Son of controversial author brings father's books into 21st century

Josh Irving was 11 years old when his father Clifford Irving was hauled off to prison in 1972 to serve time for plotting one of the greatest literary frauds in American history -- a fake autobiography of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. Irving would recover his career from the wreckage writing a total of 20 books, most of which are out of print.

In November, the younger Irving discovered only one of his father's books had made it into the 21st century.

"I asked him, ‘Dad, why do you only have one book on Kindle?' " said Josh Irving, who lives in Ansley Park. "He said because he has all the rights to all the books and no one is available to do the technical work."

As a gift for his father's 81st birthday in November, Irving, 50, decided to take on the task. He thought the project would take a couple of weeks. It took three months; he completed the project Feb. 15. There were pages to digitize, text to be formatted and father-son debates to be had (mostly via email) over everything from book jackets to pricing to paragraph indentation.

Irving, an entrepreneur in the fitness industry, said it was worth the effort to bring his father's work to a new generation. "Many older people have read and like his books," he said. " I'm thinking he will get a younger audience."

It may be an audience that is too young to remember the scandal that sent the writer to prison for penning the fabricated "Autobiography of Howard Hughes." The caper, cooked up with collaborator Richard Suskind, would net Irving more than $750,000 from publisher McGraw-Hill before Hughes emerged from seclusion to call it a sham. Irving confessed, repaid the advance and served 17 months in prison.

Releasing a digital version of 12 of Irving's books would become a bonding experience for the author and the eldest of his three sons.

"We argued so much about how to do it, and resolving arguments is how you bond, trying to understand the other generation's point of view," said Clifford Irving by phone from his home in Aspen, Colo., where he moved in 2001. It also dragged the author, an early adopter of computer technology in the '80s, into the latest technological advances.

The elder Irving didn't own a Kindle (he does now), but he knew getting his books transferred to the medium would require more effort than he wanted to expend.  But as the project unfolded, he couldn't avoid involvement. While formatting the digitized pages to make them readable on Kindle, he couldn't resist making a few changes.

"I took out a lot of exclamation marks," he said. He also added a couple of chapters to "Fake!" the 1969 story of art forger Elmyr de Hory. "I had done that some years ago for a private edition published in England," Irving said. "It brought the story up to date."

Irving had the foresight many years ago to purchase the rights to all of his books. Many book contracts stipulate that when a book is no longer in print, an author may acquire the rights.  "You don't want your books out there," Irving said. "Unless you get the rights back and assert that you own those rights, they fall into public domain and anybody can publish them."

In addition to previously published books, the Kindle books include unreleased works such as "Jailing: The Prison Memoirs of 00040t is also the first time the Hughes "autobiography" is available to the American public.

The Hughes book is the author's most well-known work, but Irving said the Kindle project helped put that 40-year-old book in perspective as one of 20 in his literary canon. "That was all people wanted to talk about. It quickly became old for me and boring. I had done this crazy thing when I was living in Europe and I paid the price for it," Irving said.

Irving would go on to write "The Hoax," an account of the fraud, which was made into a film starring Richard Gere in 2007. As for why he wrote the fake autobiography, it was an adventure born of the wild times he was living on the island of Ibiza, he has said.

Irving is currently working on his latest novel, a tale about the bad boy days of a young Claude Monet, the French Impressionist painter, which he plans to release on Kindle with a little help from his son.

"I am grateful to Josh. This was his idea and he was the guiding force and the energy," Irving said. "I would not and could not have done it if he hadn't pushed me."

SIDEBAR: Clifford Irving books on Kindle: