I WANT A NEW WRITER NAME ...

... Or at least one as cool-sounding as "Spike Morelli."

How cool, right?

But who in the eff was Spike Morelli? Good luck finding that one out. Little is known about the guy. Was he American? British?

The post-war books are said to be British. The titles are pure pulp with names like "Death for a Doll," "Coffin for a Cutie," "This Way for Hell," "More Than Kisses, Baby," "Deal me Out" and "Take It and Like It."

Fantastic Fiction says Morelli was a pen name for a scribe named William Newton (William Simpson Newton) who also wrote under the names Francis Donaldson, Gilroy Mitcham, Macdonald Newton and Gene Ross.

Can anyone shed light on the mystery? Until then, I'll just savor his cool pen name that just oozes whiskey and sin.

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SHOULD AGENTS BE PUBLISHERS?

Well this is certainly a grey area...

The Wylie Agency, whose clients include such scribe estates of Saul Bellow and John Updike and living authors like Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth launched a publishing house last week called Odyssey Editions. So far, it boasts 20 e-books of acclaimed contemporary works, including Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Updike's four "Rabbit" novels and available only through Amazon, an arrangement that enraged publishers and rival sellers.

The new venture also received a mixed response from the Authors Guild, which represents thousands of published writers. In an e-mail sent to authors, the Guild defended the Wylie Agency's right to sell e-books of older works without the publisher's permission, but also criticized excluding Amazon's competitors and worried about "serious potential conflicts of interest" when an agent becomes a publisher.

"The most obvious of these (conflicts) is the possibility of self-dealing to the detriment of the agency's client, the author," the Guild's message said. "A major agency starting a publishing company is weird, no matter how you look at it."

What say you? To read more, click HERE.

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AUTHORS WHO CRAPPED OUT MASTERPIECES

Via Cracked.com: So what does it feel like to write something that will inspire audiences for generations? Apparently it feels like another day at the office, as it turns out some of the greatest works of all time weren't intended to be classics... and often were just dashed off for the hell of it.

To read the entire list, click HERE.

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