Will this be yet another annus horribilis for the British Royal Family, in particular for Prince Philip? Well, having the redoubtable Kitty Kelley poking into your life is certainly no fun, as Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra can testify. Indeed, both the former American First Lady and Ol' Blue Eyes threatened court action over Ms Kelley's baleful biographies but were probably wise in letting the matter rest.
So what will the stormy but enigmatic Prince Philip do when her biography of him, entitled To Be Royal, appears in the autumn? It all depends, I suppose, on what she has managed to dig up - meaty stuff, I hear, including at least five startling revelations not known even to royal-watchers at the Sun or the Mirror.
But maybe he'll have nothing much to worry about, given that no British publisher has yet plucked up the courage to buy the rights to it. And Ms Kelley definitely won't be worrying - she was reputedly paid a £5 million advance by Warner Books, who are keeping everything about the enterprise very secret, right down to having the book printed at a secret location for American publication on September 23rd.
What next, then, for Ms Kelley? Well, I can immediately think of the perfect subject for her relentless probing. Charles J. Haughey mightn't agree - and probably wouldn't relish the prospect one little bit. But then Ms Kelley isn't in the habit of seeking permission from her "victims".
FIVE million dollars might seem like an extravagant advance to an author, even by today's loony standards, but at least Kitty Kelley's name on the dustjacket is a guarantee that a lot of copies will be sold. What, though, about the advances being offered to unknowns - such as the well-publicised £66,000 recently given to young Irish writer Antonia Logue on the strength of a few pages of her first and yet-to-be-published novel?
Still, that's pin money when set against the amount that's just been paid to 25-year-old Keri Beevis, who works in a travel agency in Norwich. Ms Beevis (who's obviously no butthead and who, anyway, is changing her name to Keri Leigh) has been given £750,000 to pen three horror novels - this on the basis of a sample and some outlines.
Who said writing has to be a vocation - especially when it can be an immensely lucrative career instead?
I'm pleased to see that Bord Failte's bi-monthly flagship magazine, Ireland of the Welcomes, has won two awards at the International Regional Magazine Association annual conference in Bermuda, and that one of these awards was for last autumn's excellent "Irish writing" edition, edited by Derek Mahon and praised in this column at the time.
AMONG the many bargains to be found in our bookstores, here are a few I came across this week in Book Upstairs of College Green:
Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (Cape), reduced from £15.99 to £6.99; Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood in the 22-dollar Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition at £6.99; David Thomson's biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud (Little, Brown), reduced from £20 to £9.99; Grace Paley's Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). formerly £27.50 and now £9.99; and Elizabeth Bishop's One Art: Selected Letters, in its elegant £25 Chatto & Windus edition but selling at 9.99.
I also found there, selling at £7.99 each, four of the five volumes of Harold Evans's classic books on journalistic practice. Under the overall title Editing and Design, these were published by Heinemann in the 1970s and have been unavailable for years. Much of what's contained in Book Two, which is titled Handling Newspaper Text and concerns sub-editing, has been somewhat overtaken by technological advances, but the basic advice is very sound, while the first volume, Newsman's English, should be on the desk of anyone remotely interested in the way the English language is used and abused. Place it beside your Fowler, Gowers and Partridge.