CAMILLE JOHNSON

The first rule of Fight Club is: you don’t talk about Fight Club. The first rule of ghostwriting is also, apparently, you don’t talk about ghostwriting, but Argylle: A Novel, a January 2024 release by Elly Conway with a film version in theaters just weeks later, was definitely not written by ghosts. The author even has an Instagram page where she posted a quaint picture of a bookstore with an excited caption about famous director Matthew Vaughn buying the movie rights to her book. Vaughn apparently told Conway that she had “to start using social media for ‘visibility,’” with quotation marks around the word as if it were the beginning of a joke between her and her followers (Conway). However, scrolling to the date of the post might give one pause. Conway posted months before the release of both her novel and the film: September 22, 2023, to be exact.

Fig. 1. Elly Conway’s Instagram post from September 22, 2023.

Conway’s is an example of the less common practice of purchasing film rights to a novel that has yet to be released. As marketing for the film kicked into gear, the novel’s release fell into a quagmire of constant delays. In July 2021, a Variety article announcing the film shared that the novel was slated for release in fall of the next year. By 2023, however, Argylle: A Novel was still nowhere to be found, yet teasers and trailers for the film dropped throughout September. During it all, Conway posted New York City pigeons and half-eaten tiramisu on her Instagram, seemingly unbothered by this paradoxical release schedule. Was the novel delayed in order to meet expectations from a prospective film audience seeking a more cinematic read? Would it be more accurate to call the delays “marketing ploys”?

Maybe Matthew Vaughn’s our head of MI6, orchestrating international espionage behind the scenes; in other words, maybe only he knows. After all, he secured the film rights long before anyone had ever heard of Elly Conway and her spy thriller. Matthew Vaughn, director of the famous Kingsman film franchise, is the sole owner of Marv Studios according to the company’s IMDb page. Even the Marv Studios Instagram features a bio that proudly proclaims, “Films by Matthew Vaughn.” It is all his show, his production company, and his money. His decision to make a film based on an unreleased book showed that he seemingly believed in a narrative which the public hadn’t yet seen, but given his previous films, it fell in line with his affinity for the spy genre. In July 2021, Marv announced the production of the film along with a host of celebrity actors: Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bryan Cranston. Even the pop star Dua Lipa was cast, set to make her film debut through the project. A month later, in August, Apple Original Films was “near completion on another seismic film package streamer deal”; this would be Argylle, acquired by Apple for around $200 million (Kroll, Fleming). The next summer, Variety reported that Apple had partnered with Universal Studios for the distribution of Argylle and that it would “land on the big screen” followed by a later Apple TV+ streaming release (Rubin).

The book was still yet to hit shelves but was slated for September of 2022. In March 2022, the Apple Original Films Twitter account was already posting a glossy “first look” photo of Dua Lipa and Henry Cavill’s characters embracing. Months later, The Hollywood Reporter released an article ahead of the novel’s scheduled release questioning Elly Conway’s background like one would question an agent’s real identity. The author of the article, Seth Abramovitch, wondered, like others, how an unknown, unpublished writer had managed a film deal with the Kingsman director that had been subsequently picked up by giants like Apple and Universal. Abramovitch states, “Attempts by The Hollywood Reporter to read an advance copy of the book— a common industry practice— were unsuccessful.” By then, the book, originally set to release that same month, was delayed until March of 2023, six months later. Abramovitch’s article marked the start of a real-life spy plot: the hunt for Elly Conway.

Fig. 2. Elly Conway’s Instagram post from December 13, 2022.

So, what was Elly Conway up to during all this? Apparently, she was still posting pictures on her Instagram, including lies about the book’s release. “#Argylle, coming summer 2023,” Conway wrote in her very first post on December 13, 2022, two months after the novel’s original release date. This was a new delay, adding up to a total postponement of ten months. It also never happened. Summer 2023 came and went and not a single page of Argylle: A Novel was seen by the public. Conway would continue to post cryptic pictures of New York City streets and glowing advertisements for the film, but barely a word about her book, the text which the entire production was dependent on. This raises an interesting question about authorship: Does the book really matter if the film has already been made, if the director and producers and screenwriters have already read their advanced manuscripts and decided what to adapt and what to cut?

