The Talented Mr. Mallory

February 4, 2019 10:01 AM

A fabulist's path through the world of publishing. Dan Mallory, who writes under the name A. J. Finn, went to No. 1 with his début thriller, “The Woman in the Window.” His life contains even stranger twists. (SL New Yorker) A review of the book in the same magazine by Joyce Carol Oates.
posted by PussKillian (93 comments total)

The Twitter response to this story has been a great deal of D:

I am flabbergasted that none of this guys' employers ever did any due-diligence on his claims. I mean, didn't he use sick leave? What the ever-living hell.

Guess if you're a wealthy white guy you can do just about anything. Sigh.
posted by suelac at 10:14 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

Hannah seems to have found, in Mallory, a remarkable source of material.

Mallory has said that his second novel will be set in San Francisco. It will have the flavor of an Agatha Christie story, and will be partly set in a Victorian mansion. It’s a story of revenge, he has said, involving a female thriller writer and an interviewer who learns of a dark past. He hopes to turn it into a television series.

Bully for these two, I hope they continue this thread of mutual inspiration and productivity. Always had a bit of soft spot for pathological liars; sometimes they turn out to be great writers.
posted by sophrontic at 10:30 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

The hoopla over this book, so clearly written by someone trying to capitalize on the trend of thrillers about women written by women, left a bad taste in my mouth from the very beginning, and I'm feeling nicely smug right now about intentionally avoiding it. I'm also feeling, however, a moderately incandescent rage. It started when I got to "two hundred thousand dollars a year." Also, today is the fourth anniversary of my cancer, which was real, and for which I did not miss work.

The end of the article almost made me feel sorry for him, with the pivot toward the mental illness explanation. For being that debilitatingly mentally ill, though, he sure did manage to cobble together an impressive career based upon cobwebs and lies. I'd like to know what's actually going on with his family, too. There is no Stage V breast cancer, only Stage IV, which is terminal, but his mother is alive and seemingly healthy. So...?
posted by something something at 10:36 AM on February 4, 2019 [20 favorites]

Daniel Mallory Ortberg: *in an obviously wounded voice* oh, is the OTHER Daniel Mallory in the news today? good for him
posted by a hat out of hell at 10:41 AM on February 4, 2019 [51 favorites]

This kind of thing should be formalized, where every industry will be pen-tested by having someone come along and try and set up a grift based on stroking egos and just generally looking like they belong. Smart companies will bring in people to do this to make sure decision makers in their ranks aren't vulnurable to such unforced errors.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:48 AM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

(I mean maybe without the piss cups..)
posted by Space Coyote at 10:52 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

I am flabbergasted that none of this guys' employers ever did any due-diligence on his claims.

"One of Mallory’s London colleagues to whom I spoke at length described publishing as “a soft industry—and much more so in London than in New York.” Hiring standards in London have improved in the past decade, this colleague said, but at the time of Mallory’s hiring “it was much more a case of ‘I like the cut of your jib, you can have a job,’ rather than ‘Have you actually got a Ph.D. from Oxford, and were you an editor at Ballantine?’ ” "

I have a feeling that HR offices in the publishing industry (and in other places) will have quite a busy week.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:52 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

I was curious, and I like thrillers, and I do not think I got one full chapter in before I thought this book was very Not For Me and this background explains a great deal.
posted by jeather at 10:53 AM on February 4, 2019

I'm already exhausted by Twitter news today, and as far as I know trumplestiltskin hasn't even said anything publicly.

I haven't read the info in depth. But I'd thought this novel was among the better among it's genre, and sure thought it was written by a woman, not an oddball guy capitalizing on a trend.
posted by NorthernLite at 10:59 AM on February 4, 2019

Always had a bit of soft spot for pathological liars; sometimes they turn out to be great writers.

It doesn't sound like this is one of those cases, though, from the description of the book in the article.
posted by kenko at 10:59 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

The end of the article almost made me feel sorry for him, with the pivot toward the mental illness explanation.

Don’t, it’s obviously bullshit. Or if he does some kind of mental illness it sure as hell isn’t Bipolar and anything he’s said about it is a lie.
posted by Artw at 10:59 AM on February 4, 2019 [10 favorites]

Also, today is the fourth anniversary of my cancer, which was real, and for which I did not miss work.

Very glad to hear you use the past tense to refer to it, something something. I think I've mentioned it On Here before, but my wife had an employee who attempted to fake cancer. It occurred shortly after my father died of pancreatic cancer which meant that my wife was able to see the inconsistencies in her story more clearly and took a significant amount of pleasure in accepting said employee's resignation upon being asked to explain some irregularities in her sick leave documentation.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:39 AM on February 4, 2019 [8 favorites]

Yeah, the thought of my husband, who has bipolar II, trying to sustain this sort of deception makes me blink rapidly in disbelief.

