MISTAKING WRITERS FOR OTHER WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Really, truly, when I think of that bit about mistaking writers for other writers, if I think of the topic at all, I realise I’ve misplaced a story. I believe, with the rabid fury of a thousand frothing suns, that one writer wrote a tale penned by another scribbler. Simple as that.
   Then something awkward happens: a loose detail floats over the horizon, staining the otherwise unsullied sky. Now the sky is sullied by the fury of a thousand waxing moons. Wait a bit. This book was written a few years after the author’s death. How can this be?!
   It could be that the storyteller’s last manuscript sat forgotten by daylight, beneath a massive pile of socks in a holiday home untouched by time. Only now are we dimly hearing of this belated publication.
   Or maybe there was a bitter family dispute over the eventual release of the last great work/collection of notes for a story/a fragment little better than a receipt for dry-cleaning.
   Maybe, though, just maybe, I’ve mismatched the author to the wrong bit of scribble. And now I am on a (hopefully) short trail to find who wrote what, when, and possibly where. Complicated as that.
   Generally, I don’t think of the mystery writer Josephine Tey being mistaken for the children’s author Eleanor Farjeon. It’s never on my bingo card in any year, and won’t show up behind door number one on the advent calendar of strangeness. Or any other door.
   Except…
   I was staring into the middle distance of the internet, and squinting at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon. My response was surprising.
   That’s Josephine Tey.
   Firstly, I was astonished that I knew this. Somewhere along the line, the strands of the interwebs were muddled in the weaving of it. And, from some polluted stream, from one slightly awkward source, I suppose a miniature industry of mistaken identity poured forth.
   Eleanor Farjeon wrote Morning has Broken. This religious ditty went to church in a shotgun wedding with an old Scottish tune by the name of Bunessan. You may know it as a pop hit by the singer/songwriter Yusuf. (Additional noodling provided by Rick Wakeman.)
   What else to say of children’s author Eleanor? She won a few literary awards in her day, and had one named after her. And she’s not the mystery author Josephine Tey. Did these two women write in the same area? No. Not even remotely.
   Misattribution. Who wrote this one? Maybe Ray Bradbury wrote that story. Or I thought he did. And it was someone else. Or I believed someone else wrote Ray Bradbury’s story. But, then, watching the end of DARK STAR by John Carpenter, I fucking KNEW I’d read that bit of the story before. And it was absotively posolutely by Ray Bradbury.
   Turned out to be the case. Well. Damn.
   So, yes, there’s plenty of scope for confusion. William Shakespeare’s War of the Worlds, or Much Ado About Martians, for example. Could’ve sworn he wrote that. He didn’t pen a word. Christopher Marlowe was the author.
   Marlowe famously faked his own death, polished all of Shakespeare’s plays, entered into a Faustian pact with the devil, became immortal, and passed his own stories off as those of H.G. Wells.
   Legit. As legit as an award for Legitness provided by the International Committee of Legititude™, based in Luxembourg. That is a lie. The organisation flies a Panamanian flag when operating at sea. A fiction was told there, surely.
   No worse than supposing that Lord Byron was in fact a vampire. Tom Holland appears to be the source of that story. Spider-Man wrote about Lord Byron the vampire? Fuck it. Yes, yes, he did. No, no, he didn’t. It’s an easy mistake to make. Is the writer Tom Holland not the same person as the actor Tom Holland? Oh. Okay then.
   Was Christopher Lee, the historian, also in fact a vampire?
   There is no real or unreal evidence of this. My source is that I made it up. Anyway, I invented my source. Even that bit is fabricated.
   Also, concerning Lord Byron, there is no proof that he was a werewolf, a herewolf, a therewolf, a mummified corpse, or a creature from the black/blue/dried-up lagoon. Was he the Invisible Man? I just don’t see it.
   That’s The Invisible Man written by Christopher Marlowe, naturally.
   I myself am often mistaken for the Venezuelan rocket scientist of the same name. It’s a light burden. Any questions that come my way concerning rocket science and the laws of physics are quickly farmed out to my scientific advisor: Doctor Google.
   Doctor Google himself made a Faustian pact with the devil to acquire that sort of knowledge. There is no direct record of Doctor Faustus making a similar Googley pact to gain control of the interwebs.
   Unless you count that play, The Tragical Search History of Doctor Faustus. There’s some evidence that the work was scribbled on the back of a hard drive by one Will Shaxberde, believed to be a French literary critic down on his luck, in need of funds, and lacking wine. Except that he wasn’t officially French. Just for reasons of beef tax.
   Often, facts are at our fingertips just as those facts slip from our grasp and bounce down the stairs into a million fragments. Honestly, though, it might as well be a hundred fragments for all the difference it makes to us.
   I was once told that I knew that song by the guy who was singing about the thing…
   An attempt to get me to provide the name of the singer, the song, and the subject matter. I DEFINITELY KNEW THE SONG. Gradually, based on the sliver of a crumb of an atom of a detail, I worked out the name of the song. And it was coincidence that I knew it.
   YOU DEFINITELY KNOW IT. THE ONE ABOUT THE THING THAT THE GUY SINGS AND THERE ARE WORDS WITH MUSIC AND STUFF. IT’S REALLY CATCHY. YOU KNOW. THAT ONE.
   You know it. It was that one-hit wonder. It keeps popping up on the radio. And on the radio’s successor. Internet radio. But you definitely know it. That song, about the thing. By the guy. Who sings about that thing, very specifically without any detail handed over to tell you what the fuck anyone is talking about whenever they raise a topic in so vague a manner.
   I typed that while listening to the song. It was featured on the interwebs. All I had to do was type the guy’s name and there he was. You definitely know, anyway.
   All I had to do, when staring at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon, was to type the name of another author. And the same photo popped up. A picture of Josephine Tey. OR IS IT?! Maybe the photo of Josephine Tey is really the picture of Eleanor Farjeon, has been all along, and the whole thing was messed up since BEFORE the beginning.
   Despite the actors Anthony Quayle and Anthony Quinn looking nothing like one another, they are often mistaken for each other. That must be very confusing when they appear in the same movie together.
   I was about to include a photo showing both of them together in a movie. But they are both on the right in the picture I selected, and the temptation to type Anthony is pictured on the right is really too much. I must let the weak joke die where it stands.
   Checking stuff is difficult. You face the Dictionary Problem. What is that? To know what you are looking for in a dictionary, first you must know what you are looking for. And if you know already, then maybe you don’t need to look it up.
   When I saw the picture of “Eleanor Farjeon” I just knew she was Josephine Tey. So I went looking for Josephine Tey. And there she was, in several images, looking like herself in all of them.
   It’s a conspiracy. She replaced herself. Like, y’know, that big unsinkable ship. The one that hit the iceberg. Or did it?
   RMS Titanic was replaced in a last-ditch effort to pull the world’s supply of wool over everyone’s eyes in order to…
   (Checks notes in ever-rising levels of disbelief.)
   …swindle an insurance company.
   According to Robin Gardiner, the sister ship Olympic went to the bottom of the ocean instead and the real Titanic was in service until scrapped. The most remarkable thing about Gardiner’s career is the legit profile of the White Star Line he somehow managed to write. That appears, at least, to have been written by someone who was rational.
   Doesn’t explain The Great Titanic Rock ’n’ Roll Insurance Swindle vibe that emerges from his other writings. You see, if you measure the width of the sprocket found on the ocean floor, and you compare that against the detailed blueprints stored in the secret filing cabinet, you’ll realise it’s all a load of nonsense.
   Never Mind the Bollocks. Here’s the Fruit Pastilles.