Victoria Lindrea, entertainment reporter for BBC News wrote a recent article entitled “Spin-off, sequel or sell-out?” in which she comments on the spate of literary attempts at writing ‘in the style of’ the masters. Basically, she’s expanding on a post I wrote in September, which I’m sure she read with great attention… But the list of sequels continues to grow. As it happens I really enjoyed Sebastian Faulks’ continuation of the Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse, and William Boyd’s James Bond novel, Solo, got good reviews. Now there’s to be a fourth installment in the Stieg Larsson series The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. What do you think? Are these people taking a terrible liberty, or are dead authors fair game? Here’s what VL had to say:

Publishers, like film studios and broadcasters, have been trading off literary hits for decades. And 2013 was another bumper year of literary reinvention.

Earlier this month, a writer was hired to pen a fourth instalment to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson’s hit trilogy that has taken the book – and film – worlds by storm.
Larsson died in 2004 while working on a fourth novel. David Lagercrantz has now been commissioned to take on the characters of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomqvist, as Swedish publishers look to cash in on Larsson’s cult creation.
They are not alone.
This year also saw Sebastian Faulks take on Jeeves and Wooster, William Boyd tackle James Bond and Joanna Trollope take on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, as well as another spin-off of the ever popular classic Pride and Prejudice, in the form of Jo Baker’s Longbourn.
There was also the announcement of a new novel featuring Agatha Christie’s Belgian crimebuster Hercule Poirot, due for publication next year.
You can read the rest of the article here.