Best-selling authors rework earlier novels into new hits

What's the name of that new book? Isn't the story vaguely familiar? Are we talking about plagiarism? Self-plagiarism? These questions are raised by a recent example of a traditional literary gambit: the repackaging and even the rewriting of past clunkers by best-selling authors into somewhat new books that will possibly sell in the hundreds of thousands on the second go-around.

That's not to be confused with the relatively fresh strategy for using the brand name of a popular author to make money, which is to franchise it. Tom Clancy, for instance, conceptionalizes a book and approves or disapproves it as the project proceeds. Someone else writes it. Both names are on the cover, the brand name, of course, in larger type. That process is really all about cash.

But later this month one of the most popular authors in recent years, James Patterson, is leveraging his name and best-selling status the old-fashioned way. He is publishing in glossy hardcover a rewritten and renamed version of a novel, Virgin, that first appeared in 1980 and then quickly sunk from sight.

In March a somewhat rewritten version of a paperback he published in 1986 as Black Market (Simon & Schuster) was renamed Black Friday and reissued by Warner Books in paperback.

For some authors, like Patterson, pride in craft plays a large part in these literary resurrections, but so does book publishing's eternal quest to squeeze more lucrative opportunities from the work of its principal talent. Still, while there may be something disquieting about an author granting someone else the license to write under his name, it is not necessarily a disturbing idea for a writer to try to make a book better by rewriting it and selling a new version, providing that when the new rendition is published, the writer's surgery has been made clear.

Whatever the motives of a particular author and publisher, the republication of a rewritten book has a long tradition, for the authors of literary works as well as popular commercial and romance fiction. In 1900 Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, a tale of a country girl who became the mistress of a wealthy man and then an actress, so horrified its publisher, Doubleday, Page & Co., that it was virtually suppressed. Dreiser, under attack as immoral, tried distributing it himself with little luck. The novel was reissued in 1919, but it was not until 1982 that it was finally published with many passages restored from his original manuscript.

Authors aren't easily satisfied. In 1978 John Fowles' cult novel The Magus was reissued by Little, Brown. At a hefty 656 pages, it exceeded the original 1965 version by 70 pages and was considerably reworked. He was still dissatisfied with his most popular novel. In the foreword he wrote that even with the revision it is "a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent."

The most famous rewrite in American publishing was probably Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. It was originally sent to his publisher Scribner's in 1924 under the title Trimalchio. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, told him that "the novel is a wonder," but that the main character was "somewhat vague," that "the reader's eye can never quite focus upon him."

Fitzgerald revised, cutting and pasting, disclosing more information about Gatsby's earlier life, reshaping supporting characters. The book became the story of the Jay Gatsby we now know, which sells several hundred thousand copies annually.

In a reversal of the trend, Trimalchio, the failed version, if it can be called that, will be published for the first time this month by Cambridge University Press. Which raises the question: Is it fair and proper to publish a version of a writer's work that the writer withheld?

More recently the writer with perhaps the greatest itch to rewrite has been Dean Koontz, the best-selling author of psychological thrillers, who has rewritten a number of his early paperbacks. Yes, his name brand makes these books best sellers the second time out, but mostly he does it for pride of craft. He's a better writer now than when he started.

Later this month, Little, Brown will publish Patterson's Cradle and All. It's hard to imagine that it will not be a best seller. If one looks carefully at the bottom of the front cover flap the reader will see a small box in which it is disclosed that the book is based on an earlier Patterson novel, Virgin, and "includes scenes and characters from that book."

Given Patterson's success in making his name a brand product since the first publication of Virgin, the book probably could have been republished into an instant best seller without a changed comma. But Patterson said that the book "has been sitting in my brain file."

"I never felt that I got it where I wanted it," he said. "I didn't feel I had it right. I always thought this was a neat story but no one ever read it."

So what did he do?

For starters, he rewrote part of it in the first person "because I'm more comfortable there." In Virgin, the main character was a Catholic nun who was also an amateur detective.

In Cradle and All she has been converted to being a former nun who is now a professional private investigator.

"I've learned some things about telling a commercial story; I substantially rewrote this," Patterson said. "I always felt Black Market," now Black Friday, "was too dense, and

I went in and cut out 70 or 80 pages of extraneous information. There are two or three others I'd like to redo."

Along with the pride of craft -- "I don't feel I've written my best thriller yet," Patterson said -- there is the drive by publishers and their best-selling authors to increase their potency in the marketplace. Black Friday is in the stores, and Cradle will soon be as well.

In September Along Came a Spider is to be reissued in paperback to ride the coattails of the movie version; in October there will be a paperback version of Pop Goes the Weasel, last year's hardcover best seller by Patterson; and in November there's his new hardcover, Roses Are Red, featuring Patterson's franchise character, Alex Cross, the psychologist detective.

In the end, does anyone care about our opening questions? The answer is: apparently not, if it's a good yarn from a brand name writer. Anyway, why should there be extra respect for a novelist who can only tell a story one way?

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