> Mr. Ardai: If I recall correctly, you edit some
> of your reprints (I seem to remember you asking
> Donald Westlake to make changes to Somebody
> Owes Me Money). Do recall correctly, and if I do,
> what do you use as a basis for those decisions?
If an author wants to edit a book he's written, I think that's his
privilege; the edits might be improvements or they might not, but it's
his book and he's entitled to do what he wants with it. (I had a
discussion about this with John Lange before his death; he was concerned
that the books he'd written in the 1960s wouldn't read properly today
because of references to 1960s prices and other dated material, and I
assured him that it wouldn't be a problem. His compromise in the case
of ZERO COOL was to add a new pair of framing chapters set in the
present day. I'm not sure that was less confusing to people, but it was
his preference.)
So that's one case. Another is a case where I think a book would
benefit from some editing, for clarity or to fix errors in the original
edition or for some other reason. In SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY, for
instance, the entire book is about the main character trying to get some
gambling winnings that he's owed -- but you got to the end of the book
and the subject of the missing money was simply dropped. It was left
completely unresolved, and I didn't find this satisfying. So I dropped
Don a note, pointed this out, and asked how he'd feel about adding a
line or two to tie off this loose end. He was delighted to do it.
In the case of a book we're publishing posthumously and that has never
been published before (such as David Dodge's THE LAST MATCH or Roger
Zelazny's THE DEAD MAN'S BROTHER or Don's forthcoming MEMORY), we'd be
doing neither the author nor the reader any favors by printing the
typescript without any editing at all. The author deserves to get at
least the same quality and caliber of editing he'd have gotten if he'd
sold the book to a publisher during his lifetime. Initially, we erred
on the side of doing less rather than more editing in cases like this,
and that's generally been a mistake, I think: THE LAST MATCH would have
been better if tightened up a bit more. But in any event we work with
great care, like restorers of priceless paintings, working very hard not
to damage things in the process. (And we try to work with someone who
is able to speak on behalf of the author with reasonable authority:
Dodge's daughter, Zelazny's son, Don's wife.)
What about posthumous reprints? Well, once in a while we come across
one where there are sentences that look like they contain typos or a
missing word or two, but there's no way to be 100% sure; we use our best
judgment. Sometimes, as in Robert Parker's PASSPORT TO PERIL, there are
inconsistencies that just need to be fixed -- a woman learns about a
character's death on page 2 but then says something on page 20 that only
makes sense if he's alive, that sort of thing. Again, we try to consult
with the author's children or spouses about this sort of thing whenever
possible.
We do modernize spelling and punctuation: In the old days "ash tray" was
two words and now it's one; same with "girl friend" and "boy friend." I
go back and forth about whether to leave the charming archaism of
capitalizing "Lesbian" or "Martini" or just lowercasing them the way you
would today. Once in a very long while there's some incidental bit of
dialogue written in gruesome racist dialect -- a detective interacting
with a "negress" maid who comes on the scene and delivers a line or two
in dialect that just makes you wince -- and changing that sort of thing
falls somewhere between modernizing spelling and being a shameful PC
bowdlerizer; it's come up maybe four times in 67 books and whenever
possible I leave it up to the author (or author's close relatives) to
decide. Note, though, that I would only consider such an alteration if
it were truly incidental, if the plot, characters, situation and so on
would be completely unchanged either way; in a book like Shepard
Rifkin's THE MURDERER VINE, there's lots of ugly, painful, uncomfortable
racial material, but that's the central point of the book (which is
about a northern detective traveling to the Deep South to address a pair
of race-related murders), and altering one word of it to make the reader
more comfortable would be criminal.
And in the worst case I'm talking about changing the spelling of a word
or two in a scene of several thousand words, or maybe changing "I told
the negress" to "I told the maid." I would never -- NEVER -- change the
substance or events of a scene in a reprint (absent a living author's
asking to do so, of course). You don't like near-rape scenes? Well,
neither do I, and yes, old crime novels do have a lot of them. You know
what I do? Choose different books to reprint. Why do you think I've
never reprinted a Lionel White book? The man was a decent author (not
fantastic, but decent), but in almost every book he had a near-rape
scene that was clearly supposed to be titillating. I don't enjoy
reading it, I don't think our readers would like it much either, the
books aren't so amazing in other ways as to make me ache with regret
over missing the chance to bring one back into print, and there are
plenty of other books that are. So: I find other books to reprint.
Issue resolved.
Why Harlequin couldn't have just done that, I don't know.
--Charles
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "trentrey" <trent@...> wrote:
>
>
> A couple of comments about previous comments.
>
> Harlequin _brags_ about censoring their crime books here. They were
going to be on my Christmas list. They have been struck:
>
>
http://harlequinblog.com/2009/10/the-harlequin-vintage-collectiona-lesso\
n-in-patience/
>
> I'm astonished Ellroy said what he said about The Cold Six Thousand. I
liked it on first read (after adjusting to the style) and on a second
read concluded that it was almost the equal of American Tabloid, which
is about as high a praise as I can give a novel. It's much better than
Blood's a Rover.
>
> I'm against editing already-printed books, but I think very minor
exceptions can be made. In The Cold Six Thousand, a character chews
Nicorette gum a couple of decades before it hit the market. Removing
that one word in the reprint would have eliminated a jarring
anachronism. So I guess I'm not a purist.
>
> Mr. Ardai: If I recall correctly, you edit some of your reprints (I
seem to remember you asking Donald Westlake to make changes to Somebody
Owes Me Money). Do recall correctly, and if I do, what do you use as a
basis for those decisions?
>
> If you think it will cause a shitstorm on this message board, feel
free not to answer. ;)
>
> --Trent
> The Violent World of Parker
>
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