The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris

I said. “Stephen King did it.”
    â€œYou’re not Stephen King,” Ox said. “And he killed off Bachman years after everyone was in on the joke. He was also already successful under his real name. No one knows who the fuck you are.”
    â€œThat’s what I want to change.” I looked out the window and saw Grady standing next to my rental. It was a nice ostentatious yellow Hummer, the perfect vehicle for a covert operation in Ensenada. Grady was giving some last-minute instructions to Digby, who was nodding enthusiastically while trying to light a joint in the stiff wind coming off the sea.
    â€œYou want people to buy you drinks, is that it? Don’t I buy you enough drinks?”
    â€œI’m tired of people thinking I have a vagina,” I said.
    â€œYou whine like you do. There are more people who depend on Toulouse than just you, you know.” This was the umpteenth permutation of the same conversation we’d been having for the last month and a half. The hardest thing to achieve in publishing is a recognizable brand. There are only so many authors out there whom the average reader has time to give a shit about. To most readers, books are like potato chips; you go with the brand you like. It’s why new writers clamor all over themselves to get a blurb from a recognizable author. It’s why Toulouse Velour gets six-figure book deals and Henry Cooper does not. It matters not that we’re the same person.
    The idea to bump off Toulouse Velour had germinated last year when I was reading Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live . He posited that one of the best things that could happen to a musician’s career was dying. The artist’s death makes his art more valuable because there won’t be any more produced. Rarer is more valuable. This coupled with our species’ overwhelming obsession with death and all its connotations makes shuffling off the mortal coil one hell of a marketing scheme. Look at Michael Jackson. The King of Pop was always a big seller, astronomical even, but after decades of weird scandals his sales had begun to slide into oblivion. It was his ignominious death, however, not his overhyped comeback tour, that rocketed him back into the stratosphere. Consumers are like the Irish. To them everybody is a saint after they die.
    This phenomenon is not limited to the music industry. In fact, it had already been perfected by the publishing world. Take J. D. Salinger, who was already using the old marketing trope of lunatic isolation to garner respect and adulation. The day he died, bookstores were inundated with people clamoring for Holden Caulfield as if they hadn’t stuffed Catcher in the Rye in the bottom of their lockers when they were in high school. It was this example that I used to approach Ox with my plan to kill Toulouse. I brought up the multitude of manuscripts that Salinger had squirreled away in a desk drawer. Now they could be posthumously published and would fly off the shelf regardless of their quality. Hell, if they found a collection of grocery lists in his closet they’d try to publish it.
    Ox was right on board with the idea at first. His eyes glazed over, and a touch of drool congealed at the corner of his mouth as he thought of the swarming mass of MacMerkin fans beating their breasts and tearing their sleeves over the loss of their beloved Toulouse. He conjured up a picture of them descending on Barnes and Noble like ants on a discarded Snickers bar, consuming every last MacMerkin crumb. He imagined parceling out Toulouse’s posthumous works as each one was “found” in a fictitious attic, like a literary Tupac.
    Ox’s excitement lasted for two days, until he met with his mentor and former boss, Stu Weingold. Weingold had tutored Ox in the immutable laws of agency. The first rule, or one that was right up there, was “Thou shalt not fuck with a brand.” Ox, properly chastised, had been dead