A letter came in my inbox late one night this week. I’ve changed the name of the sender to John Doe and the publisher to Big Five Publishing Plc. The content remains unchanged.
John Doe <Johndoe.editor@gmail.com>Tue, 15 Sep, 11:37 PM
to Christopher
Subject: The Client That Wasn’t There
Hello Christopher,
My name is John Doe, and I am with Big Five Publishing Plc. I recently came across The Client That Wasn’t There and was particularly struck by the way you expand the Vincent Calvino crime series into something much larger than a conventional investigation.
Set in a Bangkok where memory glasses record virtually every aspect of life, the disappearance of a man without a trace creates an especially compelling premise. What stood out to me was how the investigation developed into an exploration of identity, surveillance, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the boundaries of human recognition. The relationship between Calvino and Niran, alongside the emergence of an AI capable of something resembling empathy, gives the novel an intriguing philosophical dimension while retaining the atmosphere and tension of Bangkok noir.
The combination of a long-running detective character with questions about AI, privacy, and what it means to be recognized as a person makes this an ambitious evolution of the series. I believe the novel has the potential to connect with readers interested not only in crime fiction, but also in intelligent speculative and philosophical fiction.
I would be interested in learning more about any current or upcoming projects you may be developing, as well as whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you are, I would be happy to continue the conversation through your agent.
There may be alignment between your work and Big Five Publishing Plc’s interest in distinctive fiction that combines compelling storytelling with meaningful cultural, philosophical, and contemporary ideas.
If this is of interest, I would be delighted to hear from you and discuss your work further.
Best wishes,
John Doe CMgr
Big Five Publishing Plc
The gmail came from a man who does not exist. That is not quite right. The actual man (whose name isn’t revealed) exists. I looked him up. He works at one of the great London houses, has done for years, and carries a professional credential after his name that checks out. The photograph beside the email is his real face. What has no existence is any version of him who wrote to me.
I write crime novels. For nineteen books a Bangkok private eye named Vincent Calvino has walked the city’s back sois, and the most recent turns on a man who vanishes in a place where wearable glasses record every face on the street. The premise is simple. In a city that sees everything, how does a person disappear? The answer runs through identity, surveillance, and the question of who the machine agrees to recognise as real.
I mention this because the letter is that book, folded back on its author.
The email praised the novel with a precision that flattered. It named the themes. It caught the tension between the private eye and his Thai policeman friend. It admired the artificial mind at the centre of the plot, the one learning to feel. Then it asked two questions. What am I working on next. And am I represented by a literary agent.
What author wouldn’t be thrilled to receive a letter like this? Out of the blue. But I knew this was more like winning a lotto in which I had bought no ticket. Lotteries don’t work like that and neither do publishers.
The letter did an excellent job of baiting the hook. And your gut tells you to go for it. This is why such a letter works. The play on ego stroking to construct a pitch perfect message. An author who has spent months looking for representation is the fish this net is cast for. The author’s intense desire does the rest of the work. You read the flattery, you feel seen, and the small twitch of doubt gets talked down by the part of you that has been waiting.
Three things stood out from the private eye point of view. Here’s the evidence.
The address. A commissioning editor at a listed publisher does not write from a Gmail account with “.editor” bolted onto his name. The house has a domain. He would use it.
The division. The real man publishes in a corner of the house that has nothing to do with crime fiction. A Calvino novel would not cross his desk. The letter was aimed at the wrong editor by someone who lifted a real name off the internet and never checked what the name actually does.
The face. A profile photograph proves nothing. Anyone can save a public headshot and set it as an avatar in under a minute. The picture authenticates the picture. It says nothing about the scammer who typed and sent the message.
So I went looking further. The letter stopped being personal. We’re at the point that a personalised letter becomes part of the evidence trail exposing a possible scam.
In fact, what I had actually received was a form personalised around one title. The editor-impersonation scam is, in the words of the people who track it, everywhere right now. The watchdog site Writer Beware keeps a running list of the real editors whose names are being worn. The mechanics of the scam are consistent. A real staff member’s name, borrowed. A free email account dressed up with the person’s own name, a period, and a tag like “.editor” or “.agent”. Lavish praise, an ask about your last book or your current project, and slipping in a question about whether you have an agent. The wording barely shifts from victim to victim. Other writers have received my letter with a different book slotted into the compliments.
