The literary world may, at first glance, seem like a relatively quiet and well-behaved industry. After all, you don’t often see authors followed around by paparazzi or see their faces splashed across the front pages of tabloid magazines the way you do Hollywood movie stars. But don’t be fooled. There are plenty of shocking crimes and outrageous scandals that have raised the eyebrows of book lovers.

A real-life murder mystery

This one resurged with the release of the film version of Where the Crawdads Sing, the wildly popular novel by author and wildlife scientist Delia Owens. Delia, along with her then husband Mark and her stepson Christopher, took a trip to Zambia in 1995 when something truly horrific was caught on camera: a suspected elephant poacher, already lying on the ground after being shot, was executed by someone off-screen.

An investigation was immediately launched by Zambian authorities, and all three Owens family members are still wanted for questioning to this day. The Owens family had a reputation for taking it upon themselves to rid the area of poachers, with Mark forming his own ragtag militia to whom he would provide guns and other weapons. Although the case still hasn’t been solved, many readers have drawn strong parallels between Kyra, Owens’s character in Where the Crawdads Sing who (spoiler alert!) literally gets away with murder and Owens herself.

A classic age-inappropriate affair

Romantic affairs are often the source of major gossip and scandal, and Charles Dickens’s extramarital affair with the actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan is a whopper. After marrying his wife, Catherine, and producing ten children, Dickens eventually met the teenage Nelly while she was rehearsing for a play. There has been some debate whether she was aged sixteen or eighteen at the time their affair started, but it’s generally agreed that Dickens himself was forty-five years old.

He officially separated from his wife in 1858 and took on Catherine’s younger sister, Georgina, as a housekeeper. Rumors then started flying that he was also sleeping with Georgina—which would have been considered incest at that time—but that would have to be a different entry entirely.

Dickens proceeded to financially support Nelly throughout the duration of their affair, which only ended at his death. And in case you doubt the sheer amount of drama this stirred up during the time period, this scandal was actually made into a movie: 2013’s The Invisible Woman starring Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, and Kristin Scott Thomas.

A memoir that was more fiction than fact

Who would dare lie to Oprah Winfrey’s face? James Frey, that’s who! After choosing his “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, for her famed Oprah’s Book Club and having him as a guest on her show in 2005, Oprah (along with the rest of the world) soon learned that major events of the book were altered to create maximum drama. From claiming he resisted arrest, crashed into a police car, and spent eighty-seven days in jail (when in actuality he was given two tickets and spent five hours at the police station before being released on bond) to exaggerating his rehab stay, it turned out that Frey took real minor events in his life and essentially wove them into spectacular fiction.

A husband plagiarizes his wife

I love The Great Gatsby as much as the next person, but it still pains me to know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a plagiarizer. It’s even more painful when you consider the fact that he took whole lines and passages directly from his wife, Zelda, by stealing her journals. So much of Zelda’s own writing was used in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, in fact, that he demanded Zelda’s publisher remove portions of her own manuscript that she submitted because it would be too similar to “his” writing—which again, he lifted from her journals and letters.

It’s a tragic situation all around, especially when considering Zelda’s eventual confinement to a mental hospital. It did lead, however, to perhaps one of the best quotes of all time, when Zelda was asked by a newspaper to give her thoughts on Fitzgerald’s second novel: “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

Romance author fakes her own death

The romance industry has a loyal and tight-knit fan base, so you better believe there were some major shockwaves reverberating when it was reported in 2020 that romance author Susan Meachen died by suicide after being bullied by fellow writers. That was nothing, however, compared to the utter bombshell that exploded two years later when it turns out Meachen had faked her own death and was, in fact, very much alive.

Not only that, but Meachen announced her continued existence on this mortal plane by trying to hype people up about her future writing. She announced (on a Facebook post no less): “I debated on how to do this a million times and still not sure if it’s right or not . . . There’s going to be tons of questions . . . I am in a good place now and I am hoping to write again. Let the fun begin.”

This laissez-faire attitude—after a significant portion of the writing community had falsely accused certain authors of being the ones who “bullied” Meachen in the first place—combined with the sheer size of the lie, has quite obviously sunk the romance writer’s career. While she claims her family announced her death to “protect” her after a real suicide attempt, readers may never know what really happened.

Andrea Moran lives outside of Nashville with her husband and two kids. She’s a professional copywriter and editor who loves all things books. Find her on LinkedIn.