Ghostwriters, Creators, Cheats

• Author: Anuradha Swaminathan
• Position: WIPO Communications and Public Outreach Division

Ghost writers can do a good business these days. There are firms of them as well as individuals offering their services to those who are too busy (such as political celebrities), too lacking in the necessary skills or too prolific to go without assistance in research and preparatory drafts. Alexandre Dumas was in the last category.

Although Dumas died in 1870, it was not until 2002 that his remains were removed to the Panthéon in Paris, to join other literary giants of his age, among them Emile Zola and Victor Hugo. This seems to set the seal on his authorship of some of literature's best-loved works, such as "The Three Musketeers" and its sequels, "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Black Tulip." He used a large number of collaborators for both his plays and his novels, the most outstanding of whom, Auguste Maquet, having helped him to write the books mentioned above among others, took him to court in the 1850s to claim unpaid fees and also to recover his literary property as a co-author. The outcome was that Dumas retained his right to sole authorship but as a debtor was required to pay Maquet 145,200 francs within a period of eleven years. Even if ghost writers contractually agree not to enforce their right of attribution, against payment, there can be circumstances in which they may seek to have their contribution acknowledged. Maquet vs. Dumas illustrates the difficulty of clearly delimiting the value of each person's contribution.

Dumas, when attacked, was perfectly frank about the contributions of collaborators - his open letter to the Société des Gens de Lettres of 1845named Maquet and the works with which he had assisted - as he was about the factual and literary sources that inspired his work. Several of his novels were serialized in various journals virtually simultaneously over many months, requiring constant copy-writing to tight deadlines. Both Dumas and Maquet (who was a trained historian) found subjects, discussed plot outlines and made detailed suggestions; Dumas constantly asked for preliminary copy, which he then revised into final form. The final manuscript was almost always in Dumas' hand, but as Matharel de Fiennes confirmed to Maquet for use in the court case, when an installment of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne was lost on the eve of publication in Le Siècle, Maquet was summoned to the journal's premises to re-write his own text from memory: de Fiennes observed that his subsequent comparison of...