700 books?
Stephen Guthrie
The claim is that Jon Creasy has written 700 books. Is this possible?
Is it a record? I don't know anything about this author (I think he
may be a thriller/mystery writer) but let's say he's been writing for
50 years. That works out at 15 books per year or one every 3 1/2 weeks.
Maybe Barbara Cartland wrote that many also. I've also heard that
L.Ron Hubbard wrote quite a few.
I guess my real wonder is why the hell that want to write so many.
Joel B Levin
Creasey, who died a few years back, did write a lot of books. I don't
remember if 700 was the number given on the back of a book jacket, but
it was large enough that I found it hard to believe. He wrote a
number of 'series', in the sense that the Sayers Wimsey books are a
series or Stout's Wolfe books. These include (but are not limited to :-)):
The Baron (there was a TV series) - a rich jewelry store owner who
used to be a burglar;
The Toff - well known among East London and criminal society, though
I forget his personal connection with it; he often helped police;
Inspector West - of New Scotland Yard; his rank probably changed
over time;
Inspector Gideon - similar to above, but a very different type of
character and novel;*
S. A. Palfrey and his secret international organization whose name I
forget - disasters both natural and man made strike earth -
semi-fantasy, and sort of "alternate present", since I seem to
recall that often recovery from some incredible disaster was
complete by the next novel;
Another spy series I forget, because I never read one.
Many of these were originally published under pseudonyms; later copies
that I have often say "by John Creasey writing as <so-and-so>".
Lots of good stuff, if you like that sort of thing.
/JBL
*My favorite story about this, which may be apocryphal; a reviewer of
a Creasey mystery supposedly got quoted on a dust jacket to the effect
of "as good as one of J. J. Marric's 'Gideon' novels!". At that time
it was not widely known that Creasey WAS J. J. Marric.
=
Nets: le...@bbn.com | "There were sweetheart roses on Yancey Wilmerding's
or {...}!bbn!levin | bureau that morning. Wide-eyed and distraught, she
POTS: (617)873-3463 | stood with all her faculties rooted to the floor."
john oughton
> In article <96...@portia.Stanford.EDU> s...@portia.Stanford.EDU (Stephen Guthrie) writes:
> |
> |The claim is that Jon Creasy has written 700 books. Is this possible?
> |Is it a record? I don't know anything about this author (I think he
> |may be a thriller/mystery writer) but let's say he's been writing for
> |50 years. That works out at 15 books per year or one every 3 1/2 weeks.
> |Maybe Barbara Cartland wrote that many also. I've also heard that
> |L.Ron Hubbard wrote quite a few.
> |I guess my real wonder is why the hell that want to write so many.
According to the good ol' Guiness Book, Creasey does hold the record
with 564 titles (he also may have the record for rejection
slips with over 700! )
Coming up fast on the romance side is Barbara Cartland, with 450
titles.
A friend of my father's, named Dan Ross, is still actively writing out
of St. John, New Brunswick. I don't have the exact number of
titles, but he's written at least a couple of hundred under
half-a-dozen pseudonyms in a similar number of genres--
suspense, action, mystery, etc. Apparently he writes by pacing
back and forth, dictating separate novels to separate
dicta-typists. Sometimes he works on up to six at once!
As for why someone would want to write so many -- it probably becomes
a habit, like any other good or bad pursuit. The characters
and plots keep busting into your head and you've got to do
something with them -- so you write another book. Most of us
would probably trade one Gravity's Rainbow or Left Hand of
Darkness for all of Creasey's output -- but you do what you
can.
Mark Brader
> > Maybe Barbara Cartland wrote that many also.
> Creasey, who died a few years back, did write a lot of books. I don't
> remember if 700 was the number given on the back of a book jacket, but
> it was large enough that I found it hard to believe. He wrote a
> number of 'series', in the sense that the Sayers Wimsey books are a
> series or Stout's Wolfe books. ...
John Creasey is the correct spelling, and the above is substantially true.
