Dan Mallory: The Good Liar

Missing Pages S01E02 

Dan Mallory: The Good Liar

Bethanne Patrick: In the spring of 2018, Dan Mallory’s debut novel was unavoidable. 

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Host and Dan Mallory): Gosh, it's the stuff that authors dream of having their book picked up and turned into a Hollywood movie. It’s incredible! 

Bethanne Patrick: The author zipped around the globe on a multi-city book tour, charming audiences with his megawatt smile, swift wit and refreshing vulnerability during Q&As. 

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Dan Mallory): When I wrote the book, and this is the truth, this is not false modesty, I had no ambitions beyond tapping up the words “the end” at the conclusion.

Bethanne Patrick: Before the age of 40, Dan Mallory would rise up the ranks, maneuvering his way into a successful career.

Listen, I didn't get to this place in my career overnight. The traditional path to becoming a successful writer is full of twists and turns, meetings and drafts, and a lot of rejections. It took me almost 20 years of writing, networking, and finding my way in the industry to become a respected literary critic. 

Dan's star soared as an Executive Editor in addition to a handful of other jobs, and then as a bestselling author, in less than half that time. Now, it’s not impossible in publishing to achieve so much in so short a time. But it isn't the norm and it raises some red flags. Dan didn’t want to wait.

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Dan Mallory): I'm not sure what the secret ingredient is. I'm just lucky that my book has connected with millions of readers.

Bethanne Patrick: Scattered along the trail to the top, there was one unfounded claim after another. From false cancer diagnoses, to lies of omission surrounding his education, to tragic but ultimately untrue family deaths.

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Dan Mallory): And I'd never written a script before. They instead got a Pulitzer winning playwright. I don't have a Pulitzer yet, yet. That's exactly right.

Bethanne Patrick: And as the facts eventually bubbled to the surface, you’d think the ground beneath Dan Mallory’s feet would begin to crumble.

TV Clip - Good Morning America: He's now admitting to lying about his past.

Bethanne Patrick: That he would, or the industry would, brace itself for the oncoming avalanche.

TV Clip - Good Morning America: Some are calling him a con-artist, but Mallory, who's now apologizing, claims it's mental illness. 

Bethanne Patrick: What should someone do if they’re caught in an avalanche? Pretend to swim? Do nothing? Or as Dan’s publisher did: issue a statement that said they “would not comment on the personal lives of their authors or employees,” with hopes that it would blow over.

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, long-time literary critic and publishing world insider, Bethanne Patrick. You can find me tweeting about books, my dog, and G&Ts on Twitter @thebookmaven.

In Season One of Missing Pages, I’ll be your guide, as we look back at some of the most iconic, jaw-dropping, and just truly bizarre book scandals to shape the publishing world. In every episode we re-examine the headlines and go behind the scenes to give  you the unabridged industry story we all missed the first time around. Because isn’t there always a page that gets cut from the final draft?

On that note, let's find the missing pages together on today’s episode: 

THE GOOD LIAR

CHAPTER 1: The Golden Boy

Dan Mallory was riding high. 

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Host and Dan Mallory): So let's get this straight. You're a critically acclaimed author for your very first debut novel.  You're a millionaire. You're incredibly handsome. Go on!

Bethanne Patrick: In the lead up to The Woman In The Window’s release, Dan revealed his true identity to participate in promotional press. This is when details about his personal life first emerged to a broader audience 

TV Clip - Good Morning America: I'm actually, as Daniel Mallory, quite a private person and disinclined to chat. But as A.J. Finn, I can talk about literally everything. A.J. Finn does not shut up.

Bethanne Patrick: Writer and journalist Jessa Crispin, who reports on power dynamics in the publishing world, covered the story of Dan Mallory.

Jessa Crispin: The primary requirement of an entry level position in publishing: that you have to come from resources of some means in order to survive the process of making your way into publishing.

Bethanne Patrick: Dan Mallory certainly grew up as a “person of means.” He started building the right kind of resumé from a young age.

