It is a little known and largely unpublicised fact that the majority of professional writers are really quite kind. They are not the scruffy eccentrics or crazed egotists that one reads about in fiction and in the Sunday newspapers. Professionally, most of them walk a thin, fraying tightrope every day, something which keeps arrogance and bullying in check.
Even the lowest hack or scribbler tends to be given the benefit of the doubt by his or her peers. As Ford Madox Ford put it in 1932, "I would rather see the worst popular writer roll in gold than a fraudulent pill maker or a Wall Street bear."
Then there are the exceptions. Recently, we have been reminded that those who write books for a living can be as ruthless, duplicitous and downright nasty as any banker, politician or journalist.
Stephen Leather,(left), a successful writer of thrillers, boasted to a panel at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, and to listeners to Radio 4's Front Row which was recording the discussion, that his fiction was not restricted to the page but was part of his self-marketing. "As soon as my book is out, I'm on Facebook and Twitter several times a day talking about it. I'll go on to forums and post them under my name and various other names."
Asked about the use of so-called "sock puppets" to praise his own work, Leather said that everyone in his business did it. Rather confirming the point, another established crime writer, RJ Ellory,(right), was outed over the weekend as an author who invents online personae to enthuse about his own novels while trashing those of his rivals.
What a genuinely loathsome couple they make, Leather and Ellory, and what shame they have brought to the previously respectable genre of thriller-writing – until now, one thought that only poets behaved this badly. The New York Times has recently revealed that self-published authors buy fake online reviews in huge quantities, but at least those poor saps have the excuse of desperation. It is old-fashioned greed which propels an established author to use fake identities to deceive readers and harm rivals.
Publishers have thrown up their hands in horror, but this kind of dodgy behaviour has not emerged out of a void. The anonymity of the internet has something to do with it, as does the belief, pioneered by Jeffrey Archer, that the ability to self-promote is the most important talent an author can possess.