provide a chink of light by predicting that within a year ghostwriters will be forming their own trade association, Ghostwriters of Britain (GOB), and will be powerful enough to “cripple the book trade for several months” by withdrawing their labour. The revenge of the scurfy recluses; it seems our day of power is nigh.

“Ain’t Ghostwriters Sexy?”

Not my words, obviously, heaven forfend, but those of Horace Bent, éminence grise of the Bookseller magazine, and himself a strangely attractive man. I feel I must thank him, not only on behalf of myself but on behalf of all my fellow literary wall flowers as we shuffle awkwardly in the shadows of the great literary prom dance, too shy and unsure of ourselves to step out into the spotlight. Mr Bent, you see, has also been to a preview of “The Ghost” and has had his heartbeat quickened by the performance of "dapper" Ewan McGregor, our representative in the limelight.

A Viewing Room in Soho

An email out of the blue invites me to a preview of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost”, in a viewing room behind a discreet Soho door and up dark, creaking wooden stairs.

No sign of the email sender when I arrive, just a tiny cinema sparsely populated with professionals. There can be no sign of Polanski during this launch either, or course, because he is under house arrest in Switzerland for crimes too old and too famous to be regurgitated here, except that his fate strangely mirrors that of Pierce Brosnan’s character in the film, an ex British Prime Minister holed up in a rich man’s heavily guarded beach house. Once swept to power on a wave of adoration he is now wanted for war crimes and the publishers who have paid out millions for his memoirs are demanding speedy delivery of a manuscript that will recoup their outlay.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the promotional machine for Tony Blair’s forthcoming memoir is kicking into life with suggestions of publication in the autumn. No one has bothered to make any secret of the fact that Pierce Brosnan’s character was modelled by its creator, novelist Robert Harris, on Blair himself. Blair and Harris used to be friends but, one imagines, not any more.

When Harris’s book, “The Ghost”, was published, bearing quotes from my own book, “Ghostwriting” at the opening of every chapter, I was just starting work on a book for the mysterious futurologist and educationalist, Jim Martin. As I travelled out to his private island in Bermuda the parallels seemed uncanny. But whereas the secret tunnels, fantastical buildings and gardens that riddle Jim Martin’s island are drenched in sunshine, Polanski’s wind and rain-swept landscapes are altogether bleaker and darker, the violent sea grey and menacing rather than brilliant blue and sparkling. In Polanski and Harris’s world there is a body on the beach rather than the sails of millionaires’ yachts bobbing cheerfully off shore.

The ghost of the title is played by Ewan McGregor, a Chandleresque protagonist suddenly transported into a closed, dangerous, mysterious world. Initially, as with many ghostwriting projects in the real world, virtually nothing going on around him makes sense. But then slowly, as he grows familiar with his story and the characters, he sees the terrible truth materialise out of the lies and secrets.

As the film ended and the lights came back on there was still no sign of the e-mail sender who had assured me he was so looking forward to meeting me, and in the bright sunlight of Old Compton Street the darkness and menace of the film begins to fade. But actually Polanski and Harris’s world is all around us. Polanski himself is still under house arrest, Blair’s publishers still have a memoir they have to sell, there is still talk of possible war crimes accusations hanging in the air and still no one can really explain what madness drove us to go to war in Iraq with the Americans. There are conspiracy theories circulating on the internet as to why the authorities should have chosen the moment when Blair was running for European President to resurrect the case against Polanski after so many decades of indifference.

Nothing, as always, is quite as safe as it seems as I head with my wife to Little Italy in Frith Street for a late lunch.

As One Little Goldmine Closes

Just over twenty years ago I decided to take a modest advertisement in The Bookseller magazine – “Ghostwriter for Hire”. At the end of this year I am told the magazine will be closing the Directory page which has carried that ad almost every week since.

I owe The Bookseller a huge debt of thanks for all the fascinating people that little ad has steered in my direction over the last couple of decades.