Jessa Crispin: You can't just, like, wander your way in the way that it used to be. Dan Mallory was a high level editor at a prestigious publisher in New York City and had the path to that job that one would expect, in that he worked at Little, Brown in London,

and then before that, Ballantine in New York City. He had on his resume several degrees, including a PhD from Oxford and undergrad at Duke. So, a very sort of traditional, expected pathway into publishing from, you know, 18 years old on. 

Bethanne Patrick: Dan received the kind of top-notch education that opens doors. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the Mallorys.

Jessa Crispin: When Dan Mallory was at Oxford, he wrote an essay about the hardship that he had endured: that his mother had died of cancer and he nursed her through that experience, his brother had cystic fibrosis, his father was dead of some undetermined cause.

Bethanne Patrick: Despite all of this tragedy, Dan would persevere. While he never published the essay about his personal losses and hardships, this backstory built important professional bridges which launched him into an illustrious publishing career.

He worked for Sphere Books in London, an imprint of Little Brown. He was a Vice President and Executive Editor at William Morrow and Company in New York.

He claimed to have a doctorate from Oxford. He also regaled people with stories of working with big time celebrity writers. But Dan Mallory’s life wasn’t without more hardship. His professors and colleagues were stunned to learn that various absences were due to a brain tumor he was battling.

In 2011, a colleague recalled Mallory saying he was even considering a visit to Dignitas, an assisted-death facility in Switzerland, saying the prognosis was not good and that he might only have a few years left to live.

Years later, in 2015, Dan, appearing to have survived brain cancer, opened up about his mental health challenges with bipolar II disorder.

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Host): And the best part of this entire adventure, even better than the money, and the bestseller lists, and the movie, and traveling the world, is the opportunity to make the most of this platform to speak about mental health. Because it's under-discussed, it’s unjustly stigmatized. If, I’m addressing the audience here, if you suffer from mental health issues, there’s nothing wrong with you, you just need a steer.

Bethanne Patrick: His message was clear: although he suffered from loss and depression and lived with a bipolar II diagnosis, he was a success. And it was refreshing, inspiring even, for someone so high up in the book publishing world to be this vulnerable and share a less than perfect biography.

Video Clip - Coffee with AJ Finn (Dan Mallory and host): She struggles with depression, which is something I've struggled with my entire adult life. And in combating, she resorts to alcohol and drug abuse, which as you say, is a real issue, a proper epidemic, in the country right now. So, I didn't have that in mind when endowing her with these problems, but it's topical, that's right. You know, in the world of sports journalism, that is known as a walk off home run.

Video Clip - Home Run Call: That ball is high, it is far, it is gone! 

Bethanne Patrick: So, in 2018, when his novel led book sales and was a runaway hit, this was an especially sweet triumph for a man who had endured so much. And as Jessa points out, across the publishing industry, authors with traumatic backstories often make for great marketing.

Jessa Crispin: I would like to place the blame for trauma entertainment on Oprah's feet.

TV CLIP - Oprah: Wow. Wow. And I can't even express how excited I am about the announcement of this book.

Jessa Crispin: I think that kind of material definitely sort of just trained us to expect these tales of woe, to expect these tales of trauma, and told us how to formulate them.

Bethanne Patrick: Mallory’s publisher went all out with marketing the book.

Jessa Crispin: It wasn't so much that I was paying attention to it because it was an important book. I was paying attention to it because it was in all of the airports and the front tables at bookstores. And it was unavoidable for a while.

Bethanne Patrick: The book is a prickly psychological thriller told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who believes she’s witnessed a murder. An agoraphobic who enjoys her wine, Anna works with her psychiatrist to decipher what’s real and what’s in her mind. In this interview clip, Mallory even shares how the experience of switching psychiatric meds one summer evening served as inspiration for the book’s main character.

TV Clip - WCBS: In July and August, the publishing industry, in which I worked, shuts down. So, I got to spend about six weeks on the couch titrating off my old meds and titrating onto new ones. And so one night I was parked on my sofa watching rear window – 

Movie Clip - Rear Window: First, you smash your leg, then you get to looking out the window, see things you shouldn't see. 

