“The spoils are part of the point,” he said, sneering. “It’s irony. I can explain it to you if you like.”
“You can justify it however you want. For the record, I think you’re a hypocrite. But you are a man of convictions, and the point of the experiment was always to unveil it. That was what you were telling Wyatt over dinner: who you really were. You were also telling him that you were going public. That’s why you invited these influential tastemakers, people whose opinions you respected. You let them in on the joke, signed their books, basked in their adulation of your genius.” The comments that had so appalled Simone, from the supposedly respected professionals over such a trashy novel—genius . . . true vision . . . a revelation—now made sense.
I paused, glanced around the room, then turned back to Wolfgang. “But none of that’s quite ruinous—that’s what I couldn’t understand. Your thesis could be to set out to prove that anyone can write a bestseller. Sure. Mario Puzo reportedly did that with The Godfather. Or maybe you wanted to highlight the financial excess that some books, some writers, receive. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. Millions of people are still going to read Erica Mathison. Wyatt might be embarrassed, but Gemini’s profits must be through the roof. The Death of Literature demanded something more dramatic.”
Erica Mathison was supposed to be a huge middle finger to the establishment; she was supposed to take them down a peg. Veronica Blythe had said this herself to Simone: It’s people like you who could learn a lot from this book. I was pacing now, working my way into my deductions. Aaron had slowly moved to the back of the crowd. He’d finally cracked his professional veneer, pulling up a stool at the bar and unscrewing the cap from a bottle of vodka.
“Erica Mathison isn’t real. But here’s the kicker: neither are the books she wrote.”
At this, Wolfgang’s smugness dropped for the first time. He knew I had him all figured out.
“It was never as simple as writing a book that you consider beneath you. You created The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock using a computer program. Artificial intelligence wrote it for you. That’s why you were reading a textbook on AI coding the other morning, The Price of Intelligence. AI is open source now, everyone can use it. Hell, my uncle used ChatGPT to write his website. Why not use AI to write a book? You said yourself on that panel that in fifty years books like mine will be written by machines. And that”—I jabbed a finger at him—“is dramatic enough to prove your point. Wyatt Lloyd’s new bestseller was written by a computer. He’d be livid. It’s almost worth killing for.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it was,” Wolfgang said. “I just punched in what I needed to happen in each chapter. The algorithm spat it back out. It took me all of a single day. The writing wasn’t perfect, but Wyatt’s team cleaned it up in edits. He was so titillated by this debased concoction, his judgment so blurred by dollar signs, that he ignored all the red flags. He didn’t even care we didn’t meet. Voilà. That was the point of the whole thing. Commercial fiction is a recipe. True art can only be made”—he pointed at his forehead—“here.”
“If I understand correctly,” Hatch interrupted, now leaning forward like an overeager schoolchild, no longer objecting but fully invested, “this gives Wyatt motive to kill Wolfgang. Not the other way around.”
“Exactly,” Wolfgang said. “Not only that, but I wanted everyone to know. That’s why I invited my guests. It was going to be in the papers as soon as we hit Adelaide. I told Wyatt to his face. This was always a secret I intended to tell. I didn’t kill anybody”—that was, if you’re counting, the fifth of six times this phrase will be used—“to cover it up.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I did wonder if the money might have been enough to make you change your mind. Now that you’d enjoyed the financial success that had eluded your career so far, would you kill to keep it? But I don’t think you would. And you gave me the biggest clue of all to the real killer.”
“At your service,” Wolfgang said dryly.
“No joke. You actually liked someone’s writing.”
Wolfgang grunted, perhaps offended by the accusation of positivity.
“I’m talking about Life, Death and Whiskey. When you flicked through it in Wyatt’s cabin, you thought McTavish’s writing had improved. Right?”
“A little,” Wolfgang scoffed.
“Yes. Literally. You thought Life, Death and Whiskey had the smallest of improvements. You thought his first book, the only one you’ve read, was bloody awful. Littered with Oxford commas, you told me. You also told me writing is like a tattoo. No one can shake their little tics. An Oxford comma is one of McTavish’s habits. The answer’s been looking us straight in the face.”
Given we were down to discussing literary technique, most of the writers in the room had figured it out by now. Hatch still needed a little more explanation, so I went on.
“It’s in the bloody title! Life, Death and Whiskey omits the Oxford comma.”
I’d like to apologize quickly. I’m about to break one of the fundamental rules here. Turns out there are ghosts in this book after all.
“Henry McTavish wasn’t writing his own books anymore,” I said. “Jasper Murdoch was.”
Ghost
Chapter 35
A ghostwriter. It was as simple as that.
It should have been so obvious that McTavish wasn’t writing his own books anymore. The timeline of his publications alone told enough of the story. His first book was a worldwide bestseller and his second was a flunk, which had made his confidence plummet. Coupled with his painful recovery from his accident—I could tell the third was squeezing out of him like a kidney stone, Simone had said—this had meant he’d had to steal from S. F. Majors just to get the third one done. But that wasn’t a trick he could use twice. Brooke had summed it up perfectly in the Chairman’s Carriage: Maybe now I think he’s a man who likes pleasure but doesn’t want to have to work for it. He’d needed another way to write the books.
“I thought you’d bought the Erica Mathison story,” Jasper whispered.
“As I told you last night, I knew you weren’t writing for yourself. You looked a bit worried that I’d figured it out at first, but at the time, of course, I thought you were Erica Mathison. You seemed relieved when I told you this, which I thought was a natural response after holding such a big secret for so long, but it was really because you thought your secret was still protected. After all, the scheme only has value if no one knows about it, as you told me. You were only too happy to confess to being Erica when I prompted you, not knowing Wolfgang was the real thing, to keep me off the scent. But, even if I was wrong about that, the clues are the same. The way you act is all developed from never being in the spotlight. And Harriet’s always trying to boost you up, make you recognize those achievements. That frustrated you—I assume the confidentiality clause in your contract is drum-tight, and so that was why you often tried to quiet her. You told me Harriet wants you to write under your own name, and maybe once that was your dream too. Your first novel came out in two thousand and nine, and the New York Times review compared you unfavorably to McTavish, whose books you were also writing. Despite the fact that Harriet had praised the fifth McTavish book, one you wrote, in two thousand and six, so highly that the blurb is still used on his covers. There’s that tattoo simile again—your voice is not something you can hide. You sound like you, and you can’t shake it, even though the world believes that you is someone else. But that review, that was what broke you. That was when you stopped pursuing your own voice and decided you were happy at the back of the room. You also did something no writer should ever do: you responded to the review.”