The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Apache]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

From what little I know about James Patterson, I wasn't even sure he was a real person.

I know of at least one nonexistent author. "Lauren Brooke", who wrote a juvenile horse-fiction series called Heartland (this later was adapted into a popular television series by CBC) was actually a handful of ghostwriters under the company Working Partners.

There's also a weird case in V.C. Andrews, who wrote maybe half a dozen books before dying but now she has a zillion ghostwritten books to her name.

Don't forget Frank Dixon, the writer of The Hardy Boys. Or Carolyn Keene, the writer of The Nancy Drew Series.
Apache

[ownedbycats]

Wasn't Carolyn Keene just the penname for Mildred Benson?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Wasn't Carolyn Keene just the penname for Mildred Benson?

She was the first but there were others. See Carolyn Keene for more information.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I know of at least one nonexistent author. "Lauren Brooke", who wrote a juvenile horse-fiction series called Heartland (this later was adapted into a popular television series by CBC) was actually a handful of ghostwriters under the company Working Partners.

There's many of those. They're called house names.

There's also a weird case in V.C. Andrews, who wrote maybe half a dozen books before dying but now she has a zillion ghostwritten books to her name.

As far as I know, all the Andrews books not written by Andrews were written by Andrew Neiderman.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Wasn't Carolyn Keene just the penname for Mildred Benson?

No, she was just one of the original employed writers by Stratemeyer. Franklin Dixon, Laura Lee Hope and others were house names for their series. Maybe one of their best writers.

Edward Stratemeyer or his wife may have written the first volume of some their series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratemeyer_Syndicate (may contain inaccuracies). Of course it was decades and post-internet that I discovered that Franklin Dixon, Carolyn Keene and Laura Lee Hope were not even pen names like Cordwainer Smith or John le Carré or Leslie Charteris, though Charteris, like Patterson, eventually employed ghost writers for The Saint.

[JSWolf]

When I was a lot younger and I did read The Hardy Boys books, I had no idea that Franklin W. Dixon was just a name for a stable of authors.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

There's many of those. They're called house names.

Another horsey juvenile example is Bonnie Bryant. She wrote all the Saddle Club books (and yes, this also got adapted into a TV show...) up until around the 30th book - if you have anything after that you'll see a note at the beginning expressing "special thanks" to the ghostwriters for their "help in the writing of this book."

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Another horsey juvenile example is Bonnie Bryant. She wrote all the Saddle Club books (and yes, this also got adapted into a TV show...) up until around the 30th book...

At their peak, I was sure that Goosebumps' R.L. Stine was a house name. I was surprised to find he's a real person (who also wrote the novelization of Spaceballs!) and actually wrote all of those books.