Reclusive author J.D. Salinger has never written a sequel to his best-known book, Catcher in the Rye. But that doesn't mean he wants someone else doing it.

Salinger's lawyers filed suit this week in federal court in New York City against an author called J.D. California and his publishers, Windupbird Publishing and Nicotext, to stop the U.S. publication in September of California's novel 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

The new novel is about a 76-year-old character named Mr. C. who escapes from his nursing home (just as Holden Caulfield escapes from his prep school in Catcher) and roams around Manhattan. In an interview several weeks ago with the Guardian, California said, "He's still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he's disappointed in the goddamn world."

But California (no doubt having heard about the lawsuit) backpedaled in another interview published in the Telegraph on May 30: "The stories are so different that I don't think you can argue this is a sequel."

Salinger's lawyers beg to differ: "The sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticize the original. It is a rip-off pure and simple."

Just to complicate matters, Aaron Silverman, president of SCB Distributors (also named in the suit) described the book to Publishers Weekly as "less a sequel to Catcher than a conversation between that book's protagonist and Salinger himself."

60 Years Later has already been published in the U.K., with a dedication to Salinger, "the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life."

Salinger, 90, hasn't published any new fiction since the mid 1960s, but he has been to court to defend his work or his privacy several times. Since it was published in 1951, Catcher has become a classic of 20th century American fiction and sold almost 70 million copies, so there's reason for him to defend it as his intellectual property.

On the other hand, this kind of thing has been done before without damaging the reputation of the original book -- John Gardner's Grendel is a fascinating gloss on Beowulf, Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife didn't harm Moby-Dick, and Jon Clinch's Finn offers an interesting view of Pap Finn that isn't going to stop anyone from reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Of course, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and the unknown author of Beowulf aren't around to file suit. Not to mention that Gardner, Naslund and Clinch had other published fiction under their belts before taking on those classics.

California, on the other hand, is a first-time author, at least as far as anyone knows -- John David California is a pen name, he told the Telegraph, and he won't disclose his real name or anything else about his identity except that he has lived in the United States and now lives in Sweden.

His publisher, Nicotext, is not exactly a literary press -- its titles include The Macho Man's (Bad) Joke Book and Sexicon, and its mission statement includes this: "We make books whose sole purpose it is to make you giggle. While thumbing our collective nose at the literati, we have found our niche amongst the useless, the trivial and the potentially offensive."

So maybe Salinger is just embarrassed. Weirdest rumor I've seen on the Web: that Salinger wrote 60 Years Later himself and is suing himself for publicity.

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