The 1989 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records has this to say:
# Most Prolific Writers
#
# After receiving a probably 743 rejection slips, the British novelist
# John Creasey (1908-73), under his own name and 25 noms de plume,
# had 564 books totaling more than 40 million words published from
# 1932 to his death on June 9, 1973.
#
# The writer with the longest series of books is Margaret Farrar,
# whose series of crossword puzzle books first published April 10,
# 1924, reached a total of 133 by the time of her death in June 1984.
Obviously June is a bad month for prolific writers. :-)
I was surprised to find the above, not only because I thought
I remembered seeing the "over 700" number somewhere myself, but because
I remembered Guinness mentioning other authors here. So I checked my
1984 edition Guinness. (Doesn't everyone have several old copies?)
And *it* says:
| Authors
| Most Prolific
|
| The most prolific writer for whom a word count has been published was
| Charles Hamilton, alias Frank Richards (1875-1961), the Englishman
| who created Billy Bunter. At his height in 1908 he wrote the whole of
| the boys' comics "Gem" (founded 1907) and "Magnet" (1908-40) and most
| of two others, totalling 80,000 words a week. His lifetime output has
| been put at 100,000,000 words. He enjoyed the advantages of the use
| of electric light rather than candlelight and of being unmarried.
| The champion of the goose quill era was Josef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812-87)
| of Poland who produced more than 600 volumes of novels and historical
| works. Soho Tokutomi (1863-1957) wrote the history "Kinsei Nippon
| Kokuminshi" in 100 volumes of 429,425 pages and 19,452,952 letters
| in 35 years.
|
| Most Novels
|
| The greatest number of novels published by any author is 904 by
| Kathleen Lindsay (Mrs. Mary Faulkner) (1903-73) of Somerset West,
| Cape Province, South Africa. She wrote under six pen names, two of
| them masculine. The most prolific living novelist is Lauran Paine
| of California, who has had 876 published under 74 pen names.
The Creasey information is then given exactly as above, except that
it says "13 noms de plume". This makes me wonder if the count of
564 novels actually included only those published under the 14 names
that Creasey was first known to have used; the change from 13 to 25
pseudonyms would seem to make the count of volumes suspicious.
And I *really* wonder why Creasey, rather than some of the other
authors mentioned in the 1984 edition, was retained as the sole author
mentioned under the "Most Prolific" heading in the later one!
Elsewhere, the 1984 edition also notes:
| John Creasey is the fastest novelist. Not only did he write 22 novels
| in one year and 564 in 42 years, but he once wrote 2 books in one week
| with a half-day off.
The book "Murder Ink: the Mystery Reader's Companion" (1977, Workman
Publishing), a collection of lighthearted essays edited (the cover says
"perpetrated", which fits the mood nicely) by Dilys Wynn, includes one
on the topic of pseudonyms, four pages long, by Carol Kountz ("managing
editor of 'The Writer'. She once checked into a small hotel near the
Reichenbach Falls as Irene Adler.").
The essay is illustrated with 26 identical photos, captioned as follows:
Gordon Ashe, Margaret Cooke, M. E. Cooke, John Creasey, Norman Deane,
Elise Fecamps, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday,
Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter
Manton, J. J. Marric, James Marsden, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson,
Anthony Morton, Ken Ranger, Tex Riley, William K. Riley, Henry St. John,
Jimmy Wilde, and Jeremy Yorke.
And it says:
+ No discussion of pseudonyms used for reasons of output is complete
+ without mention of John Creasey, whose loyal readers are hard put
+ to keep up with his books (over 600 of them!) and his aliases. He
+ used twenty-six, varying them from sleuth to sleuth.
Note that this was published 7 years before the earlier Guinness I cited,
and 2 years before the SF Encyclopedia which I cite below, but does give
the (presumably) complete and correct set of pseudonyms which the other
books do not.
As for his books, I love the series about Commander* Gideon of Scotland
Yard, which are police procedurals (his pseudonym for those was J. J.
