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Rambling hasn’t read it so we can’t vouch for the quality of the prose, but Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body must be one doozy of a book. Because 14 different publishers ended up bidding on it last month, with the winner — Minotaur, a division of Macmillan — offering a reported $2.4 million. Make that almost offering. The deal swiftly fell apart after accusations began swirling that its author used AI to pen his thriller about a Harvey Keitel-in-Pulp Fiction-like professional “cleaner” who gets mixed up with a drug cartel in Texas.
If you’re keeping score, it’s the third time something like that has happened this year. Back in March, Hachette yanked Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl from U.S. shelves after running Ballard’s prose through an AI detector and finding that 78 percent of the text had been computer-generated (Ballard claims a freelance editor helping her with the book was the one who slipped in the slop). Just last month, there was a kerfuffle over Daggermouth, a viral self-published dystopian thriller that got picked up by Simon & Schuster in a reported seven-figure deal. Another detector concluded that 60 percent of that book had been computer-generated, but it got published in late July anyway, after its author, H.M. Wolfe, vigorously denied the accusations.