It might be a good book, I guess. Although if it's trying to be The Girl on the Train, I hated that book so I'm not going to bother looking for it.
posted by PussKillian at 11:46 AM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

I remember the exact moment where I whispered, IN A VERY LOUD BAR, to a friend that I thought my best friends girlfriend was continually faking cancer and illness (along with of course a host of other things). She looked right at me and agreed. Turns out the entire group had realized what was going on but felt too paralyzed by the sheer monstrousness of it. Once one person said it, it became so unbelievably obvious. Like stories of when they "fell" down some stairs and were taken for an X-ray with someone. The doctor said they were completely fine, but then said they went back the next day, alone of course, and were diagnosed with a break/whatever. Same-day surgeries but nothing seemed at all different, etc. This person is now a psychiatrist, I believe.

Sometimes our inherent sense of decency, "No one would like about THAT." is what lets this shit go on far too long.

This has to end his career, right?
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 11:53 AM on February 4, 2019 [11 favorites]

Mallory sounds completely fucking insufferable even without the serial fabrications.


Seriously, does anyone succeed with talent and hard work anymore, or is it all just grifting and family connections?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:53 AM on February 4, 2019 [17 favorites]

Also Joyce Carol Oates seems to have liked the book?
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 12:01 PM on February 4, 2019

Seriously, does anyone succeed with talent and hard work anymore, or is it all just grifting and family connections?

I, too, used to believe that a time existed when talent and hard work mattered more than grift and connections.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 12:11 PM on February 4, 2019 [25 favorites]

I doubt this will bring any changes at publishers' HR departments. By most accounts in this article he was very good at attracting and shepherding successful authors. As in all the 'creative industries' that's the skill set that earns an editor/A&R person/etc. their paycheck.

I read the book - thought it was overrated and didn't warrant all the raves.
posted by PhineasGage at 12:18 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Oh, how I love a good old-fashioned literary grift.
posted by redsparkler at 12:20 PM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

I remember thinking of joining the FBI in college but I found out they wouldn't let you in if you'd ever smoked pot, so I thought, "oh well," and decided to do something else. I should've just lied! I could be running that place by now!

I really do think liars get away with crazy stuff because it doesn't occur to non-liars that people lie, and other liars think everyone is lying so they don't give a shit.
posted by something something at 12:22 PM on February 4, 2019 [17 favorites]

i know i am supposed to be mad about this, but like isn't most of publishing grift, and also does the grift nessc. matter if the work is tight, and also, isn't this what charismatic white men do as a general rule in the arts.
posted by PinkMoose at 12:28 PM on February 4, 2019

I read this story this morning in wide eyed rubbernecking amazement that transitioned to loud guffaws when the working title of the Poirot novel was cited. A++ WOULD CLICK AGAIN
posted by mwhybark at 12:29 PM on February 4, 2019 [11 favorites]

Now thirty-nine, Mallory lives in New York, in Chelsea. He spent much of the past year travelling—Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia—for interviews and panel discussions. He repeated entertaining, upbeat remarks about his love of Alfred Hitchcock and French bulldogs. When he made an unscheduled appearance at a gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he was greeted with pop-star screams.

I mean, the very first sentence of the article already put me off Mallory, who I knew nothing off going in, but that paragraph cemented my feeling he was a collossal knob and that was before it got to all the lying.

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:36 PM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

I took Ian Parker to be writing from a standpoint of incredulous glee, and felt he carefully staged his presentation of that standpoint until he reached the book itself. In particular, this passage:

His book consists of a hundred very short chapters, and reads like a film script that has been novelized, on a deadline, under severe vocabulary restrictions: sunshine “bolts in” through a door; eyebrows “bolt into each other”; eyes “bolt open”; one character is “bolted to the sofa”; another has “strong teeth bolting from strong gums.”

led me to experience uncontrollable and convulsive laughter.
posted by mwhybark at 12:40 PM on February 4, 2019 [18 favorites]

This kind of thing should be formalized, where every industry will be pen-tested by having someone come along and try and set up a grift based on stroking egos and just generally looking like they belong. Smart companies will bring in people to do this to make sure decision makers in their ranks aren't vulnurable to such unforced errors.
posted by Space Coyote

Are you trying to single-handedly destroy American politics?
posted by mecran01 at 12:44 PM on February 4, 2019 [6 favorites]

This reminds me of another thriller publishing scandal, that of Q. R. Markham (pen name of Quentin Rowe) who basically assembled a spy novel through plagiarism.

Both Rowe and Mallory were golden boys who found it hard to live up to their early promise and tried to quicken their way to triumph by lying, though Mallory didn’t lift words from other authors, and Rowe didn’t pretend to have cancer. The difference is that Rowe reaped no benefit in the end, while Mallory gets to keep his earnings.