TV Clip - WCBS: In my peripheral vision, I saw a light flicker, and across the street in this beautiful townhome, a woman had turned on her light. And so I'm watching her, and then I look back at the screen where Jimmy Stewart is watching Raymond Bird, and I thought how funny that 60 years on I'm doing exactly the same thing. Voyeurism is timeless. And it occurred to me that there might be a story here.

Bethanne Patrick: In this interview, Dan Mallory gives a dizzying recollection of where the inspiration for his novel came from. As you listen, you’ll notice how the story is a bit nonsensical but also simultaneously charming.

TV Clip - WCBS: In the book, we learn that something has befallen Anna. Something terrible. And she's having trouble dealing with it. She is aggrieved. She is house bound. She's unable to leave. And at numerous points during my depression, I was unable to rise myself from bed, let alone leave the house. So, between my experience, my corrective experience with depression, and the influence and inspiration of Jimmy Stewart, Rear Window, Hitchcock, and film noir more broadly, this sort of sloshed together in my head and took shape quite quickly. 

Bethanne Patrick: See, this is exactly what I love about books. You start in one place and then you wind up somewhere completely unexpected.

Video Clip - Nicki Swift: The novelist was forced to come clean after a profile in The New Yorker accused him of a large swath of lies surrounding his career and medical history.

Bethanne Patrick: Maybe Anna Fox, the protagonist in The Woman in The Window, had the right idea. Something’s not adding up.

Video Clip - Nicki Swift: A former colleague told the outlet, “My God, I knew I’d get this call. I didn’t know if it would be you or the FBI.”

Bethanne Patrick: Like Anna, we need to separate the facts from the fiction. I mean, this is the book world after all.

Dr. 1: How did people learn that these were just a string of lies?

Bethanne Patrick: So we know that Dan’s own mental health treatment served as inspiration for the novel and this got me thinking about the mental health angle. What other diagnoses might lead somebody to lie and deceive for decades? When we come back, I consult the professionals.

CHAPTER 2: Dan’s Undoing

Bethanne: Here I am talking to not one, but two psychiatrists.

Dr. 2: I have a psychiatrist practice in Fairfax, Virginia. 

Dr. 1: Well, I've been in the private practice of psychiatry for about four decades. 

Bethanne Patrick: The doctors could not speak in specifics about a patient they’ve never personally treated; the two agreed to weigh in with what they do know.

You have a patient like Dan Mallory, someone from a privileged background, who lost multiple immediate family members at a young age, someone who has faced personal terminal health scares personally, along with mental health challenges like bipolar II disorder. What would you make of them? 

Dr. 2: First, I would say for me, it would raise the fact that he has so many difficulties, problems in his life with so many losses, that for me would raise a red flag.

Bethanne Patrick: We’ve all told a lie. It’s a common human phenomenon. I lied to myself this morning when I told myself I would get on the rowing machine. Hasn’t happened yet. 

But actually, it’s a critical part of our development, says one of our experts.

Dr. 1: We use the term pathological lying, suggesting that there's also kind of non-pathological lying, that, I'll say, we all deceive others and ourselves in our everyday life throughout the day. And it often facilitates maintaining good relationships with other people, with spouses, lovers, friends, etc. And learning to lie, by toddlers and small children, is a developmental step, actually. When the child can first tell a lie, it realizes that it has a mind separate from its mother and father. That they cannot read their thoughts as we think the child thinks early on.

Bethanne Patrick: However, in pseudologia fantastica, a pathological form of lying, the patient lies not to avoid painful consequences, but rather to obtain internal reward or gratification. 

In 2019, Ian Parker released a long and well-researched profile on Dan Mallory for The New Yorker. It was a 10,000 word piece called “A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions.” Do you know how rare it is for The New Yorker to spend ten thousand words on a debut novelist? It just doesn’t happen.

To unravel how the magazine figured it all out, we met, of course, with the article’s fact-checker.

Camila Osorio: My name is Camila Osorio. I'm a reporter from Colombia. I am the fact checker of the Dan Mallory article that was published at the beginning of 2019.

