Courthouse News Service reports today that J.D. Salinger is suing an anonymous writer, pseudonym J.D. California, over a book entitled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which is slated for September 9 publication and bills itself as a sequel to the reclusive Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye. The latter made household names of Holden Caulfield and his creator, and sold almost seventy million copies. The suit also names Windupbird Publishing of London, Nicotext of Sweden, and SCB Distributors of Gardena, Calif.

The lawsuit, which alleges that the book is derivative of the original and is a violation of Salinger's intellectual property rights, asks that publication of the book be stopped, and all copies destroyed.

Read Robert Kahn's article for Courthouse News here.

Judging from the publisher's product description on Amazon, J.D. California hopes to profit handsomely from tying his own book to a famous name and a beloved story:

On a seemingly normal day Mr. C wakes up in a nursing home with an unnerving compulsion to flee his present situation. He boards a bus and embarks on a curious journey through the streets of New York. Sixty years after his debut as the great American antihero, Mr.C is yanked back onto the page without a goddamn clue why. 60 Years Later is an astonishing debut and a marvelous sequel to one of our most beloved classics.

Most annoying perhaps is the bio for J.D. California, whom no one, apparently, has been able to locate or identify: "After finding a well-traveled copy of The Catcher in the Rye in an abandoned cabin in rural Cambodia, the iconic characters within saw John through the most maniacal of tropical fevers and chronic isolation. Years later he was finally able to return the favour, holding the fate of Mr.C in his inspired hands with 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye."

That this fellow would consider it a "favor" to the famously reclusive author to rip off his book is preposterous. The real Salinger worries, justifiably, that people will be confused and think he wrote the book.

In general, I find sequels written by anyone other than the original author to be vaguely annoying and unimaginative at best, downright unethical at worst. At least in the case of something like Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, it's clear to everyone that the dead author didn't write the book. But Salinger is still alive.

I protested loudly a few years ago when all stock of Brad Vice's Bear Bryant Funeral Train was pulped following allegations of plagiarism. But this seems to me to be an entirely different beast: a book described by the author himself as "pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past," and by Salinger as "a rip-off pure and simple."

What do you think? ~M.R.