Tampering with genius: the 'new' Hitchhiker's book

When looking at books to buy, I always become somewhat suspicious when I see two authors on the front page. Not a co-authoring project, but a 'brand' name at the top, and the real author at the bottom.

This is the kind of thing which happens with thriller writers like James Patterson. It is a commercial enterprise: Patterson outlines the plot, and the hack writer churns out several hundred pages of thriller. Patterson gives it his seal of approval and it's on your supermarket bookshelves a few weeks later.

That's fine. James Patterson is alive. He is making no bones about the fact that his creative juices overflow so wildly he cannot possibly write down all of his ideas for trashy thrillers himself.

But when I find Britain's best-loved author of the twentieth century, Douglas Adams, fronting a book by Eoin Colfer, I become shocked. Adams is dead. He can't give that seal of approval. He can have no say over the product bearing his name.

I become even more shocked - appalled, even - when I see that Colfer has picked up the thread of the work for which Adams is known, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Colfer has written part six of three. This is a crime.

Euan Ferguson wrote a review in the Observer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/11/and-another-thing-douglas-adams

He said the book is really quite good. I believe him. But that is not the point. This is a series of books with which millions of people have fallen in love over the years. It shouldn't be expanded on, extended or tampered with. These are Adams' characters. This is his universe which he chose to share with us. It is not for another author to come along and bandwagon the operation, a few years after the author's death, and carry on the franchise. The whole thing seems crass.

It is so crassly commercial that nobody even in the world of rap music has attempted it. Yes, Tupac and Biggie have both had flourishing careers after their untimely deaths. But not even Puff Daddy has attempted to create a Notorious BIG album, with no real material from the rotund rapper himself. He just samples a bit of Biggie rapping, brings in an alive rapper and a honey-voiced singer, and he has the 'Duets' project. That is honest by comparison.

There is no suggestion, even, that Adams was thinking up a final book and Colfer is picking it up. No, he feels the man's muse and writes a book in Adams's name. And, worse still, there may be more to come.

Ferguson says this in the Observer:
Colfer has given us a delight, and an eye-opener, and hope, and, close as this book does on the line "The end of one of the middles", the near-promise of more to come.

This is not a near-promise. When I saw the advert for the book on the tube, I felt a nagging distress, a feeling that one of my heroes was being tampered with, with no chance of recourse.

Who knows if Adams would mind. Many splendid creative types take horrific decisions late in their career (see Beatles video game for evidence). Adams' wife did sanction the project.

But I'm sure many, many fans of the Hitchhiker's series of books mind very much. The best way to put a stop to this tawdrey enterprise is to avoid buying or reading Colfer's book, and hope it disappears, with no more additions.