Marric, though they often appear as by Creasey now), basically because I find
Gideon a highly appealing hero. It may well be a case of hack work that
happens to push my personal buttons. Anything else he's written that
I've sampled, I haven't much cared for. But most of the pseudonyms
listed above, I've never seen. I merely presume that most of the books
fall in the general area of mysteries, thrillers, spy stories, and the like..
*No, Gideon does not change rank throughout the series, though others do.
He declines a promotion to Assistant Commissioner at one point.
According to "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction", edited by Peter
Nicholls (1979, Doubleday/Dolphin, ISBN 0-385-14743-0; no relation to any
current book of similar title), Creasey wrote two continuing series of SF
novels, the Dr. Palfrey and Dept. Z novels. The article there, by the
way, gives the same "546 novels, 13 pseudonyms" as the older Guinness.
It enumerates about 50 titles of his SF, not classified by series or
pseudonym, and notes that they "were sensational in nature, contributed
nothing to the genre, and were influential only on the cheap thrillers
market". This is a fair assessment of the one Dr. Palfrey novel that
I've read.
Oh yes, Barbara Cartland. The 1989 Guinness says:
# Top-Selling Authors
#
# Currently the top-selling authoress is Barbara Cartland with global
# sales of over 500 million copies for 470 titles in 24 languages.
# She has averaged 23 titles per year for the last decade. ...
I should also mention Isaac Asimov. He remarked in one of his essays
somewhere that while he may have been exceeded in output by such authors
as Creasey -- not to mention Robert Silverberg -- he figures he may hold
a record for having written so many books in so many different subject
areas -- obviously this is hard to quantify -- and for having hardly ever*
used a pseudonym despite his large output. (But is this true of Barbara
Cartland also? I don't read her.) Recent dust jackets credit Asimov
with "over 400" books, but this includes anthologies that he edited.
--
Mark Brader "There are three rules for writing the novel.
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto Unfortunately no one knows what they are."
utzoo!sq!msb, m...@sq.com -- Maugham
This article is in the public domain.
Edward Suranyi
>a record for having written so many books in so many different subject
>used a pseudonym despite his large output.
I read once that Isaac Asimov has more books in print than any other
author. I don't know if this is true, though.
Ed Suranyi
Dept. of Applied Science
UC Davis at LLNL
e...@das.llnl.gov
Tom Galloway
Shadow for the pulps, for at least one year and I think 2 or 3 more, he wrote a
60,000 word Shadow novel every 2 weeks. In The Shadow Scrapbook there's a
picture of an ad claiming a new world's record of 1,440,000 words written in a
single year (the ad was for a typewriter company). The Shadow stories were
published under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant.
Cisco's Buddy
} The claim is that Jon Creasy has written 700 books. Is this possible?
Like Mark Brader, I was sure that I'd seen a reference somewhere claiming
that Creasey wrote over 700 books, though lord knows where I saw it. Every
reference I can dig up pretty much claims the same number of published
works as 564.
} Is it a record? I don't know anything about this author (I think he
} may be a thriller/mystery writer) but let's say he's been writing for
} 50 years. That works out at 15 books per year or one every 3 1/2 weeks.
Walter Gibson wrote 285 Shadow novels during the ~17-year period that
THE SHADOW pulp magazine was being published (about another 45 of them
were written by Theodore Tinsley and Bruce Elliot). 225 of them were
written during a 10-year period in which the magazine was published
twice a month. That means he wrote an entire Shadow novel every two
weeks for 10 years, in addition to whatever other short stories and
books he may have been working on at the time. It's certainly possible
for someone to crank out that much work in that amount of time. Now
granted, these novels are relatively thin rather than the size of, say,
THE THREE MUSKETEERS, but they are still novel-length.
} I guess my real wonder is why the hell that want to write so many.
It puts bread on the table.
--
"You show me someone who'll eat lima beans without
being at gunpoint, and I'll show you a pervert."
--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, "The Mill", Maynard, MA)
UUCP: ...!decwrl!ruby.enet.dec.com!boyajian
ARPA: boyajian%ruby...@DECWRL.DEC.COM