Rowe was also the subject of a New Yorker piece.
posted by Kattullus at 12:56 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

but like isn't most of publishing grift,

I mean, the grifters certainly seem to grab all the big headlines (and payouts), but most of publishing is actually people working very hard for not very much money. That includes writers and editors, but also the whole production team behind a book (project managers, designers, copyeditors, etc), and the many hardworking editorial assistants who don't leave a bunch of pee cups around their boss's office before lying on their resume and becoming senior editors/bestselling authors. So yeah, this kind of thing does tend to be a bit galling.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 1:08 PM on February 4, 2019 [21 favorites]

Or if he does some kind of mental illness it sure as hell isn’t Bipolar and anything he’s said about it is a lie.

He has Convenient Amnesia, a disease that makes him forget that he lied about having cancer, lied about having a doctorate, lied about having another doctorate, lied about his mother's death, lied about his brother's death, and worst of all, faked a British accent.

His book popped up as a rec for me, so I've read the first chapter. It's very putdownable.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:11 PM on February 4, 2019 [12 favorites]

Also, he claimed to have a doctorate in psychology from studying Munchausen syndrome?


I hate it in a story when the killer tries to tell you that he's the killer.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:13 PM on February 4, 2019 [26 favorites]

In a recent e-mail, Joan Schenkar, the author of “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” an acclaimed biography, described “Window” as a “novel of strategies, not psychologies.” It was, she said, “the most self-conscious thriller I’ve ever opened.”

When I've read the work of authors who turn out to be con artists and/or fabulists, it is inevitably too much of a muchness for me--too many emotions, too many details, too many flourishes, too many bases covered. I'm not claiming to have some sixth sense for these things; it's only something I manage to add up when I learn about the author's extracurriculars from some other source. Before that, the work just makes me feel a vague unease, and I move on. (Although at times, it has made me feel somewhat inferior with its profusion of invention, which is perhaps what it was designed to do.)

Mallory's over-the-top fondness for dogs reminds me of a book I read about Christian Gerhartsreiter, Blood Will Out. The author, Walter Kirn, met the soi-disant Rockefeller over the adoption of a paralyzed dog. Rockefeller was apparently very fond of injured and elderly dogs. He seemed to have a convenient supply of them. And when they were no longer convenient, they were no longer a problem.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:14 PM on February 4, 2019 [7 favorites]

This guy sounds like a weird asshole who is a horror to know in real life. But I'm not 100% certain why this article exists. Is it just like, "Hey, look at this asshole"? I guess he's a con artist, but he seems to have really written his book (searching for similarities between the book and a movie from 1995 feels like a petty stretch -- how original are the elements in most thrillers anyway?), he doesn't appear to be a rapist or a child molester, and fucking Madonna has faked a British accent for years. Who at The New Yorker has it in for this person, and why?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:27 PM on February 4, 2019 [8 favorites]

I am distantly acquainted with a few of the players in this, and I know the London publishing world well enough to be unsurprised at the ease in which a tall, "good looking", Oxford-aligned white dude could pull off this grift.

The superior Daniel Mallory has written about it: "I had a fairly unique name for a woman, and a relatively commonplace one for a man, and now the only other man who shares both is being exposed as a charming fraud, and if you don’t think that sums up a whole host of particularly transmasculine anxieties, baby, you’ve never transitioned from female to male!"
posted by Gin and Broadband at 1:29 PM on February 4, 2019 [30 favorites]

Oh wow a wealthy white dude who attended an elite school is a sociopath what will they think of next?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:37 PM on February 4, 2019 [7 favorites]

Who at The New Yorker has it in for this person, and why?

Indeed. As awful as Mallory (not the good Mallory, the other one) appears to be, he doesn't seem to have actually hurt anyone.

I did however love the detail of all the offers for his novel being rescinded as soon as his name was attached to it. That's pretty fucking telling: means nobody thought the money to be made would be worth the drama associated with him.
posted by suelac at 1:54 PM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

Indeed. As awful as Mallory (not the good Mallory, the other one) appears to be, he doesn't seem to have actually hurt anyone.

He's terrorized multiple offices full of people and his taking jobs through deceit made them unavailable to people who were not opportunistic sociopaths?
posted by Artw at 1:58 PM on February 4, 2019 [31 favorites]

Also anyone who actually has cancer or is bipolar or any number of other things this dude lies about.
posted by Artw at 2:04 PM on February 4, 2019 [12 favorites]

Eh. That sounds like life in the American corporate world to me, man.