Fig. 3. Fan-made still of the 1999 film “Fight Club” directed by David Fincher, uploaded to the blog FILM GRAB.

In his book Big Fiction, Dan Sinykin highlights many novels with titles we might be more accustomed to discussing in conversations about film: American Psycho, The Godfather, Jaws, The Exorcist. He describes the story of publishing Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, a book which, along with Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, another of these massive film adaptations, “operated against the consensus of the publishing industry in the mid-1990s” (192). One must imagine that the somewhat scrappy, imperfect process of getting the novel Fight Club published would be told much differently if Gerald Howard and Chuck Palahniuk had to work against the clock of the film’s 1999 release. One must imagine that the novel we have today would also be much different. Maybe Palahniuk would feel pressure to write for a more cinematic-minded audience, or perhaps Howard, the editor, would be the one supplying the pressure, highly aware that stars like Edward Norton and Brad Pitt could carry their own names into stardom. Maybe Elly Conway’s cryptic posts and advertisements served as distractions as she dealt with the behind-the-scenes drama of editors trying to match the quality of the novel to the fame of Henry Cavill, Samuel L. Jackson, and Dua Lipa. The authorial process can be a long and difficult one and having a big-budget film’s release as a deadline certainly doesn’t make that easier.

However, what if there is no true authorial process at all, or what if it isn’t a traditional process in the way we typically think of book-to-film adaptations? What if the film comes first? In fact, what if I said Elly Conway isn’t real? That’s right; I lied earlier, just like the Argylle team. Elly Conway does not exist— so who wrote Argylle?

In July 2013, Terry Hayes released the novel I Am Pilgrim, a crime and mystery thriller about a former American agent. A fast-paced synopsis of the book on Goodreads says: “A breakneck race against time… and an implacable enemy. An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel… A father publicly beheaded” (Hayes). At the time of the book’s release, Hayes sat down for an interview with Tom Tivnan of The Bookseller where he talked about his decades spent as a screenwriter. He wrote the scripts for two Mad Max films alongside director George Miller and received notoriety for this work, but he admits to Tivnan that he prefers the publishing world. “Movie studios could learn a thing or two from British publishers,” he says. “There is an intelligence, and a respect for writers; things that you hope for and never get in Hollywood” (Tivnan).

Perhaps both Hayes’ enjoyment of and disillusionment with Hollywood allowed Matthew Vaughn to convince him to write Argylle: A Novel. Even its synopsis mirrors I Am Pilgrim: “A luxury train speeding towards Moscow and a date with destiny. A CIA plane downed in the jungles of the Golden Triangle” (Conway). Matthew Vaughn was originally tapped by MGM Studios to direct I Am Pilgrim’s film adaptation, but somewhere along the line, those plans fell through (Siegel). Alejandra Gularte writes in her article for Vulture that since MGM had the rights to Hayes’ book, Vaughn decided to take matters into his own hands by approaching Hayes himself. Hayes agreed to write a new novel for Vaughn’s project, which was already in development. Then, Hayes enlisted fellow writer Tammy Cohen, author of When She Was Bad, to co-write Argylle: A Novel since he would be busy with his next book.

Fig. 4. Elly Conway’s Instagram post from January 31, 2024.

People were stunned to discover that this woman they might have followed on Instagram for two years wasn’t a woman at all, but likely an amalgamation of Vaughn, Hayes, and Cohen having the last laugh at the rest of us. Realistically, though, the account was likely run by some marketing or public relations employee who worked for Marv Studios. After the reveal that “Elly Conway” was Hayes and Cohen, the fake Conway Instagram account still put up a few more posts. One of them was a picture of Hayes’ I Am Pilgrim with the caption, “Going back to read Terry Hayes’ debut novel, so I’m fully booked for tonight” (Elly Conway). In the comments, disgruntled fan @laneys_world wrote, “’Going back to read my own first novel’ doesn’t that feel a bit arrogant? Especially after intentionally deceiving people?” Many of the comments post-reveal originate from angry Taylor Swift fans who had built a convoluted theory to explain why they believed the “Love Story” singer was secretly Elly Conway. Whatever the reason, it seems a lot of people felt deceived, cheated. The mystery of Elly Conway ironically led fans through a twisted spy plot of their own.