Bethanne Patrick: Camila Osorio is now a culture correspondent at the Spanish language newspaper, El Pais. But in early 2019, she was given three weeks to fact-check a liar’s falsified biography. Even for The New Yorker, a magazine known for its rigorous fact-checking process, this story was a doozy.

Camila Osorio: I mean, it's really a challenge for a fact checker because it's not, let's say, a book review where you can just, like, see the book and see if it actually says what the book review is saying.

In this case, there's a list of lies and you have to figure out, like, okay, how do I make sure that this is a lie? And also, how do I make sure that this is a lie, given that the author doesn't wanna talk to the reporter, the editor, and then the fact checker? 

So, normally what you have to do in those cases is try to find more than one source for each of the lies. Or, if some of the lies are documented in emails, for example, or in videos, then just try to check as much of those documents. And that was the challenge of this piece. There's a lot of accusations of lying. So, how do we put it in the piece?

Bethanne Patrick: This was the first time Camila had checked a piece for Ian Parker, an award-winning journalist known for developing and writing complex profiles.

Camila Osorio: Ian Parker. I mean, Ian Parker is a legend inside and outside The New Yorker.

Bethanne Patrick: It turns out the article, which went viral upon its release in February 2019, was a whole year in the making. Complete with in-person encounters with the very-much still alive mother of Dan Mallory, and long pauses of disbelief on phone calls with his once sympathetic professors back at Oxford, an institution from which he never graduated due to a series of serious medical issues that could not be proven.

And to set the record straight, here’s Jessa Crispin again, listing out all the lies that came to light about Dan Mallory’s life. 

Jessa Crispin: He claimed to have agoraphobia. He pretended to have a doctorate from Oxford. He tended to have a doctorate in psychology. He pretended like his mother died from breast cancer. His brother both died of cystic fibrosis and suicide. And the father, again, died of unspecified causes. Then he claimed himself to have an inoperable brain tumor, and he also claimed to have a tumor on his spine. Then, he had a fake British accent. Then, he pretended to be dog sitting when he wasn't dog sitting as a way of explaining why he didn't show up to a meeting.

Bethanne Patrick: The Woman in the Window appears to be his own work, but even that plot is suspiciously similar to a 1995 movie starring Sigourney Weaver called Copycat, which is also a film based on a book.  I will leave the irony of that film title for our plagiarism episode.

Then there’s Dan’s tragic family stories and academic accolades, which could not be verified. His mother is still alive and well, and so is his brother. Dan was never the victim of a brain tumor and he doesn’t have any doctorates either. 

The whole thing, Mallory claimed, resulted from his bipolar-II disorder, which he had been diagnosed with relatively recently. But the lies are so deep and go so far back, that it’s not clear whether a bipolar-II diagnosis would lead to compulsive lying. And for Camila, this was particularly tough to fact-check.

Camila Osorio: The hardest part was the one that had to do with bipolar disorder II, which is not a lie, that he was diagnosed by that, and one of the things that came out in the checking process is actually that a therapist that he was seeing confirmed that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder II.

The hard thing about that part is that, and we quote two experts in psychiatry on this, is that bipolar disorder II doesn't explain that you will end up creating a world of lies. This is not a symptom of bipolar disorder II. So, what was hard on that is, and this happens in a lot of reporting that has to do with psychiatry, is that it's hard for psychiatrists to be on the record on somebody they haven't seen in their offices.

Bethanne Patrick: There [are] a lot of frustrating things about the Dan Mallory story. But the detail that irked everyone we talked to the most? The author’s willingness to scapegoat bipolar-II disorder as a tidy explanation for behavior, orchestrated for his own personal, professional, and financial gains.

During his time at Ballantine, where he spoke openly and often about his dissatisfaction with his employer, did bipolar-II excuse unexplained spending on Amazon, charged to the corporate American Express card? Or using his boss’s computer after hours? Or that his colleagues thought he was likely the one leaving plastic cups of urine around the office?

Camila Osorio: Ah, the cups of urine. I mean, actually, it's interesting. That was not one of the most difficult parts of the piece to check. You would think it would. But I think there were very firm sources confirming.

