Salinger taking action over ‘follow up’ book to novel

AUTHOR JD Salinger is taking legal action to block the publication of a book billed as a follow-up to his classic novel The Catcher in the Rye.

The 90-year-old, who is as protective of his work as he is of his privacy, is seeking an injunction against the writer, publishers and distributor of a spin-off of the author’s famous novel.

Lawyers for Salinger filed the lawsuit in Manhattan, seeking to stop publication of what it says is a copycat book titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, by a man writing under the name John David California. It also seeks unspecified damages.

The lawsuit said the right to create a sequel to The Catcher In The Rye or to use the character Holden Caulfield belongs only to Salinger. The lawsuit says Salinger, who has never allowed Catcher to be filmed, staged or otherwise adapted, has “decidedly chosen not to exercise that right”.

In 60 Years Later, due to be published in Britain this summer and in the US in the autumn, a character very much like Caulfield is 76-years-old, an escapee from a retirement home and identified as “Mr C”. The novel is dedicated to Salinger and the author is a character in it, too, wondering whether to continue Caulfield’s story.

A recluse living in rural New Hampshire, Salinger has not published in a book in decades and has rarely been heard from in public.

In 1982, he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the author to a magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and Salinger dropped the suit.

Five years later, the high court refused to allow publication of an unauthorised biography, by Ian Hamilton, that quoted from the author’s unpublished letters. Salinger had copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton’s book, which came out in a revised edition in 1988.