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The Talented Mr Ripley, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novels. "It's hard to shake the idea that Dan Mallory may have read one at an impressionable age."
Why are frauds so fascinating? The question comes around in journalism and publishing on a disturbingly frequent basis. In 1998, there was the case of Stephen Glass whose contributions to The New Republic were revealed to be based on false quotations and wholesale fabrications (a story later made into the movie Shattered Glass starring Hayden Christensen). The New York Times had its version of this a few years later with the Jayson Blair affair. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces started selling as a memoir until an expose forced the publishers to re-package it as a novel. Such cases of fraud are part of the rich tapestry of publishing life. There’s Johann Hari, Jonah Lehrer – the list goes on.
Now The New Yorker has added another name to this list of authorial shame. Dan Mallory has worked in the publishing world most of his adult life. He has also studied at Oxford. Last year, he published a novel called The Woman in the Window under the pseudonym AJ Finn. It went straight to number one in the New York Times bestsellers list – an extraordinary achievement for a first-time novelist. But as so often when such rockets enter the stratosphere, even minor flaws can them break apart.
On the basis of The New Yorker’s profile, Mallory has more than a few minor flaws. Throughout his professional and personal life, he has developed a taste for making outrageous and untrue claims about himself and those around him. It seems he did it to draw attention and sympathy to himself, but also to get out of situations he didn’t want to be in and to get into positions that he did.
He claimed his mother had died of cancer, that his brother had recently committed suicide and that he himself had terminal cancer. None of these stories was remotely true. But for years he spun versions of some or all of them –and received serious sympathy and professional leeway in return.
He left some clues along the way. At one point, he decided to change his accent from American to British. He devoted his (eventually stalled) Oxford studies to Patricia Highsmith. Neither of which is a crime. But when reading about his career, it’s hard to shake the idea that Mallory read one of the Ripley novels at an impressionable age and thought – interesting character, let’s see if it can be done
Since Mallory has only written one novel, it won’t be raked over in the same way that the fraudulence committed by Frey, Hari, Lehrer and others was. But as he is a person of some talent, not to say cunning, there’s still a fascination in considering why he did it.
It would probably be hard to find a journalist today who has not thought, however briefly, about ‘improving’ a quote, or slightly exaggerating the amount of risk they were under in covering a story. Equally, most journalists have probably suspected a colleague of doing something similar. At the start of my career, I learned this after a conversation I’d had with a hack was splashed all over the following day’s newspaper with my views attributed to “a source in MI5”. I asked the journalist about this a couple of days later. “Who was the source who told you exactly what I told you between our conversation and the print deadline?” I asked. “Ah, erm, couldn’t possibly comment,” came the response.
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