Bethanne Patrick: For the record: Mallory denies leaving those cups, but once he was gone, they ceased to appear.

Does bipolar-II explain the lies getting even more bizarre when he was hired at William Morrow, the eventual publisher of his novel? And when coworkers started receiving emails claiming to be from Dan’s brother – remember, the dead one – some grew suspicious that these messages were sent from Dan, himself.

One to his former English department colleagues at Oxford, and one to his new New York colleagues at Morrow. Those in England received word that Mallory was having a tumor removed. Those in New York learned the tumor was on his spine. Recipients wrote back to him in genuine distress. 

In this interview, Parker shares that the emails were obviously written by Mallory.

Podcast Clip - Sydney Writers’ Festival: Somebody showed me the emails, supposedly written by Dan Mallory's brother, Jake. He uses exactly the same voice. And so, I thought, “This is interesting.” This seems clear to me that he is impersonating his own brother to kind of, I don't know, accentuate his story of personal suffering.

Bethanne Patrick: Mallory’s web of deceit seemed to be spinning tighter and tighter, but who would face the consequences? 

It’s really difficult to figure out why someone would just pile untruth on top of untruth. An essay that Dan wrote in high school claims that, from a young age, Dan’s mother, Pamela Mallory, encouraged her son to leverage stories of suffering and adversity for personal gain.

Mrs. Mallory did in fact have cancer during Dan’s high school years. While that bout of cancer did not result in her tragic death, Dan’s article from his school paper claims that his mother suggested that he capitalize on her illness. In 1999, when Mallory was a sophomore in college, he wrote an article entitled “Take Full Advantage of Suffering,” which in retrospect, may be seen a kind of mission statement for the next fourteen years of his career.

Second, there’s Dan’s fascination with Patricia Highsmith and the Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming and brilliant impostor. You may recall The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was turned into a 1999 movie starring Matt Damon, Gywneth Paltrow, and Jude Law.

Movie Clip - The Talented Mr. Ripley: What did you actually do in New York? Telling lies, forging signatures, impersonating practically anybody.

Bethanne Patrick: That book and film follow around Tom Ripley, a cunning huckster from a lower socioeconomic position, who charms the elites. But somewhere along the way, it seems Dan Mallory misinterpreted the message Highsmith was sending in the Ripley novels. Unlike Tom Ripley, who tricked the aristocracy into believing he was a member of their ranks and got the reader to root for him, as this kind of antihero winning at class warfare, Dan Mallory’s game missed the memo about classism.

Mallory was a person of means, earning the sympathy of people who were willing to extend their connections. He was a man lying about his plight to climb up the corporate ladder. Here’s Jessa again talking about how even though Dan studied twentieth-century detective fiction with a focus on Highsmith, he seemed to miss the lesson:

Jessa Crispin: Dan Mallory stated that the thing that he likes about Patricia Highsmith is that Patricia Highsmith persuades us to root for the sociopaths. And that's not what she's doing. Like, Patricia Highsmith is showing that all of us are capable of doing hideous things and you root for Ripley, you root for the con-man in these books, because they are class warriors, basically. I mean, they're not doing it for, like, a great cause. And the thing that I find objectionable then about Dan Mallory is he's not a class warrior, he comes from money.

Bethanne Patrick: You could spend countless hours trying to figure out why Mallory would lie so much, to so many people, about such horrible things. But one thing is visible even at first glance: the holes that his story exposed in publishing probably won’t be going away soon. Here’s Ian again talking about why he’s pessimistic about the prospects for change.

Podcast Clip - Sydney Writers’ Festival: Will anything change? Uh, um, no. I suspect not.

Bethanne Patrick: Despite his many deceptions, Dan Mallory still benefits from book publishing, an ironic twist worthy of a thriller villain. After the break, we’ll reckon with some hard truths about the publishing industry.

CHAPTER 3: The Hard Truth About Publishing, or A Lot of Lies and One Truth

Here’s why we should be angry about what Dan Mallory did. He never seemed to take a sidestep in his career. He never seemed to account for his lies. He always seemed to be on the rise.

