"No," He Said.

G.P. Putnam's Sons has announced that they will turn the late Robert B. Parker into V.C. Andrews by farming out two of his book series to other writers.

That is not how the Putnam press release phrased it, of course, but in essence that's what's going to happen. Andrews was a writer of Gothic-influenced teen fiction that despite some, er, uncomfortable themes, sold like mad. Her death in 1986 left some of her series unfinished, her fan base unsatisfied and her publishers unremunerated. Andrews' estate commissioned a writer named Andrew Niedermann to continue her existing series and begin new ones under her name.

Putnam will use crime fiction writer Ace Atkins to continue the Spenser series and Michael Brandman, the producer and co-writer of the television Jesse Stone movies, will continue that character. Atkins has produced some good crime fiction and has even done some semi-documentary-styled writing with Wicked City and Infamous. He's a sharp storyteller and knows his genre well, and his blog shows him to be a devoted Parker fan.

But he ain't Bob Parker.

Brandman, as mentioned above, collaborated with Parker and actor Tom Selleck on the Jesse Stone movies released by CBS. The last three of the series were stories pretty much created out of whole cloth rather than adaptations of the novels. The work produced some excellent television drama and the collaboration allowed Selleck to garner an Emmy nomination and the author's approval. Brandman also worked with Parker on the A&E Spenser movies from the late 1990s and early 2000s and could definitely be said to have a good handle on Jesse Stone and know Parker well; Parker respected his work on both productions.

But he ain't Bob Parker.

If less than 95% of Putnam's decision to continue these characters stems from something other than money you may color me shocked and awed. Notice it is his two most popular characters that will continue -- no mention is made of the slower-selling Sunny Randall series, moribund since 2007's Spare Change, or of Parker's Western novels with Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, or of the young-adult books he'd begun in the last few years. I've no reason to doubt the praise Parker's widow Joan offers to both Atkins and Brandman or to doubt her pleasure at seeing her husband's creations live on, but I certainly wish the estate had followed the lead of Charles Schultz's children, who decided that Schultz' iconic Peanuts comic strip would not be written or drawn by anyone else following his death.

Will I check out the zombie-Spenser and nosferatu-Stone? Probably, especially Atkins' take on Spenser since Stone had grown less interesting over time. Brandman's version of Stone debuts in September, and Atkins says he has his first Spenser book finished and it will appear next spring. But I'll probably wait for the paperbacks or check them out of the library, and either way the borrowed time for both series won't be extensive.

A friend who's also a big Parker fan (and who actually had the honor of having RBP blurb one of his own books), put it this way: "I think I'm done with Spenser, Jesse Stone, and anyone else 'ghostwritten'...'cause the guy I wanna read is a ghost."