ETA: The scumbaggery of lying about his illnesses is pretty vile. But it's not actually illegal to lie...I don't think. And even if it is, what makes this my business? He's not running for office. He's just some guy who wrote a book they sell at airports.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:04 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Like I don’t wish New Yorker exposes on all their Akira Yoshida asses.
posted by Artw at 2:07 PM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

The New Yorker publishes articles on a wide variety of things. I found it to be a genuinely interesting story, regardless of whether you think he's a horrible monster or just an opportunistic fabulist who is taking what's in front of him. I don't think you need to suppose that someone at The New Yorker has a vendetta against him to justify them writing an article about it. The New York publishing scene is kind of their home turf, anyway.
posted by AndrewInDC at 2:09 PM on February 4, 2019 [6 favorites]

Also, at this point, he’s like a Republican: we can get some enjoyment out of sneering at him but he’ll face no actual real consequences.
posted by Artw at 2:09 PM on February 4, 2019 [8 favorites]

The guy wrote a best-selling book and it's being made into a movie with A-list actors. He has another book coming. There should absolutely be an article exposing that he is a huge fraud. He's a public person now, and from all the interactions described in the article, he loves that.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 2:10 PM on February 4, 2019 [17 favorites]

But I'm not 100% certain why this article exists.

It's a profile of a best-selling author. That's something The New Yorker does; however, most author profiles aren't entertaining enough to get posted here. Apparently George Saunders doesn't go around leaving pee cups.

Tbh, I don't understand the rush to defend him. As long as he makes money for the company, he'll be fine. If he stops making money, he'll go to rehab for a couple of months, and then come out with a memoir/self-help book and share his hard-won wisdom on NPR.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:26 PM on February 4, 2019 [5 favorites]

Honestly, I see no reason to defend him at all. He's obviously a piece of shit. But so are a lot of people. Someone just spent tens of millions of dollars to make a movie based on the book whose author they're now trying to discredit. That studio stands to lose a lot of money. The publisher stands to lose a lot of money. Why is this guy, a hack thriller writer, getting the Ronan Farrow treatment now, with so much money at stake? Who stands to lose? I just wonder.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:45 PM on February 4, 2019

Love a good exposé. The Anna Delvey exposé was also a classic.

In fact, this genre produces such reliable hits, I wonder if a journalist has ever been tempted into writing a meta-exposé — that is, an exposé of a fraudster who you've invented for the purpose of selling your "outing" of them to the New Yorker? I had never heard of Anna Delvey before and yet I totally bought the article about her, so maybe it's possible to pull off.
posted by matthewr at 2:49 PM on February 4, 2019 [5 favorites]

All this foofaraw threatens the seven figure purchase of The Gal in the Military Surplus Hovercraft, my elegant new manuscript. I worked long and hard on borrowing its premise from the 1994 Madeleine Stowe movie Blink.
posted by Iridic at 3:14 PM on February 4, 2019 [10 favorites]

he doesn't seem to have actually hurt anyone.

He sent anonymous abusive emails, he committed corporate fraud, he lied about his qualifications and experience to secure jobs over better candidates. He urinated I someone's office as part of a harrassment campaign. He faked illness and death for personal gain.

He has hurt a lot of people.
posted by smoke at 3:17 PM on February 4, 2019 [25 favorites]

I could have sworn I saw someone on Twitter this morning comment that they had been looking forward to this article coming out for months, possibly even almost a year -- which would have put the timeframe for the start of writing this article close to when Mallory's book was first hitting the best-sellers lists. I could easily imagine that they had started with a conventional author profile and then they just happened onto unravelling this guy's entire Mr. Ripley stituation. Either enough people they talked to had suspicions about this guy (e.g.: the editor who said “I knew I’d get this call. I didn’t know if it would be you or the F.B.I.”, etc..) or the New Yorker's fabled fact checkers started pulling at all the loose threads and found all this sketchy stuff or both.

Speaking of fact checking, towards the end of the article, they manage to talk to Mallory's father who appears to confirm that his mother did indeed have cancer when Mallory was a teenager. However, he calls it "Stage V". Generally, Stage IV is as high as it goes (tumors metastatized and/or spread to other organs). Wikipedia indicates that they use Stage V for a certain kind of kidney tumor, but in Mallory's mother's case I think it's supposed to be breast cancer so this would be inapplicable. Plus, even if it was Stage IV breast cancer, surviving for around three decades after diagnosis is pretty rare, I think. The 5-year survival after a Stage IV diagnosis is 22 percent. I'm not saying that I think she didn't have cancer at all, but I am curious if we're not still missing something here.
posted by mhum at 3:23 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

The Gal in the Military Surplus Hovercraft

Spoiler: she was murdered by the eels
posted by chavenet at 3:27 PM on February 4, 2019 [8 favorites]

The article doesn't really get into this much, but there's also a gender politics angle to this, which is part of why it's getting shared so much. Publishing is definitely one of those industries where the people at the top getting most of the money tend to be older men, while the people doing the underpaid grunt work of making books tend to be younger women. There is an impression that perhaps he rose so quickly in the ranks not just because of his sociopathy, but because as a white man he fit the profile of "someone who deserves to be at the top in publishing."