Certainly, we all know of people juicing up stories and maybe we’re guilty of it in some ways ourselves, but Dan wasn’t telling harmless white lies. He told serious lies that manipulated others and deployed them at key moments in his life where he could gain the most. 

His thesis, to always take advantage of suffering, is already tacitly callous. But to invent suffering to take advantage, well that takes misconduct to a whole new level. And there were no real consequences for Dan’s bad behavior, only rewards.

TV CLIP - Studio 10 (Dan Mallory): I'm often asked because I am a former publisher. I left my job at the end of last year because I got rich, as you would.

Bethanne Patrick: Even following the reveal that Mallory had confabulated his way into the book publishing world’s highest ranks, his publisher and former employer, William Morrow, issued this comment: “We do not comment on the personal lives of our authors or employees,” which left a lot unsaid.

Here’s Ian Parker sharing his outrage and frustration with the publisher’s response back in 2019.

Podcast Clip: Sydney Writers’ Festival: You know, even though they know that, and even though they now know a lot more from reading my piece, there is no embarrassment on the part of his publisher. If you go to the Harper Collins website, A.J. Finn has written for numerous publications, which isn't true, [he’s] written for a few. So, in other words, it's pitching him as a writer, not… It's just an odd thing.

Bethanne Patrick: Huh, this is not the kind of response you’d hope for from over-educated leaders in an industry predicated on expanding one’s worldview through reading. Unfortunately, like every other industry in America, book publishing is not exempt from the biases born out of a system that protects the white, the male, and the over-educated. 

Publishing is an industry that working class people, and people of color, struggle to get through the door of, let alone stay there. Dan Mallory didn’t invent this and we’re not saying he was personally trying to keep others out. But he was particularly adept at building and consolidating power at the highest rungs of the publishing industry, then exploiting its preexisting conditions for his own advancement. 

It's important to remember that what Dan did was more than just “take advantage” of the system for his own benefit. Dan’s exploitative behavior, in turn, may actually have removed opportunities for other writers who didn't have the same access to or understanding of the system as he did.

Instead of focusing on a privileged white guy who took advantage of systemic inequalities, how about we meet a writer and artist whose path differs greatly from Mallory’s.

Luis Urrea: Hi, I'm Luis Alberto Urrea, and I've been a writer for a really long time.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s my buddy, Luis Alberto Urrea. We’ve known each other for more than a decade. We met at some literary summit or another back in 2006 and have kept up ever since. 

Luis Urrea: I remember drinking those lime rickeys somewhere.

Bethanne Patrick:  Hop toad rickeys. 

Luis Urrea: Hop toad! Where was that?

Bethanne Patrick: At the Tavern Inn.

Luis’s career is nothing short of impressive. He’s a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame and was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction. With seventeen books under his belt, Luis has snapped up numerous awards for poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism that verges on activism.

Luis Urrea: I think the book that broke it open for me was the devil's highway. And you couldn't have gotten a more macho freaking cis male, you know, cisgendered male, white thing than me with the border patrol.

Bethanne Patrick: I’ve always known Luis as a successful, accomplished writer. I never thought about how our paths might have differed when we were starting out. I started out at a private liberal arts college where big publishing imprints recruited on campus. I had a job secured at one of those imprints before I’d even graduated. So, when I talked to him last February, I asked what it was like for him in the beginning.

Luis Urrea: I had to do this book. So, I wrote it and I showed it to a friend's agent and it was rejected immediately. I rewrote it, showed it to the agent. He turned it down. I rewrote it a third time and he said, “Hey, that's pretty interesting.” And we began submitting. 10 years of submitting this same book.

Bethanne Patrick: Luis’ story would be incomplete without the mentorship of visiting workshop professor, the great Ursula K. LeGuin. 

Luis Urrea: And I'm sure you know this too, but my discoverer was Ursula LeGuin, right? And she was my training. Through this weird miracle that I still don't quite understand, I was hired. I didn't even, I only had a BA, but I was starting to publish little things, including the story Ursula put in her, in an anthology. And I got an offer to teach expository writing at Harvard.

