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A judicial inquiry has been opened into a criminal complaint filed by thriller writer Patrick Graham against French publishers Anne Carrière and Univers Poche, the online book magazine ActuaLitté has reported.
The inquiry will establish whether or not the publishers will face charges over the complaint, in which Graham alleges abuse of weakness and extortion of signature.
Graham, the bestselling author of L’Evangelie selon Satan (The Gospel According to Satan) and L’Apocalypse selon Marie (The Apocalypse According to Mary), has claimed that the contracts for his next three novels had been transferred from Anne Carrière to Univers Poche without his permission while he was recovering from open heart surgery undergone in February 2013.
Univers Poche has strongly denied the charges and accused Graham of libel.
The author had sent his new publisher a number of emails and letters expressing his satisfaction and gratitude for the arrangement both before the contract transfer was signed on 5th September 2013 and afterwards, Univers Poche’s lawyer Olivier d’Antin told The Bookseller. "So my client was astonished to be accused of abuse of weakness and extortion of signature in 2014 by an author who owed them two manuscripts for which they had paid €105,000 in advances,” he said. The third manuscript covered by the contract had already been completed.
D'Antin said that after Graham had made his health problems known, he signed a further book contract on 10th June 2015 with Belfond, "which like Univers Poche is part of the Editis group,” d’Antin added. “And he has still not submitted the two outstanding manuscripts.”
Graham’s lawyer Pierre-Philippe Boutron-Marmion acknowledges that the author signed the contract transfer, but said this was only under duress, and that he was not capable of conducting any kind of negotiation at the time. Moreover, the terms included an impossibly short deadline of 40 days for delivering the first of the two outstanding manuscripts, Boutron-Marmion claimed. “Graham is still extremely ill and has been certified an invalid for life--unless there is a miracle.”
The problem is said to have began when, despite the absence of an exclusivity clause, Anne Carrière objected when it learned that Univers Poche had approached Graham to publish some future thrillers. “The upshot was that the two publishers reached a secret agreement behind Graham’s back on the transfer of his existing contracts in May 2013, four months before the transfer was signed,” Boutron-Marmion claimed.
The French language writers union, Syndicat des Ecrivains de Langue Française (SELF), has joined the lawsuit on Graham’s behalf, according to ActuaLitté.
Photo: Melania Avanzato