Add to this the fact that his book rode a wave of hype created by the huge success of female authors such as Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware, writing for female readers, and his book borrowed heavily from concepts popularized by the first two. And then, as a man writing in a typically woman-dominated field (women's crime fiction and psychological suspense), he managed to get a really shockingly massive advance for a debut author.

His entire career feels exploitative of both women's creative contributions and women's good will at every level. What we don't even know right now is how many women declined to be mentioned or quoted in this article because they presumed, with good reason, that it could hurt their careers more than his.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 3:39 PM on February 4, 2019 [38 favorites]

I don't understand how his former professors were able to discuss his graduate work and application essay. There are so many privacy laws around this stuff. Maybe in the UK it is different?
posted by k8t at 3:40 PM on February 4, 2019

Someone who makes up stories is discovered to have made up stories? Publishers don’t buy books based on the moral characters of the authors, but on the fictions created by those authors.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:09 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Someone who makes up stories is discovered to have made up stories? Publishers don’t buy books based on the moral characters of the authors, but on the fictions created by those authors.

I think that Dan Mallory was aware of this, because he was the publisher. Are authors allowed to care about the moral character of the people editing their books? Are people in publishing allowed to care about the moral character of their co-workers and bosses?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:32 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Good time to open up the issue of the increasingly frequent morality clauses in publishing contracts...
posted by PhineasGage at 4:37 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

But it's not actually illegal to lie...I don't think.

Well, if it's not actually illegal, there's surely no grounds for complaint!
posted by kenko at 4:42 PM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

But it's not actually illegal to lie...I don't think.

It depends on the lie. You can be criminally charged for fraud. You can wind up in civil court for defamation, or for causing emotional distress with lies. Alex Jones is currently facing some potentially ruinous lawsuits because the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook victims are suing him for having claimed on air that Sandy Hook was staged. I hope they take every last cent he has.

I couldn't say if any of Mallory's lies are actually actionable, but he certainly has done damage with his lies and it's good that he's been exposed for it. He makes my skin crawl, and so does his prose style. There are too many people like him out there, and it's about time we stopped tolerating, let alone rewarding, that kind of behaviour as a society.
posted by orange swan at 5:07 PM on February 4, 2019 [11 favorites]

in his defense, his sweet and friendly dad seems to think he's a great guy and to be very proud of him. plus dogs! good doggos

(i pretty much don't have any actual skin in here, I just found the story per se, the one in the New Yorker, to be rivetingly amusing. the idea tha the editor of the skinwalkiing Agatha Christie consciously modeled himself on Tom Ripley to such an extent that she in turn hired a whaddya call, sweeheart, a private dick, it is simply, well, my goodness I suppose at one time it sold magazines!

please note as well that the issue this week includes a profile of comedy-slash-noir scriptwriter Ben Hecht by David Denby, a man who came up as a crime reporter in pre-depression Chicago, and a profile of former Louis C.K. protegeé and writing partner Pamela Adlon [best known to you as the voice of one young Bobby Hill]. This is one of those issues of the magazine where the content of the individual pieces chimes against one another and reminds one that, yes, editing for literary quality is a thing, and one that is worthwhile.)
posted by mwhybark at 5:22 PM on February 4, 2019 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking so much of the indirect effects on coworkers and the abusive emails, just that he hasn't appeared to have defrauded anyone directly. I was thinking more of the online cons where the false illness resulted in scamming people out of gifts or money for medical treatment, which he appears not to have done to any great extent. Nor, like Anna Delvey, did he run out on any bills.

Anyway, the brief snippets of his prose from the emails quoted in the story are so ridiculous and over-the-top it's hard to believe anyone would write them with a straight face.
posted by suelac at 5:28 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Boy, there’s just nothing white men can do that people won’t let them get away with, huh.
posted by maxsparber at 6:12 PM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

in his defense, his sweet and friendly dad seems to think he's a great guy and to be very proud of him. plus dogs! good doggos

His dad also mentioned that mom was afflicted with Stage V cancer, a cancer so horrible that it doesn't even exist on this plane, so...
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:37 PM on February 4, 2019

... unless it's associated with kidney disease, a detail picked up on in another set of deceptions...
posted by mwhybark at 6:46 PM on February 4, 2019

Am I reading a different story from everyone here who seems entertained by the grift? I see a white man who can’t even be bothered to make his medical lies plausible (seriously, planned overnight surgery? Ask any nurse how likely that is) who nevertheless kept racking up prestigious positions and fawning sympathy. I see this through the lens of a country run by a different sort of unqualified, unstable charlatan. Through the lens of a world where I just got a lecture on softening my tone for daring to suggest that maybe a white male business bro isn’t qualified to make medical or social services decisions without input from professionals. A world where my co-workers of color are busting their asses and still being told that they are never enough.

