Pt 3
Going through a story like Winn’s line-by-line – or tracking down former acquaintances, as The Observer did – to confirm the truth is not affordable for any publisher. “If you ask any publisher who’s been around for a while, it’s really just not feasible,” says Ravi Mirchandani, the head of Simon & Schuster’s Summit Books. “The approach of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic is to trust their authors. Obviously, we question things when we’re editing, but we’re questioning within the context of our, frankly, general knowledge. If somebody says, ‘My house was repossessed because…’, you just believe them. Maybe it should be otherwise, but it’s never been the way things are done in book publishing.”
The boss of another rival reckons that there are some unscrupulous authors who will abuse the trust of publishers, and that “there’s no real mechanism to really check… There are some con artists, it is going to happen once in a while”. This publisher did, however, express amazement that such a high-profile book had prompted these kinds of allegations.
A former Penguin executive says that editors and publishers are so stretched that they cannot do proper due diligence on inbound non-fiction books. “There’s a genuine problem in corporate publishing, where the editorial culture across the board has been so diminished versus something like The New York Times or The Telegraph, or whatever, where there are editorial standards and checks,” he tells me. “You’ve basically got editors who are now sales people, comms people, they’re doing everything… Fact checking is rarely used, and when it is it’s more on serious non-fiction projects, not memoirs.”
Once a book like The Salt Path is published, and then exceeds all imagined sales projections, it means that any sequels are also perhaps not scrutinised as much as they ought to be. “It’s such a hits-based business,” the former Penguin insider says. “Most books don’t work, so when something does work, the last thing anyone wants to do is stand in its way.”
Winn’s sequels follow a familiar pattern: her husband’s health declines, they embrace the supposed healing powers of the great outdoors and everybody is uplifted when things start to improve. This did not appear to ring alarm bells at Penguin.
The publisher only went public on Tuesday, a full three days after the scandal broke.“Penguin (Michael Joseph) published The Salt Path in 2018 and, like many readers, we were moved and inspired by Raynor’s story and its message of hope,” it said in a statement to The Bookseller industry magazine.
Penguin undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence, including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read, as is standard with most works of non-fiction. Prior to the Observer inquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book’s content.”
In hindsight, it’s easy to see why people might seek to pick holes in such a neat story. “I thought The Salt Path was a book about a guy who was going to die in the not-too-distant future and he’s been around for such a long time that they’ve published books two and three,” says the rival publisher. “Maybe by the time book three came around, and what seems to be very convenient timing about [Moth’s] illness getting worse and then getting better again, maybe there should have been more questions.
“But by that point, you’re not really incentivised to. ‘Either we could publish a new book and be guaranteed to sell tens if not hundreds of copies – or we can try and really get to the bottom of this.’ Even if you did have suspicions, it would be pretty hard to follow…”
The Salt Path was a surprise monster hit by a debut author writing about adversity in a part of the country that is not deemed fashionable by much of the metropolitan literary class. As well as Winn, it should have been a career-maker for its publisher, Fenella Bates, but a year ago she made the unusual move to head up the non-fiction team at Puffin, Penguin’s children’s imprint. Bates did not respond to a request for comment.
Multiple sources reckon that Winn would have been paid an advance of about £10,000 for The Salt Path – a modest sum, but not an unhelpful one if, as The Observer reported, she owed £100,000 to a distant relative of her husband in a loan secured against the value of their home that she had taken out to return the money that she had allegedly embezzled.
“Most books completely fail and disappear without a trace and Raynor Winn probably thought she could make whatever the advance of the book was, a reasonable amount of money, and move on,” says a leading literary agent. “It’s only when the book achieves a certain level of prominence, from which she has therefore made a load of money, that the veracity of it may be questioned.
“She would have never expected it was going to be a million-copy seller or a movie with famous people in it.” If the Observer allegations are true, he supposes, “she must have been living in terror of exposure”.
As well as the truth of the claims raised this week, there are also questions about the Winns’ original 630-mile walk from Minehead, Somerset, to Poole, Dorset. Quintin Lake, the author of The Perimeter: A Photographic Journey around the Coast of Britain, spent five years walking the coastline and spent a lot of time on the South West Coast Path. His book, which was published in May, has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing.
Lake says that he found much of The Salt Path implausible, from Winn’s descriptions of locals treating her and her husband badly for being homeless to the ineptitude of their camping setups. “A couple of times, people mistook me for being homeless because you have a little tent by the coast and you’re by yourself in crappy weather where there’s no tourists. But I found that there wasn’t any prejudice and that people were quite kind and neutral. I found the British, universally, were pretty understanding in that,” Lake says.
“From the practicalities of camping and backpacking it seemed like [the Winns] were so hapless about how they undertook it that I found it hard to understand why you wouldn’t improve. Obviously they were middle-aged people that were suddenly chucked into needing to camp, and that’s not easy for anyone,” he adds. “But if you’re making it a lifestyle, you tend to learn how to work around it, how to camp in the lee of the bays, how to camp out of sight. My eyebrows would raise when I read it because, yes, it’s tricky for a bit, but then you sort of figure it out… Especially if you’re travelling for months on end. If you don’t, you’re totally screwed.”
Lake says that the story told in The Salt Path seemed “off” to him and he “felt quite vindicated” after reading the exposé into the Winns’ background. “Their particular story relies on the truth of it, because it is a redemptive memoir,” he says. “So if there’s no redemption, there’s no story. I just felt really shocked and surprised.”
The locals back in Wales are experiencing similar emotions. A retired man in his Sixties, who does not want to be named, feels “let down and disappointed” in general by reports about the couple, though he admits that “[Sally] must have been a clever person”. He and his wife only discovered that the Walkers had “just disappeared” overnight in the early 2010s through word of mouth.
When it comes to the Hemmings, the couple who allegedly found themselves short of over £64,000, the town is universally loyal in its devotion to the pair. “We would always protect the Hemmings”, the local couple say. The owner of a local garage describes Walker’s employer Martin Hemmings, who died of cancer years before the story broke, as a “pillar of the community”. The news that the Walkers allegedly embezzled money from Hemmings has shocked her. “Martin was a lovely chap,” agrees another local standing by the seafront.
And by the local Wetherspoons, other members of the town who have heard the story can scarcely believe it. “I think it’s horrendous what they did [if true],” says one local who ran a pharmacy for many years in a nearby town. Another admits that he read that the couple had stolen from the garage, and suggests that they should be made to pay back the people they owe. “If they did steal, I hope they made some recompense to the people they owe money to,” he says over a pint. For him, the story is about more than the couple; it is about the truth. “The whole story really makes you wonder what the line between truth and fiction is,” he reflects.
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