This is a long post… so feel free to scroll past if you don’t have time to kill. This week, I ran smack into an ethical dilemma and it was all thanks to this short email from a complete stranger:
Charles Willeford’s GRIMHAVEN. Looks like you expressed interest in it in a blog a couple of years ago. Still interested?
Yes, I replied, of course I was interested. GRIMHAVEN is Willeford’s unpublished Hoke Mosely novel, his dark and self-destructive follow-up to MIAMI BLUES, his break-out hit. GRIMHAVEN reportedly turned Hoke into a sociopath who murders his children. Willeford’s agent wisely counseled him that it would be career suicide to submit that book to his publisher and that, instead, he should bury it and write something that would capitalize on the success of MIAMI BLUES, rather than piss all over it. Willeford took the advice and wrote three more great Hoke novels before his death. But like all Willeford fans, I’ve been intensely curious about the book. The few people I know who’ve read it say it’s Willeford at his best and worst.
So hell yes, I want to read it.
A day or two later, I got another email from the stranger. This time the note was longer, chatty, friendly, and full of tantalizing comments about the book ("it’s a viscerally sickening read, alright (I’ve got two girls), even if it has a certain internal consistency and simplicity").
He went on to talk about how he bought a xeroxed copy of the manuscript some years ago from a "bootlegger" for a mere $20 and that he came across "some asshole" selling the same photocopy for $200 on the Internet.
But I figure that it’s something the world should have, so I scanned and OCRed it, and after being distracted from it for about six months I’m finishing up the proofreading. Right now I’ve got 200 tiffs and 200 individual-page text files, and once the proofing is done I’ll concatenate it into a single text file. So the question is this: What’s the best way to get it out to the people who want to find it? Is there a torrent tracker favoured by traffickers of bootleg manuscripts?
Yes, I wanted to read GRIMHAVEN…but the idea that someone would take an unpublished manuscript that didn’t belong to him and distribute it all over the planet made me queasy…as did the idea that he thought that I would help him do it.
But why shouldn’t he think so? After all, didn’t I jump out of my seat when he offered me the book? Didn’t that make me just the kind of guy he thought I was? While I was wrestling with these uncomfortable questions, another email showed up from him:
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