I find value in exposing grifts like this, so that others may see just how many chances rich white men get to to rebound from lying about anything ever, but I find no entertainment at all. I already spend enough of my life being low-level pissed at everyday white men getting away with incompetence, famous ones just drag me over the line to incandescent with rage.
posted by ActionPopulated at 6:47 PM on February 4, 2019 [36 favorites]

When a man is good at schmoozing and being "good in a room" the odds are good others are cleaning up his messes.

I've worked with so many men like this. They need constant guidance because they could barely use common software and tools. Too busy schmoozing!

A man who is constantly faking deaths and diseases requires:
-coworkers to cover for him, unpaid
-bosses who ignore weird or unprofessional, (pee everywhere?) behavior
-assistants holding his hand b/c he needs help using spell-check or track changes
-women being encouraged to BE NIIIIICE even though he's rude or disgusting
-everyone lowering their expectations and productivity

It takes a lot of work to deal with people like this. People change jobs over this.
posted by Freecola at 7:21 PM on February 4, 2019 [24 favorites]

His dad also mentioned that mom was afflicted with Stage V cancer, a cancer so horrible that it doesn't even exist on this plane,

100% behind the son being a complete scam artist, but if you've never met an elderly(-ish) person who didn't have a close grip on the precise technical details of an illness...
posted by praemunire at 7:31 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

Am I the only one suspecting that the son gets his scamming from his mother's side? Especially since a lot of it seems to loop back to the couple of years spent alone with her in his late teens, not to mention the repeated killing of the mother in both his lies and it seems, in his book.

(This guy literally scammed his way into, among other things, a placement in New College, Oxford that he presumably took from someone more qualified and less inclined to fantasize about their parents' tragic deaths.)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:54 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I wouldn't find the article worthy if it were just another rich white dude fucking up the planet by moving stocks around, but there's an element to this that strikes this reader as extremely worthwhile: the publishing world is brutal as is; for somebody toiling in obscurity (moi) I'm content with the knowledge that I may never be successful. However, that acceptance is harder to sustain when an apparently insufferable ass has conquered the industry (at least, until now) by telling lies I can't imagine a human telling without blushing, avoiding eye contact, some tell.

Also, a friend who was determined to get a book deal got a very good one, and I know she obsessively researches markets, so I guess that why she decided to have the plot be a female psychic who uncovers a single mom who's torturing her child because mom has MbP. My friend now is negotiating foreign and film rights after getting an advance (as a debut novelist) that was quite substantial, though not as big as Mallory's.

So cash in on that sweet crazy woman gravy train folks. Blech.
posted by angrycat at 4:00 AM on February 5, 2019 [4 favorites]

/spins up "The Plaigarist's Daughter" manuscript
posted by thelonius at 5:31 AM on February 5, 2019 [2 favorites]

Bizarrely, when googling for “plagiarist’s daughter” up pops a Prezi page from 2014 which has what looks like the slides from a short lecture about a book called The Plagiarist’s Daughter by author Kate Benson, but there are no traces of that book’s existence online. An author by that name exists but the summaries of her books I could find didn’t fit the notes on the slides. What an odd little artifact, it would be interesting to know the context.
posted by Kattullus at 5:52 AM on February 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Maybe it was simply dreamed up by the copywriter for Prezi, who didn't check for an author with that name, or didn't care.
posted by thelonius at 6:27 AM on February 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

The article was a little gleeful, I found, and more than a few times I thought it was enjoying outing how fucking horrible this guy was just a smidge too much. Though at the same time, having met creatures like Mallory (of all shapes and colors and sizes) before, I sympathize with the glee of contributing towards some comeuppance.

The article made me think of the million little pieces guy, who lied bunches but still has a career. This will go away and Mallory will churn out a couple more ‘best sellers’ ghost written and then ‘tweaked’ by him, sold under the pen name.

Sometimes successful people are particularly shitty, as appears to be the case here. The island of sanity in this train wreck for me was the following anecdote,
The acquaintance who described an industry “based on hope” didn’t see Mallory for a few years, then made plans to meet him for a work-related drink, in Manhattan. Mallory said that he was now well, except for an eye problem. His eye began to twitch. Mallory’s companion asked after Jake. “Oh, he’s dead,” Mallory said. “Yes, he committed suicide.” The acquaintance recalled to me that, at that moment, “I just knew I was never going to correspond or deal with him again.”
posted by From Bklyn at 8:39 AM on February 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

He's not running for office.

