Donald Bain
Ghost writer behind numerous celebrity memoirs and the Murder, She Wrote thriller series
DONALD BAIN, who has died aged 82, was one of America’s most prolific ghost writers; the author of hundreds of works of fiction and non-fiction over half a century.
Bain would take on almost any commission, from The World’s Best
Bartenders’ Guide to a celebration of caviar. He was often hired by vanity publishing firms to “ghost” the memoirs of business executives and was the real author of many celebrity autobiographies; he admitted to having written Veronica Lake’s self-pitying memoirs at the start of his career, but otherwise was impeccably discreet as to the identity of his clients.
Bain also turned out reams of fiction, nearly all of it commissioned by publishers to meet market demand. He wrote westerns and comic novels under various pseudonyms, and collaborated with President Truman’s daughter Margaret on a popular series of crime novels centred on political skulduggery in Washington.
Although for many years Bain rebutted the rumours that he was Miss Truman’s ghost, he admitted the truth after her death in 2008 and continued to publish new stories under her name. He shared her somewhat jaundiced view of political life, which she summarised by quoting her father’s aphorism: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
Bain’s most enduring project was his novel series based on the interminable television crime show Murder, She Wrote, which starred Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, mystery writer and sleuth. Beginning with Gin and Daggers in 1989, he produced nearly 50 titles, all of which were credited to “Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain”. Angela Lansbury told him that people often approached her in the street to thank her for writing the novels.
Bain joked that Miss Fletcher was the perfect collaborator, since “she never criticises, she never edits”. In reality, he had to send each manuscript to Universal Studios to be vetted for any deviation from the television character, and although he was allowed to introduce a Scotland Yard detective as a potential love interest, he was ordered to expunge a scene in which they kissed.
It was all of a rather different order from Bain’s earliest success as a ghost writer – Coffee, Tea or Me? (1967), purportedly the saucy memoirs of two airline stewardesses, which sold more than 5 million copies.
Bain was working as a public relations executive for American Airlines when he was asked to meet two stewardesses to help them work on the book, although their anecdotes proved so disappointingly un-fruity that he invented most of the ribald content himself. He ensured that the book received maximum publicity by sowing stories in the press about a campaign to ban it by the Stewardess Antidefamation Defence League – his own invention.
He went on to write several sequels, plus more racy “memoirs” by nurses, teachers and Wall Street secretaries. As his name never appeared on the title page, he dedicated each book to himself. “I always wondered if somebody was going to look at them all and say: ‘Who is this guy who all these young women are dedicating books to?’”
Bain was fond of quoting Dr Johnson’s maxim that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, but late in his career he did begin, for the first time, to start work on a book that had not been commissioned. Lights Out!, a thriller about a disgruntled engineer plotting to cause an electricity blackout, was published in 2013.
Donald Sutherland Bain was born in New York on March 6 1935, the son of George Bain, who was of Scottish descent, and his wife Constance. He grew up on Long Island and studied speech and drama at Purdue University, Indiana, before serving in the US Air Force and going on to work in broadcasting in Indiana and Texas, spending his evenings playing the drums and the vibraphone in jazz groups.
In the early 1960s his cousin, the ghost writer Jack Pearl, offered him some commissions that he had no time to fulfil, and Donald began his ghosting career writing supposedly “true adventure” stories for magazines.
Bain latterly became a friend of the British crime novelist PD James, whom he met crossing the Atlantic in the QE2. In her memoir Time to
Be in Earnest, Baroness James revealed that “Under Don’s guidance I threw craps in the casino” – at the age of 77, “the first time I have ever gambled.”
Bearded and of scholarly mien, Bain lived in New York for many years and worked in an office with three word processors, each devoted to a different project. In 2002 he published his autobiography, Every Midget Has an Uncle
Sam Costume, subsequently reissued as Murder, He Wrote.
Donald Bain’s first marriage to Jackie was dissolved. His second wife, Renée Paleybain, collaborated with him on many of his books. She died last year, and he is survived by a stepdaughter and stepson as well as the two daughters of his first marriage.
Donald Bain, born March 6 1935, died October 21 2017