Automated Storyteller

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

We have this enduring mental image of the author at work. He's sequestered in his den, hunkered in front of a typewriter. (The computer has been a tremendous boon to writers, but there’s just no romance in the phrase “word processor.”) The cigarette on his lips has smouldered to the filter, he’s nursing his sixth cup of coffee and struggling to craft a sentence that won’t cause him to throw up his hands in futility and jettison the page to the wastepaper basket. Such is the life of an artist: intense, grueling and without exception, an ordeal.

And then along comes a chap like Alexander McCall Smith, who seems to regard book writing not as some rarefied art but as a form of daily exercise, like sit-ups or squats. Where most authors sweat to produce 1,000 words a day without self-mutilation, McCall Smith has been known to bang out three times that in a single sitting. He’s a living rebuke of the notion that novel-writing is the least bit arduous.

The Zimbabwean-born, Scottish-based author is best known for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series; set in the Botswanan capital of Gaborone, these gentle, genteel pseudo-mysteries feature Precious Ramotswe, not so much a detective as a den mother to the motley eccentrics living in her village. A professor of medical law with an oeuvre of over 50 books — including purportedly seminal works on Botswanan criminal law and “the forensic aspects of sleep” — McCall Smith is currently nurturing two other series. One is Portuguese Irregular Verbs, an academic farce starring the dotty Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld; and The Sunday Philosophy Club, another ongoing whodunit.

If no other author released a book this year, McCall Smith might well keep the publishing industry cranking on his own. He has three new titles due in 2005. First up is In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (part six in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series), which is out next week; following close behind is 44 Scotland Street, a multi-family yarn originally serialized in the Scotsman newspaper — due in June; and Friends, Lovers, Chocolate (part two in the Sunday Philosophy Club series), which is expected in September. And then there’s his avalanche of reissues.

McCall Smith even manages to make other prolific writers look lazy. Ian Rankin, best-selling author of the Inspector Rebus series of police-procedural novels, lives in the same Edinburgh enclave as McCall Smith. Addressing an audience at the Ottawa International Writers Festival last fall, Rankin talked about regularly passing McCall Smith’s house while walking his children to school and always seeing him at his desk, typing. Rankin — no idler himself — kidded that McCall Smith’s home must be outfitted with a tripwire that alerts him when someone is about to pass by his window, so that he can scramble back to his desk and preserve the façade that he never stops writing.

According to McCall Smith’s publishers, it’s no façade.

“A lot of [his] time is spent not only writing, but thinking, because he lives with these characters all the time,” says Marion Garner, publisher at Vintage Canada, which prints McCall Smith’s books in paperback. “You [the reader] become addicted to what’s going to happen next, and so does he.”

Alexander McCall Smith. Photo by Graham Clark. Courtesy Random House Canada.

The appeal of McCall Smith — who has sold more than 7.5 million books in the English language alone — is due to a confluence of factors. He writes mysteries without the off-putting gore; his books are driven by characters and setting rather than plot. (Garner calls them “literary soap operas.”) The books are amiably escapist, and because they’re crafted with something finer than the workmanlike prose of a John Grisham or Danielle Steel, they’re deemed serious fiction. “He makes you feel like you’re there,” says Marian Misters, co-owner of Toronto bookshop Sleuth of Baker Street. “You can drink the rooibos tea, you can smell the village. And I think people love to read that.”

Misters sees no problem with McCall Smith’s prolific yield. “Customers don’t mind,” she says. “If they like a series, they’d love to have one [book] a month, if they could, from the writer.”

Some observers, however, feel that prodigiousness can mar a writer’s canon in the long run.

“[McCall Smith]’s producing much the same thing every time, in a different iteration,” says Nathalie Atkinson, Canadian correspondent for Publishers Weekly. “It’s not really that different from a mystery writer like Agatha Christie — I still can’t get straight which ones I’ve read until I’ve gone through the first five chapters.”

There are other problems with an overly zealous scribe. “The most obvious is that they saturate the market,” says Doug Pepper, president and publisher at McClelland & Stewart. “You don’t build up expectations and what-have-you if the author keeps coming out with book after book after book. Also, if you don’t leave enough time between books, it’s very hard to go back to the well for more press. The media will say, ‘We just did him.’”

Peter Robinson, the creator of Inspector Alan Banks. Photo courtesy McClelland & Stewart.

The dream of most publishers is to have at least one “house author,” a writer with a robust fan base who can dependably churn out one title a year — giving the publisher the financial solidity to take the occasional flyer on more challenging (read: less gainful) authors. One example is mystery novelist Peter Robinson (published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart), who was born in Britain and now resides in Toronto. The author of more than 16 books — most of them starring Inspector Alan Banks — Robinson has a rabid following that begs to be sated. “They’ve read his backlist, they read the new book, and they’re like, ‘What now?’” says Pepper. “If there’s too long a wait, they might forget. There’s a reason mystery writers and writers of genre fiction produce like that.”

Genre writers are undoubtedly the most fertile; just think of Stephen King (horror), Elmore Leonard (crime), John Grisham (thriller) and Maeve Binchy (romance). Mystery-monger Anne Perry (Death By Dickens, The Shifting Tide) is currently releasing three titles a year. Genre publishing has become so fierce that publishers will cut mid-list writers who can’t — or won’t — keep pace. Sparkle Hayter is a case in point. The Canadian-born suspense writer (Naked Brunch, the Robin Hudson series) was dumped by her American publisher when she refused to stick to the book-a-year clip; Richard Barre (the Will Hardesty novels) suffered a similar fate. (Both have since allied themselves with smaller publishers.)

For his part, Pepper says he couldn’t conceive of coercing a writer to produce more prolifically. “I don‘t think it behooves anybody to pressure somebody like that,” he says. “They might snap. Or they might put out a piece of crap.”

There is an acknowledged double standard in how we view a prolific genre writer and a fruitful literary author. Musing on the seemingly inexhaustible John Updike, David Foster Wallace once asked, “Has the son-of-a-bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” Updike’s absurdly prodigious output — in the form of novels, as well as short stories, travel writing and literary criticism — has undermined his stature in the eyes of Foster Wallace, as well as many fiction readers. It hearkens back to this notion we have of how “serious” novels are created — that every sentence is the result of years of contemplation and agonized toil. Anything less is deemed half-assed — or purely for a commercial audience. Atkinson acknowledges the stigma. “If a Jonathan Lethem produced something like The Fortress of Solitude every year and a half, I think he would be lauded a lot less,” she says.

And yet, there are some literary authors whom we embrace for their prodigiousness. Humorist P.G. Wodehouse wrote somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 novels, but has never been viewed as a mere word factory. (Even by Foster Wallace, who has provided gushing blurbs to a number of Wodehouse reprints.)

There is also that exceptional breed of literary author who not only produces obsessively but does so in a wide range of styles and with a staggering commitment to quality. Joyce Carol Oates (Them, Zombie) is the most prominent representative of that tiny pantheon. Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle series) and William T. Vollmann (Butterfly Stories, Royal Family) each average a novel a year — each typically the heft of a phone book. Stephenson‘s three-part Baroque Cycle numbers over 2,500 pages; Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down — a seven-volume treatise on the history of violence — weighs in at 3,352 pages. Writers like that don’t invite scorn so much as unmitigated envy.

George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as “the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.” Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. “It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,” Murray avers. “With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.”

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.