Bethanne Patrick: Back in the seventies, a lot was different about the publishing biz, but a lot remains the same.

Luis Urrea: I was told by another, always in writing, I never had a conversation, the quote was, “No reader in the United States is going to read a book by a person with a name as weird as yours. So, what you need to do is have one anglo name and then your ethnic name.”

Bethanne Patrick: And Luis would enter into writing communities aware of his privilege.

Luis Urrea: Lately there's a thing that I'm just starting to see come up, and I think, I wonder what they're gonna say about me, [because] now they're talking about white-passing Latinx people. That's a bad thing. I was like, “Well, if I'd had my choice, I wanted to be brown.”

Bethanne Patrick: There are layers to how privileges can afford opportunities in publishing.

Luis Urrea: I don't believe that it's the product of some evil plot or white supremacy or anything else, but you know, when you're in a pickle barrel, you start tasting like the pickle, right?

So if you're in the pickle barrel of elite, New York, glass and steel skyscraper publishing, surrounded by white folks who are Ivy leaguers or whatever it is, you know, it'd be great to have more African American editors. It'd be great to have some good Raza editors. Like, I'd love to see Juan Felipe Herrera become a major editor, but he's too busy being wonderful.

Bethanne Patrick: While Dan Mallory took advantage of the holes in the system, Luis’ work looked to repair injustices. 

Luis Urrea: I think you're going to see more and more of us, whoever we are, queer people, you know, God bless women who are very powerful in publishing, people of color, you know this is happening.

Bethanne Patrick: Imagine facing the challenges Luis did, losing his father at a young age to senseless violence and discovering how to carry that grief into his work, rather than being paralizyed by its sadness. As a product of California public education, Luis entered overwhelmingly white and elite academic spaces as a fair-skinned Latino man.

And while he passed in appearance, literary agents also encouraged him to think about maybe using a more Americanized pen name. And even though the publishing industry around him didn’t think it was an easy or fast route to success, Luis stayed authentic.

Luis Urrea: And I believe the letter suggested I could be known as L-E-W-I-S, maybe, Urrea. “Hey Lewis, how are you, Lewis? I’m, good.” So, you know, those things weighed on me. And you know, back to back to the core of me, you know, LeGuin. LeGuin, she came right after my father was killed. She came as a visiting workshop leader, and she did a lot of really radical stuff.

Bethanne Patrick: In publishing, a profession staffed by people who fit a traditional mold, Luis owned being an outsider, and it paid off.

Luis Urrea: The reason you are intimidated is because somebody has control of something that you feel you really need. Unfortunately, because we're writers, a lot of that is our own identity. We are judging ourselves as human beings by our acceptance by these strangers. I think the Latinx writing community, there's still a kind of a war to just storm the Bastille or something, take the Alamo, you know, and get our work out there.

Bethanne Patrick: Mallory, on the other hand, he spotted these issues, and rather than using his intelligence, talent, and privilege to try and fix them, he weaponized them to accelerate his career. 

So, was this really a victimless crime? No. Dan Mallory’s actions sowed distrust in every place he worked and put him in positions of power that he may not have earned, actually amplifying systemic injustices in publishing. 

When power goes unchecked in any industry, there are victims. These are the people who never get the same opportunities that someone like Dan did.

So, you’re probably wondering… where is Dan now?

As recently as a few months ago, he was posting to Instagram about Netflix’s The Woman in The House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, a satirical mini-series, starring everyone’s favorite, Kristen Bell.

Video Clip - The Woman in the house Across the Street from the Girl in the Window Trailer:  Uh hi, I’m Anna. The truth is that I drink a lot and sometimes I mix it with pills. And I'm here because I woke up this morning convinced I’d witnessed a murder.

Bethanne Patrick: Released by Netflix in January 2022, the comedy directly spoofed both the plot of DAN’S best-selling novel and perhaps more insidiously, weaved some of his notorious pathological lies, almost like easter eggs, into the show’s story. For example, when Kristen Bell’s character randomly and hilariously fakes a British accent? 

