>Sounds like the old "follow the money"
>meme. There are only two examples that
>I've really noticed. Several book have
>been published with Robert B. Parker's
>characters Jesse Stone and Spenser. The
>stand-ins may be good authors but I had
>never heard of them. So, I have passed
>on them. And, then I've seen several
>books about Robert Ludlum's character
>Jason Bourne that were published. The
>stand-in is Eric Van Lustbader. He's a
>good author. However, after having read
>two or three of his books, I decided he
>was not my cup of tea and so have passed
>on his Bourne books. I guess the reason
>I don't much care for this practice is
>that I don't think it can ever be the
>same as the original author. When it
>comes to an author's "voice", I think
>you can imitate but seldom, if ever,
>duplicate. I suspect that your dad's
>fans much prefer your treatment of your
>dad's estate.

This is always an issue but here are several observations:

1) It's a business for us as well as Random House, so it's all about the money. We don't place profit as high on the list of priorities as some but every layer has to make some money or the entire edifice begins to collapse.

2) With a popular author you can give up some unhappy readers and still make money ... and still succeed in keeping all the original books in print. Fans lose track of the reality of the situation ALL the time. I get hate mail for finishing and publishing No Traveller Returns because to them it's not "real" Louis L'Amour (even though it's as perfect a copy of his style at that time as I can make it) what they really want is a Western written in the 1960s or '70s. The book CLEARLY isn't that, it has a picture of a ship on the cover! But they still buy it and then hate on it and me, not recognizing that there is a much bigger game being played here and, if I'm not going to create "new" L'Amour stories at this time, this is the way it has to be played or Dad will disappear. It's odd how people can't just like what they like, they have to be angry about what they don't!

3) If you are an author following up on a career like Parker or Louis's and you can't duplicate the original author's voice, and sometimes, especially with unfinished work, that seems to be impossible because the original author DIDN'T finish because their style couldn't handle the subject matter, it's often better to make a clean break stylistically.

This was nearly an issue with Haunted Mesa. LL was shut down on that story for years because his aspirations for it conflicted with the way he had trained himself to write. He finally found a work around but he had to abandon many of his goals to do so. When I was fooling around with the (unproduced) TV adaptation I was able to see the traps that he had set for himself and see ways of avoiding them that his style would not have accommodated. BUT ... I had 30 years to think about it and I had the fact that I was working in a different medium to force me away from "his style."

Douglas Preston is a good friend of mine. When he writes on his own his voice is very different from when he co-writes with Lincoln Child. Though I know what fans want, if that is impossible I see no reason not to accept this sort of "combined voice" when one writer works with another. I was able to avoid that to a great extent with No Traveller Returns but that may not always be the case.

NTR is a very close match to the combined sensibility of the bits of it that Dad left behind and the Yondering stories, of which it is one. HOWEVER, it could not really work without a more technical insight into the mechanical aspects of Tanker Ship design and the machinery aboard. Dad didn't like technical stuff, he avoided it whenever possible. I'm the opposite. If there is a tiny, hard to define, combined Beau & Louis voice in NTR it is the fact that the story requires some technical details and that wasn't in Louis's style when he was writing solo.