Yet. *lolsob* Entitled white dude is a pathological liar and no one cares because what's the big deal, really and also why is the New York press so mean? is how we get another President Trump.

I thought this was really well written and I particularly liked not only the colleagues who all could see that something was wrong but didn't really know what to do about it (and/or realized that, given the power hierarchies, there was nothing they could do about it) and the keen assessment of the guy's actual writing style, whether it's his fondness for "e.mail" or the word "bolt."
posted by TwoStride at 9:17 AM on February 5, 2019 [7 favorites]

After RTFA and then the comments here, it seems some people are a bit confused about the purpose of an author profile - it's to, uh, profile an author, their background, and how they live. Some authors are fascinating people, others not so much. In this case, the author appears to be a piece of shit human being, and for some people, the depth and breadth of that shitty-ness is profoundly interesting because they've met and dealt with similarly shitty humans in their own lives.

I didn't find it "entertaining" in any way. My reaction was "Oh shit. One of those guys," and it brought to mind some shitty, deceptive people who have passed through my life at one time or another. These types of people do very real damage.

There are systems and structures in place that will, in all likelihood, allow Mallory to continue to ply his brand of deception and abusive behaviour. But that doesn't mean said behaviour shouldn't be exposed.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:19 AM on February 5, 2019 [6 favorites]

I mean, he should be brought up on charges in The Hague for "e.mail" alone.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:42 AM on February 5, 2019 [2 favorites]

Eh. Doesn't it, though? I mean, I'll never meet Dan Mallory, and exposing him...what? protects a bunch of super-privileged people in publishing who are probably also sociopaths and social climbers too? It all just seems like a freak show to me, and again, I just wonder who he pissed off personally at The New Yorker that led to this expose on...a person who is largely powerless to affect anything in my life. I'd like to know the background on the story.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:06 PM on February 5, 2019

a person who is largely powerless to affect anything in my life

Well, I certainly don't know your life but I would like to point out that this guy is not just an author, he's also a VP and executive editor at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. This means that he's one of the gatekeepers who decides who and what gets published. Sure, maybe you'd never submit anything to Morrow for publication and maybe you'd never even want to read anything submitted to Morrow, but I would guess that he's not powerless to affect the lives of other readers of the New Yorker, whether directly or indirectly.
posted by mhum at 12:20 PM on February 5, 2019 [10 favorites]

If I scanned the (remaining) national print magazines, there are lots of articles about people who don't directly affect my life. Some of them are leading uncommon, rogueish lives. Some of those lives are interesting to other people. Surprised there is so much questioning of "why did this story run?"...
posted by PhineasGage at 1:23 PM on February 5, 2019 [5 favorites]

It's really just me, actually, wondering if there's a personal or professional axe to grind at the root of this all. I feel like there has to be. I know this has been misconstrued as defending Mallory, but it's clear he's garbage; I just want to know who sicced The New Yorker on him, because it's also clear, at least to me, that someone would really like to see him fail. I may have come across as above it all and non-judgmental, but in reality I'm all the way messy and am more interested in the drama behind the drama.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:56 PM on February 5, 2019

protects a bunch of super-privileged people in publishing

The people whose heads he stepped on to climb up over would include the least privileged in publishing. Some editorial assistants are living off Mom and Dad (because the pay is so low it's hard to do otherwise!), but some are genuine lovers of literature really struggling to break into the field.
posted by praemunire at 2:16 PM on February 5, 2019 [9 favorites]

I just want to know who sicced The New Yorker on him, because it's also clear, at least to me, that someone would really like to see him fail.

Given his history, I'd say you're probably looking at a pool of several hundred suspects: the people that over years he's lied to, trampled over, upset because they have friends and family who have real cancer, the people he's betrayed, and the people he's left little plastic cups of piss out for.
posted by reynir at 2:27 PM on February 5, 2019 [7 favorites]

Yeah, what was that mystery novel where EVERYONE was involved in the murder...?
posted by PhineasGage at 3:13 PM on February 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

There are a whole lot of fabulously talented people of color and women who labor in anonymity and near-poverty in publishing and writing. People whose work would be of great value to the world if it was just given a chance to be published. Those are the *exact* people who this smarmy piece of shit has stomped on and obstructed and slandered to get where he is.

And those are the exact people who will look at this story and realize that it’s not in their heads, there really is a glass elevator that pushes awful white men to the top in female-dominated industries.

I’ve been fascinated by and encouraged by the dialogue going on today on Twitter about this piece by women and POC. Mallory isn’t the story, really: he’s a symptom of a much larger sickness in the publishing and writing world. He’s an illustrative case study. Now we must figure out how to stop him and others like him, so we stop losing the literary talent of people far better than he is.
posted by faineg at 3:51 PM on February 5, 2019 [15 favorites]

I just want to know who sicced The New Yorker on him

I do actually hope we get a story behind the story on this eventually. It's certainly possible that someone tipped off the New Yorker about his malfeasance. It's equally possible that many people on staff had already heard rumors and gossip about him for years, given the relatively small world of the New York literary scene.

