Wednesday, March 11: Tune It Or Die!
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW, IT’S WHO GOOGLE KNOWS
by Rob Lopresti
This is not an original idea, but I haven’t seen it applied to our field before.
As everyone is aware, if someone wants to learn something about you today, they will look you up on the web, and they will probably use Google. So let’s see what they will learn.
Think of someone you want to study up on; call him “John Doe.” Go to Google and type in “John Doe is” using the quotation marks. (If the person is deceased say “John Doe was”) Take the first sentence that begins with those words, and there you have what Google considers the essential fact about Mr. Doe.
Below are what Google considers the key truth about a lot of mystery writers. If your favorite author is not listed below it probably means the sentence that came up was rather boring. (I have started with two dull ones, to demonstrate). My favorites, for sheer weirdness, are the essential facts about Rex Stout and Roald Dahl. By the way, one lucky author came up with a negative review as his first fact. I left that one out, too.
Lawrence Block is one of the most respected and bestselling names in mystery fiction
Dashiell Hammett was born on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1894.
James Lincoln Warren is the one in the white tux.
G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century.
Twist Phelan is a world traveler and endurance athlete.
Jack Ritchie was born in a room behind his father’s tailor shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 26th, 1922
Earl Emerson is currently considered a “single author.”
Ed McBain was going to come to Chicago to crown me.
Dennis Lehane is the heir apparent.
Rex Stout was a guest panelist on Information Please, Clifton Fadiman’s famous quiz show, at least four times
Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews and Edinburgh.
Dorothy L. Sayers was well known for “combining detective writing with expert novelistic writing,” and the imaginative ways in which her victims were disposed of.
John le Carré is a patron of the charity.
E. C. Bentley was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics.
Jon L. Breen is so important as a reviewer that we forget how good a novelist he is.
J.J. Marric was derived from (a) Creasey’s own initial (B) the middle initial of his second wife, Evelyn Jean) and (C) the forenames of his sons Martin and Richard.
Rupert Holmes is an American treasure.
Roald Dahl was the only one who volunteered to do it.
Kinky Friedman is probably more comfortable holding a cigar in his hand than he is a guitar or microphone.
Dick Stodghill is a man that I met over the internet (surprise) that was a rifleman in World War 2.
Georges Simenon was by many standards the most successful author of the 20th century, and the character he created, Inspector Jules Maigret, who made him rich and famous, ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world’s best known fictional detective.
James Patterson is the greatest author of all time!
Avram Davidson was a complicated and, by most standards, strange person.
Margaret Maron is no stranger to awards.
E. W. Hornung was friendly with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and married his sister.
Aaron Elkins is witty and oh so clever.
Edgar Allan Poe was born “Edgar Poe” on Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston, MA.
Dick Francis is on a book tour, and stops by to discusses his books The Danger, The Banker and Proof in this 1984 interview with Don Swaim.
William DeAndrea was great, but he died.
Alan Cook is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
Linda Fairstein is not the only female legal thriller writer with a law degree.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past.
Elmore Leonard is awesome!
Agatha Christie was revered as a master of suspense, plotting and characterization by most of her contemporaries and, even today, her stories have received glowing reviews in most literary circles.
Sue Grafton is published in 28 countries and 26 languages—including Estonian, Bulgarian, and Indonesian.
Edgar Wallace was born in Greenwich in 1875 – in the same year as the creator of the Tarzan novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Rob Lopresti is a librarian in the Pacific Northwest.
What a great article. Now we’re all going to Google ourselves and this post of yours will become infamous. Of course, I laughed when I read mine:
Deborah Elliott-Upton is a compelling writer and an even more compelling person.
William DeAndrea was great, but he died. Makes it seem he owes the world an apology.
The person who wrote Alan Cook’s has a real way with words.
Deborah has the best of all. You can’t help wonder if she wrote it herself.
I was feeling honored to be among such distinguished people so accurately described until I came to “James Patterson is the greatest author of all time!”
Perhaps we should team up, Rob. You can hand everyone a book, then I’ll shoot ’em.
Here’s something odd and interesting… when I Google’d some of the same names you did – in the same way – I found several different first sentences.
I wonder if Google results differ depending on who/what/where is Googling???
By the way, I LOVE mine:
“Paul Guyot is currently a Visiting Researcher at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.”
Want some real laughs, try Wikkipedia. Besides entries on Poe and Chandler you can find scholarly entries on “The Fairly Oddparents.” (Hey, and you don’t see what you want, you can write an entry yourself!!!)
Rob, what a great, imaginative article (and wonderful comments, too).
Whew… I’m glad they didn’t mention all my outstanding arrest warrants.