Kyle Meikle seems to somewhat dismiss the idea of searching for the “true” creator of something when it comes to film adaptation. He talks of a new model of adaptation theory based on George Bluestone and Brian McFarlane’s idea of a “hierarchal process in which adapters convert crude materials into more refined objects” (174). In this model, the “crude materials” are the books or other media that lead to the “more refined” films. Later, he says that looking for the widely-accepted true origin of an adaptation “would amount to nothing less than an archaeology of adaptation” (181). However much the search for answers about the author of Argylle amounts to simply “an archaeology of adaptation,” I think it’s fair for people to be upset about being deceived. Despite the degree to which Roland Barthes’ idea of “death of the author” has permeated and been adopted by academia,[1] no one can deny the sort of mythological aura that surrounds certain authors and auteur directors. These artists create their own styles, sometimes their own quasi-genres, and when people enjoy one work of an artist, they often seek out the rest. People don’t just ask, “Do you like mafia movies with themes of family, the Italian-American identity, and the dangers of American greed?”; they instead might ask, “Do you like Martin Scorsese films?” Even Matthew Vaughn has built a reputation for crafting these twisting, fantastical spy films tinged with a strange flavor of twenty-first century humor and dashed with a bit of historical revisionism. If it were revealed that the most recent Matthew Vaughn film was directed by others pretending to be Vaughn, it would cause an uproar.

Though Elly Conway, before her reveal, was peddled as an unknown, the fact that her fabricated story featured a director purchasing film rights prior to her debut novel’s release generated the idea that maybe she was just that good. Maybe the planned sequels to Argylle: A Novel would be just that good. Maybe the film, too, would be just that good. However, as it turns out, the film currently sits with a 33% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and domestically earned back only a quarter of its budget after a February 2024 release (IMDb). On Goodreads, Argylle: A Novel, finally released in January of 2024, has a rating of 3.28 out of 5 stars. One user on the site, @Liene, says in her one-star review, “This book is a prop and nothing more.” The cover even boasts, “The book that inspired the major motion picture,” another fabrication since we now know it was the other way around. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily matter to the studio executives and producers who the author is or where the book’s release sits on the timeline of “adapting” a film, but a lot of readers and cinephiles care about giving proper credit where credit is due. They care about integrity. They care about honesty. They care about supporting an unknown author who has had her unreleased debut novel picked up by a prominent director, until it turns out that woman is really a man and his co-author, and the whole story was just a charade in service of mediocre art.

Despite what Barthes says about ignoring the author in favor of the art, or Meikle’s similar notions concerning film adaptation, that school of thought leads us down a dangerous path. If the Argylle film had performed well and earned back its budget (and then some), it would signal to the rest of the Hollywood machine that those sorts of shady gimmicks are a good thing, actually. Who cares who really wrote it as long as it’s entertaining, right? With the way AI has developed in recent years, companies could progress to enlisting a robot to write a novel and then letting it masquerade as a real author with an Instagram page. According to an NPR piece by Andrew Limbong, AI-generated “scam books” on Amazon have increased as of late. They often try to replicate existing novels on the platform and “harm more than just an author’s sales numbers”; these books cause “reputational harm” (Limbong). These scams are already damaging authors without Hollywood deciding that AI-generated slop would make for compelling film adaptations.[2] With Argylle, the “scam” involved real people, and when masks were pulled, the audience responded by letting the project flop. Next time, we may not be so lucky.

[1] Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author”, argues for ignoring the intentions and background of a literary work’s author, instead focusing on the actual text and the reader’s perception of that text.