When Zana Muhsen went into her local library to enquire how she could make contact with a ghostwriter, it was a copy of The Bookseller that the librarian pulled out to consult. Four million or so copies of the resulting book, “Sold”, have since been sold and many other authors, publishers and agents have been led to my door along the same route.

There were many months when the ad produced no results at all and other writers, following my lead and buying space themselves, would come and go, often disappointed not to be able to see instant results for their outlay. But every few months another opportunity would find its way through to me from that calling card, which I left permanently in the publishing world’s equivalent of their Post Office window.

I have no idea how the economics of the magazine’s advertising pages pan out these days, but I’m guessing they have done their sums before deciding to close this particular window.

Is it one more small brick in the bridge leading us all away from printed media, across choppy and uncharted seas to a totally digital world? Probably.

Whatever it is, taking that ad twenty years ago was quite possibly the best business decision I ever made – closely followed by the decision five years ago to ask the wonderful folk at Wordpool Design to build me a website.

The Stamp of Glamour for Ghostwriting

At last we ghostwriters are to receive the official stamp of glamour that we have always deserved; the media is reporting that Ewan McGregor is going to be playing the ghostwriter protagonist in the forthcoming Roman Polanski movie of Robert Harris's novel "The Ghost".
With any luck McGregor will do for the image of ghosting what Bogart did for private detectives, Alan Alda for army doctors, Harrison Ford for archaeologists and Gregory Peck for lawyers.
Robert Harris very generously quoted my Ghostwriting handbook at the start of every chapter of the book and went on to paint a brutally accurate portrait of what life is like hacking away at this particular section of the publishing coalface.
As I am just starting work on a biography of an enigmatic multi-millionaire and futurologist who lives on his own private island off Bermuda and has recently become the largest single donor to Oxford University ever, I shall now be able to imagine myself as Ewan setting out into the plot of a new Robert Harris thriller. I will be able to enjoy a whole new level of self-delusion thanks to the age-old wonders of the Hollywood dream machine.

When is a "misery memoir" just a "powerful story"?

There was yet more coverage in the publishing trade media this week of "mis-mem sales dipping" - but how is anyone measuring what is or isn't mis-mem?


Misery memoirs are just powerful stories starring great heroes and the world will never grow tired of reading them, however the trade chooses to label them.


Over the last few months I have been involved with four books that might be included in the genre; "Cry Silent Tears" by Joe Peters, (currently number one in the Sunday Times paperback non-fiction chart), "Daddy's Little Earner" by Maria Landon, (which went to number two in the same chart a few weeks ago), "Disgraced" by Saira Ahmed, which is the newly published story of a girl who escaped an arranged marriage in Pakistan and went on the game to support her family and "For the Love of Julie" by Ann Ming, a woman who spent 17 years battling to get the law of double jeopardy changed in order to bring her daughter's murderer to justice.

They could all be labelled as "misery", or perhaps "women in peril", or "crime", or "culture gap stories" - or perhaps they are just powerful tales about heroes and heroines who battle against adversity and have extraordinary and extreme experiences that the rest of us are fortunate enough to avoid. If it is the latter, doesn't that cover virtually every great story ever told?

Or are we saying that "mis-mems" are only the stories told by abused children? If that is the case how can they be said to be in decline when Joe Peters, Maria Landon and Judy Westwater were all in the paperback top ten together a couple of weeks ago?

Powerful tales, with strong and likeable heroes battling against adversity are always going to appeal to readers, whether you pigeon-hole them as "misery" or just call them "powerful stories".

People overcoming adversity, (or misery if you prefer), always make for gripping reading in both fiction and non-fiction and the subject matter they deal with will always develop as we learn and understand more about the world about us. No publisher would have been willing to touch the incendiary material contained in "Cry Silent Tears" five years ago when Kevin Lewis's "The Kid" was first published. We have all learned a lot in those five years and I suspect there are many more moving, inspiring and powerful personal stories to come, whether we choose to call them "mis-mems" or not.