Then comes the move the first email hides. Reply, and after a warm exchange the editor refers you to a private agent the house works with, who they claim is someone reliable. That recommended agent is part of the same operation wearing a second mask. You can expect the new message to raise a fee, for an evaluation or a refinement or a small sum. Pay it, and the door to your dream is unlocked. Legitimate publishing houses never charge the author. One writer told Writer Beware a version of this scam cost her two hundred thousand dollars. She is seventy-six. And still dreaming.
The detail that should stop every author cold is the referral itself. A publisher does not hand you an agent out of the blue. An agent’s whole function is to sit across the table from the publisher and fight for you.
One thing has changed in 2026, and it is why these letters are a lucrative business for scammers. For years the scam gave itself away in the prose. Broken grammar, strange salutations, the tin ear of a writer working in a third language. You felt the fraud before you could name it. That tell is gone. The machines write the letters now, and the machines write clean, indistinguishable from a letter a real editor would write. The praise is specific because a model can read a book’s public description and mirror it back in seconds. The sentences are smooth, precise, and flattering because smoothness is the one thing these systems reliably produce. The old camouflage signalled its own incompetence. The new camouflage is competence, full stop. The old tells have vanished.
I spend a good deal of my working life trying to catch the fingerprints machine prose leaves on a page. The irony is not lost on me. The same fluency I hunt as a tell is the fluency that makes the con convincing. Polish used to signal effort. Now it signals nothing, and a letter that reads like an editor is no longer evidence that an editor wrote it.
There is an older thing underneath the new technology. The scam runs on a hunger that predates every model: the writer’s need to be recognised (see last week’s essay, The Writer’s Battle to Be Recognised: read it here).
Recognition is scarce in this trade. Most of us go years without the letter that says the work was seen and valued by someone who matters. The con manufactures that letter and charges admission. It does not exploit a weakness so much as a secret wish, and the wish is not shameful. It is the reason any of us keep a notebook. The authors who lose money to this are not fools. They are people who wanted the thing all of us want, met by someone willing to sell them a picture of it.
So, a field guide. If a letter lands from an editor at one of the big houses and something in your stomach tightens, run it against this list before you reply.
● Check the domain. Real house editors write from the house domain. Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo are not where a major publisher keeps its editors. A name mashed together with a period and “.editor” is a signature, not an address.
● Assume the name is real and the sender is not. Scammers borrow genuine staff names, credentials, and photographs. Finding the person online confirms the person, never the email.
● Check what the editor actually acquires. Pull up their list. If they publish cookery and you write horror, the letter is fiction. Real editors reach out inside their own lane.
● Read the agent question as reconnaissance. “Are you represented?” sounds like courtesy. It tells the scammer whether a professional stands between you and them, and it sets up the referral.
● Read the referral in context. An established relationship with a house can end in an introduction to an agent; that has happened to me. A cold first email that offers to hand you one has not. Unsolicited, the referral serves the scammer, not you.
● Weigh the praise against the process. Flattery is cheap and infinite. Terms, timelines, and a straight account of how they found you are none of those things. Scam letters run heavy on the first and silent on the rest.
● Distrust the cold approach itself. A senior editor at a major house emailing an unagented stranger out of the blue is among the least likely events in publishing. It happens. But like a Nobel Prize, it is vanishingly rare.
● Watch for the fee. Any fee. Evaluation, refinement, marketing, a small sum to get started. A real publisher pays you. The direction of the money ask is the test the scammer has set, waiting for you to pass.
● Verify off the channel they gave you. Do not reply to the address in the letter. Find the house through its own front door and ask. Real interest survives the question to the publisher.
I did not reply. I may forward the letter to the house through that front door, so the man whose face was borrowed learns that his name is out walking around Thailand without his passport. The unaware editor is the other victim here, and the quieter one. My hope was wasted for an evening. His name is being used by strangers, one author at a time.
My Calvino novel I keep returning to asks how a person disappears in a city that records everyone. I have my answer now, from the wrong direction. You need no memory glasses and no missing man. You need a borrowed face, a clean paragraph, and someone who wants to be seen badly enough to open the door. A real editor stood at the far end of that letter, and he was never there at all. Which is the trick Vincent Calvino, private eye, spent a whole book chasing. It is the reason I knew the title before the email arrived.
The Client That Wasn’t There.
And still they send them! Let me guess, Nigeria?