New authors breathe life into orphaned characters

Michael Brown,the chairman of the Pooh Properties Trust for the past three decades,said he never would have greenlighted a new Pooh book when he joined the trust,which oversees the Milne literary estate. “But there’s been a change in the attitudes of society,” he said. “There’s a sense that nostalgia is fine,but you can bring these things out of the cupboard.”

The Pooh trust decided to hire someone to create new adventures for the little bear with the honey habit and methodically went about a selection process. They eventually turned to David Benedictus,71,who had produced all-star audio adaptations of the original Pooh stories and who had submitted a couple of new story ideas for Pooh and Tigger several years ago. Brown said they did not want any updates to the sensibility of the story. Benedictus,in turn,immersed himself in the 1920s world of Milne and visited Ashdown Forest,the actual setting for Hundred Acre Wood. The trustees,he said,were very much involved in the editing process and also in the creation of a new inhabitant of the Wood,Lottie the Otter.

Jane Belson,Adams’ widow,and Eoin Colfer,the Irish lad writing And Another Thing …,told the same story of the new book’s creation: their agents met for lunch,hatched the idea,and broached it to each of them. Belson said yes,Colfer said yes. Colfer is best known for writing the Artemis Fowl series of children’s books. Belson stayed out of the writing and editing.

Of course,it’s not so easy to replicate Adams’ idiosyncratic stories that followed the adventures of Arthur Dent,who escapes from Earth moments before it is destroyed—to an intergalactic freeway—bathrobe and towel in hand. How does Colfer think he can imitate that? He doesn’t. “This is not part of the Douglas Adams oeuvre. It’s very authorised fan fiction,” he said. The legion of Hitchhiker fans,hostile to the idea when it was made public last year,have largely mellowed.

Dacre Stoker,great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker,grew up in Canada before moving to the US,aware but not terribly impressed that his ancestor,an Irish theatre manager and penny-dreadful novelist,was the author of the horror classic. His appreciation grew over time,but it wasn’t a key part of family folklore,perhaps because the Stoker family lost the copyright,due to improperly filled out paperwork,in the 1930s. He became a headmaster of private schools,later moving into land conservancy.

When screenwriter Ian Holt called him out of the blue in 2003 with a pitch that they team up to revive the count,he was all for it. The resulting storyline has it that the events in the first Dracula really happened,and that the real-life Stoker thinly disguised them in his novel. The story picks up in 1912,with Stoker attempting to stage a play about the book Dracula,when the survivors of the original adventure begin to die in gruesome ways. The advance reviews are good: “Energetically paced and packed with outrageously entertaining action,” says Publishers Weekly.