The Executor by Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison’s fourth novel is a literary detective story exploring the “competing claims of publication and privacy”, said David Grylls in The Sunday Times. Over a boozy lunch, newspaper books editor Matt Holmes agrees to become literary executor for his old friend Rob Pope, a “once-prominent poet now on the slide”. When, shortly afterwards, Rob unexpectedly dies, Matt finds among his papers a “cache of seemingly confessional poems dealing with adultery, violent sex and more”. Should he go ahead and publish, or follow the wishes of Rob’s widow, and suppress the poems?

Despite its rather niche-sounding subject, The Executor proves “hugely enjoyable”, said Malcolm Forbes in the Literary Review. As well as being a skilled satirist, Morrison asks “rigorous” questions about the relationship between posterity and censorship. Yet “for all the many pleasures it offers”, this novel lacks a clear focus, said James Walton in The Times. Themes are picked up, only to be discarded, and it ends up such a “jumble of unfused elements” that it’s hard to say what the point really is.