But also, it's extremely common for the New Yorker to profile writers, especially mega-successful New York-based editor/writers who are #1 best sellers and literally raking in millions. Like it would almost be an egregious oversight if they didn't. So it's certainly plausible that the writer began the story as a normal profile and then stumbled on a massive trove of deception and fed-up acquaintances. At that point, that becomes the story, right? I mean it would be weird to just cancel the profile, and there's also no way the famed fact checkers at the New Yorker are going to just let Mallory's self-mythology into print when his dead mom and brother are very much alive.

So I'd be really curious to hear what the process of researching and writing this story was like. I don't know if Ian Parker will ever be able to write about it, but I'd certainly be fascinated to read it.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 4:20 PM on February 5, 2019 [4 favorites]

plus dogs! good doggos

No one who speaks German could be an evil man
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 10:42 AM on February 6, 2019

Did you see? He's issued a statement blaming it all on bipolar, literally all of it, and also adding he can't remember
posted by smoke at 6:11 PM on February 6, 2019

As a funny little consequence of this is that Dan Mallory was slated to be a guest at a fundraiser for PEN America, but canceled. Instead Anand Giridharadas was asked to come. Let’s just say that the charming schemer telling lies would probably have fit in better than the guy who wrote Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Giridharadas tweeted about it afterwards.
posted by Kattullus at 11:22 PM on February 6, 2019 [10 favorites]

That tweeter thread is the best thing I’ve read all week. I will buy his book, and donate to PEN.
posted by From Bklyn at 7:01 AM on February 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

OMG that Anand Giridharadas Twitter thread deserves it's own FPP...
posted by PhineasGage at 11:15 AM on February 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

I agree, PhineasGage, but it’s included in this megapost so it would probably be deleted as a double.
posted by Kattullus at 2:41 AM on February 8, 2019

Also Joyce Carol Oates seems to have liked the book?

I don't know, that seemed like the kind of softball review where someone situates a book they didn't like very much in a genre and then goes on about that genre to avoid talking about the book.

I got a copy of that book, tried to read it and couldn't. The style seemed very numb and patronizing to the reader. Like you got this huge advance and you couldn't even throw yourself into the writing a little bit?

Will it end his career? James Frey still has a career, and lying in a memoir is arguably worse than being a liar in your life and your day job but coming up with the deliverables in a fiction book. I think they are both gross though, and Mallory has been a horrible co-worker, and his fiction book is not a completely separate thing. Look at the way people who knew him professionally bailed on the auction.
posted by BibiRose at 1:05 PM on February 12, 2019

Hot take... modern day JCO is pretty much a fountain of dumb opinions and I wouldn’t read too much into a positive review from her.
posted by Artw at 1:57 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Mallory didn’t just perpetrate a con on publishing — he proved that the prevailing culture of publishing is the con
posted by Artw at 3:49 AM on February 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

NY Times, "Dan Mallory, 2 Starkly Similar Novels and the Puzzle of Plagiarism":

“The courts hold out the possibility that it could be infringement without a language overlap,” said Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert at Harvard Law School. “If you did the exact same things in the exact same sequence all the way through, the court wouldn’t have that much trouble finding infringement.”

Ms. Tushnet said the plot parallels between Mr. Mallory’s novel and “Saving April” were “likely too thin to support an infringement claim,” since some of the plot points at issue — like the unreliable female narrator and a young victim who turns out to be a perpetrator — are well-worn tropes in thrillers.

Still, the overlap is significant enough to give some readers pause.

Sure, a bunch of the plot elements the article describes later can be considered kind of formulaic. But also there appears to be a lot of overlap, including in the final plot twist. Like, enough that readers were noticing it even before the New Yorker article.

Also, the author lied to get into Oxford, lied about getting a degree at Oxford to get a job in publishing, lied about that job to vault into a better job, and also lied about his own health for some unclear reason (possibly to get out of doing actual work?). So, yeah. There's no reason whatsoever to extend this guy any benefit of the doubt. Although, as a charming white guy of the proper social standing, he'll probably get it anyways.
posted by mhum at 5:15 PM on February 14, 2019

I mean, there’s zero chance he did the work without ripping off *somebody*. That’s just how he is.
posted by Artw at 6:39 PM on February 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

profile of former Louis C.K. protegeé and writing partner Pamela Adlon

Amusingly (at least to me) and despite the NYer's famed fact checking, I found an out-and-out, easily checked factual error in that profile regarding one of Adlon's early acting credits.
posted by uberchet at 9:56 AM on February 20, 2019