Video Clip - The Woman in the house Across the Street from the Girl in the Window Trailer: My husband used to tell me that I have an overactive imagination, that I drink too much, that I can't let go of the past, that I make plans and cancel them, that I never wear a jacket but then complain that I'm cold, that sometimes I speak with a British accent even though I'm not British. He's right. About all of it. That's why he left me.

Bethanne Patrick: Makes you wonder if this was inspired by Dan Mallory’s pretentious eccentricities. Hmm.

From what a cursory Google search shows, Dan is still slated to release a second book as a part of his initial deal. And he’s most likely still sitting on millions of dollars from his advance and his book sales, based in large part on the resources his publisher, which, as you know, was also his previous employer, put behind the book. Who knows what other opportunities he's pursuing these days?

Does a book sell well because it's well-written and engaging? Or because a publisher puts their time, money, and resources into the promotion? Is this a chicken or the egg kind of question? Honestly, I don’t know. But what I do know is if a book sells well, then the publisher and the author turn a profit. 

Other than the bombshell New Yorker article by Ian Parker and the momentary social media outrage it inspired, there haven’t been any real consequences for our dear Dan.

In a lot of cases it's easy to say “who cares” and feel jaded. But there are thousands of people like Luis out there. And the Dan Mallorys of the world, and the apathetic publishing executives? Well, by failing to publicly condemn Dan Mallory’s bad behavior, current and future Luis Urrea’s may face even more hurdles to shine through in publishing.

And if you’re like me, and you love books and the people who make them, something about all of this shouldn’t sit right. We may not be able to put a proper name to one of Dan’s victims, but he keeps signing his name on checks. And the publishing industry? They keep cashing them.

TV Clip - Studio 10 (Hosts): You're incredibly handsome. Go on. Get off my TV show!

Bethanne Patrick: I asked folks which writers tend to write themselves into their characters. Guess who came up? Patricia Highsmith. One tweeter felt she was Tom Ripley in real life. Interesting. Is Dan Mallory actually the Woman in the Window? Or is his sense of self so splintered, we will never really know? 

Video Clip - Dan Mallory Talk: A journalist recently said to me, “Oh, are you sort of like Tom Ripley?” No, I've killed like two people. He's killed seven. So there's a key distinction.

Bethanne Patrick: As for me, I’m done with this guy. It’s time to close the book on these missing pages. 

If you love juicy mystery novels, but would prefer to support an author who’s not morally corrupt, as far as we know, try reading these pageturners.

It came up a lot in this episode, but if you like the classics, definitely check out the Talented Mr. Ripley series by Patricia Highsmith. After seventy years on the shelf, readers are still fascinated by anti-hero Tom Ripley’s willingness to do just about anything to live the high life. Sounds a lot like someone else we know.

Do you like the Big City setting? Try Alyssa Cole’s When No One Is Watching. Like The Woman In The Window, it’s another book about bad behavior in the brownstones. But we’re relieved to say the author is no Dan Mallory. Come for the suspense, stay for the social commentary on race, gentrification, and life in the city today.

Finally, let’s pop across the pond for some Euro-Suspense. Check out The White City by Karolina Ramqvist for a Swedish view of an isolated woman being stalked by her ex.

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original and is written and produced by a small army. 

Showrunner: Caila Litman

Producer, Researcher, and Writer: Jordan Aaron

Producer: Matt Keeley

Production, Mixing, and Mastering by Chris Boniello

Legal Review by Alexia Bedat and Louise Carron at Klaris Law

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Morgan Swift, and Madison Richards 

Social Media by Sylvia Bueltel

Art by Tom Grillo 

Fact Checking by Kathleen Hennrikus 

Production and Hosting by me, Bethanne Patrick 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Camila Osorio, Jessa Crispin, our two expert psychiatrists, Luis Urrea, and Ian Parker. 

We have included links to a lot of the background stories we used for this episode in the show notes. 

You can learn more about Missing Pages at thepodglomerate dot com, on twitter @misspagespod and on Instagram @missingpagespod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. 

If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to. I’m Bethanne Patrick, and we’ll be back next week with another episode.