Clifford Irving (1930–2017)

Stupendously entertaining account of their attempted fraud. Two obviously intelligent men doing the stupidest things possible. If they’d been morons they could never have attempted anything on this scale, but their intelligence gave them the ability to encompass their own doom.

It’s a confession, but there’s a catch. It’s written like a novel. It has direct reported speech, pacing, tension etc. The book appears to be the same text that was previously published as ‘What Really Happened: His Untold Story of the Hughes Affair’ and ‘Project Octavio: The Story of the Howard Hughes Hoax’. There it’s credited to ‘Clifford Irving with Richard Suskind’. Suskind’s name has been removed from this edition for reasons that are unclear to me, but Irving mentions him in the Author’s Note, saying “many of the passages in this book which deal with shared experiences have been written by him from my point of view.” Well, we call that fiction, don’t we? I think this may technically be a novel. I think Irving is playing a game with the reader. He comes off rather badly and makes no attempt to justify himself or portray himself in a good light. Or rather, there are no passages that do so transparently. He talks about the Autobiography (which I haven’t read) as being a mixture of facts and also lies made of ‘whole cloth’. If the lies here are also made of whole cloth then it’s very difficult to tell where they begin and end.… (meer)

2415 Trial A Novel by Clifford Irving (read 13 Oct 1991) This is a 1990 book and has the awful obscenities that modern novelists apparently feel are essential, and also ends up in a non-elevating way, but the story of Warren Blackburn, a Houston lawyer, and his trials--Johnnie Lee Boudereau accused of killing her boyfriend Dr. Ott and Hector Quintana accused of shooting a Vietnamese--makes for an extremely fast-paced and gripping novel. The two trials intertwine and the story is fantastic. The trial and lawyer scenes are pretty authentic-seeming, and I suppose there are actually judges like Lou Parker, incredible as that seems. This was an excellent, excellent story despite the author's deficiencies so far as decency is concerned and his characters' deficiencies as to morality.… (meer)