More on Gruber and Tanenbaum

Gary commented:

"Michael Gruber is a member of the Well writers' group, and I remember well his difficulties on leaving ghosting to go out on his own byline : he would never be able to claim any of his work as a ghost. He's an ethical guy, and plays by the rules. As a ghost, he couldn't 'out' himself. But then a review in Publisher's Weekly 'outed' him. It was, apparently, a complete surprise to him. Gary"

Thanks for the information, Gary. Maybe I was too hard on Gruber in my previous posts, but I was under the impression he revealed the information himself. This whole affair interests me because I'd never even picked up a Tanenbaum book and had no idea they were ghosted. Today, since I was at Half Price Books anyway, I did a little research and checked the acknowledgements in all the Tanenbaum books they had. The earliest one I found was NO LESSER PLEA, from 1988 (the first Tanenbaum novel, maybe; I don't know about that). The first line in the acknowledgements is "My deepest gratitude to Michael Gruber for all his assistance". That's certainly vague and could mean almost anything. But by 1993 (don't recall the title of the book), Tanenbaum refers to Gruber as his "partner and collaborator". In later books he says, "All credit goes to Michael Gruber, whose genius runs through this book" (I'm paraphrasing slightly). So my question is: why the heck was anybody surprised when it came out that Gruber was writing the books? It seems to me that Tanenbaum has been admitting for over a decade that Gruber, at the very least, played a significant part in the writing of the books. Surely Tanenbaum's editors realized the same thing? Any time I see an acknowledgement like that, I strongly suspect that the person being thanked actually wrote the book, or at least wrote part of it. I'm not sure why there was ever a controversy about this particular case.

By the way, I bought that copy of NO LESSER PLEA, along with three Silver John novels by Manly Wade Wellman.

I haven't posted for a couple of days because I've just been sitting around working, nothing exciting to report. I'm still reading books for the Spur Awards, and I'm not going to comment on any of them, or the contest itself, until I've sent in my nominations. But I'm hoping that will be coming soon.