Author Unknown: Tales of a Literary Detective

I've been on the Internet before there was a Web, met my wife over a Multi-User Dungeon, and wrote my master's thesis on how anonymity on the Internet makes people act out. The notion of determining the true identity of anonymous sources really appealed to me, especially since I've been the victim of more than one anonymous attack on the Internet.

And thus we have Author Unknown. My version is titled "On the Trail of Anonymous" as opposed to "Tales of a Literary Detective" - near as I can tell, it's the same book with different packaging. Which is good, because my version's cover is of a book with glasses resting on it--not very interesting. That cover exemplifies some of the problems with Author Unknown.

Don Foster is an English professor. He works in an English professor's office, he writes like an English professor, and he stumbles around in bewilderment in the "real world," solving crimes and battling other evil skeptics. He seems to have a magical ability to determine authorship through contextual cues, an ability he never explains in detail. Armed with his trusty sidekick SHAXICON (a mysterious search program that's never mentioned once in the book), the hapless Dr. Foster wages a one-man-and-computer war against those who would cloak themselves in anonymity.

The delicious revenge such a skill can bring about is especially evident when Foster tracks down his anonymous peer reviewers. Foster slices right through it all. And what anonymous villains does our hero vanquish? The author of Primary Colors! The Unabomber! Wand Tinasky! Monica Lewinsky! Clement Clarke Moore! Shakespeare himself!

In between all this detective work is a lot of inside baseball. Foster has all the insufferable qualities of an academic, including the habit of quoting everyone and everything else even marginally relevant to the subject at hand, a lot of self-pitying "but I'm just a poor English professor!", and certain assumptions that the reader knows every detail of say, the famed Talking Points or even Primary Colors. Author Unknown has aged poorly.

You won't find much detail on how Foster actually gets to the bottom of his mysteries. SHAXICON seems to do a lot of the work and Foster pieces together the rest. Sometimes Foster leads up to the Big Reveal, and other times he simply tells the reader who the culprit is and then backs into his argument. This makes the book wildly uneven, interesting in one chapter and very boring in the next.

What's shocking is how unscientific the literary world really is. Foster's work is the analysis of text in a scientific way, a way that is now accessible to everyone on the planet in a little tool you might have heard of called Google. Back then, this was big news. Now, a man who knows how to use a specialized search engine? Not so much.

If you're looking for guidance on how to track down your anonymous detractors, this book will not help you. If you're looking for a mildly interesting tale about the evolution of scientific inquiry applied to literature and search tools, then Author Unknown will be enlightening. And if you want to know the true origins of Santa's reindeer, it's a must read.