[2] Ironically, AI has already been introduced to the Hollywood scene. Chris Weitz’s 2024 film, Afraid (with the ‘ai’ capitalized in its promotional material) is a sci-fi horror film warning against the use of AI while bafflingly using AI-generated images throughout. As of the writing of this essay, it has a 22% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Works Cited

Abramovitch, Seth. “Mystery Enshrouds Author Behind Henry Cavill Spy Thriller ‘Argylle.’” The Hollywood Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter, 22 Sept. 2022, www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/argylle-elly-conway-henry-cavill-apple-spy-mystery-1235220772/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Apple Original Films [@AppleFilms]. “New spy thriller #Argylle stars Henry Cavill, @DUALIPA, @JohnCena, @BryceDHoward, @BryanCranston, and @SamuelLJackson. Coming soon to Apple TV+.” Twitter, 8 Mar. 2022, https://x.com/AppleFilms/status/1501259524602097668. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

“Argylle by Elly Conway.” Goodreads, 4 Jan. 2024, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195608705-argylle. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

“Argylle (2024) – FAQ.” IMDb, IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/title/tt15009428/faq/?ref_=tt_faq_sm. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Conway, Elly, et al. Argylle. Bantam, 2024.

Conway, Elly. “#Argylle, coming summer 2023.” Instagram, 13 Dec. 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CmHvvwJuJ7x/?hl=en.

Conway, Elly. “Going back to read Terry Hayes’ debut novel, so I’m fully booked for tonight.” Instagram, 31 Jan. 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C2yRN0FxvUH/?hl=en.

Conway, Elly. “How do you fluster an introvert? Publish her first novel, have Matthew Vaughn buy the movie rights, then tell her she has to start using social media for ‘visibility.’ So I’ve returned to where I feel the most at home. I love bookstores and this one especially has my heart.” Instagram, 22 Sep. 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxgjt6mSU2t/?hl=en.

Gularte, Alejandra. “Will the Real Elly Conway Please Stand Up?” Vulture, Vulture, 3 Feb. 2024, www.vulture.com/2024/02/elly-conway-argylle-author-revealed.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Hayes, Terry. I Am Pilgrim. Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books, 2014.

“I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes.” Goodreads, 18 Jul. 2013, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18144124-i-am-pilgrim. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Jacobs, Mario. “Marv Studios.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 2023, www.imdb.com/list/ls568313067/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Kroll, Justin, and Fleming, Mike, Jr. “Apple Lands Matthew Vaughn’s Star-Studded Spy Film ‘Argylle’ in Massive Package Deal.” Deadline, Deadline.com, 4 Aug. 2021, deadline.com/2021/08/apple-200-million-dollar-film-deal-matthew-vaughn-argllye-henry-cavill-sam-rockwell-dua-lipa-samuel-jackson-1234808979/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Limbong, Andrew. “Authors Push Back on the Growing Number of AI ‘scam’ Books on Amazon.” NPR, NPR, 13 Mar. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/03/13/1237888126/growing-number-ai-scam-books-amazon. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.

Rubin, Rebecca. “Matthew Vaughn’s ‘Argylle’ Sets 2024 Theatrical Release Date.” Variety, Variety, 15 June 2023, variety.com/2023/film/news/matthew-vaughn-argylle-spy-movie-release-date-1235645590/.

Marv Studios. [@marv_films] Instagram.

Meikle, Kyle. “REMATERIALIZING ADAPTATION THEORY.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, 2013, pp. 174–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43798874. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Siegel, Tatiana. “Matthew Vaughn to Direct Terrorism Thriller ‘I Am Pilgrim’ for MGM (Exclusive).” The Hollywood Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter, 30 Sept. 2015, www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/i-am-pilgrim-matthew-vaughn-827881/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

Sinykin, Dan. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. Columbia UP, 2023.

Tivnan, Tom. “Terry Hayes: ‘Movie studios could learn a thing or two from British publishers.’” The Bookseller, 6 June 2013, www.thebookseller.com/author-interviews/terry-hayes-interview. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Yossman, K.J. “Henry Cavill, Samuel L. Jackson, Bryce Dallas Howard Among A-List Cast for Matthew Vaughn’s Spy Thriller ‘Argylle.’” Variety, 8 July 2021, https://variety.com/2021/film/news/matthew-vaughan-argylle-film-henry-cavill-1235014809/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.