George Stark’s gravestone

George Stark’s gravestone is a papier-mâché prop used in a staged People magazine feature about Thad Beaumont’s notorious pen name. Its inscription, “Not a Very Nice Guy,” compresses the joke and the danger of the situation into a few words: the magazine presents Stark as dead, but the false grave becomes a physical marker that characters later recognize in a cemetery where the fiction has begun to touch reality.

A prop for the People feature

The gravestone was commissioned by photographer Phyllis Myers and brought from New York City to Castle Rock, Maine, for the Beaumonts’ photo-and-interview session. The small, black-bordered photograph that opened the article showed Thad carrying a spade and Liz a pick, with cemetery tools in a wheelbarrow and flowers arranged on the grave. The stone’s inscription identified its supposed occupant as George Stark, gave his dates as 1975–1988, and added the verdict “Not a Very Nice Guy.”

Myers asked the Beaumonts to shake hands over the marker, seeking a striking shot. Liz looked to Thad with visible uncertainty, and both regarded the prop with amazement and bemused wonder. They nevertheless repeated the pose for the camera. The feature’s other pictures were staged too, including images involving brownies and one of Thad walking alone along a Ludlow woods road as though searching for ideas. The grave scene was thus not evidence of a burial but a deliberately constructed image for a celebrity profile.

The prop’s theatricality made the photograph’s contrast part of its effect. The dates suggested a boy who had died in his early teens, while the two supposed gravediggers shook hands and laughed over freshly placed sod. The article paired the appearance of a completed interment with an openly cheerful pose, turning the false burial into spectacle. Its simple, emphatic inscription was as suited to the magazine’s bold presentation as it was to the Beaumonts’ joke about having buried the name under which Thad had written his popular crime novels.

The inscription and the invented identity

The gravestone’s name points to a division in Thad’s writing life. His first novel, The Sudden Dancers, had been nominated for the National Book Award in 1972, but he had published only one further novel under his own name. Under the separate identity of George Stark, he had produced a bestseller and three successful follow-up novels. The article uses the false grave to make that pen name legible as a public character with an apparent life and death of its own.

In the interview, Thad explains that choosing the name was difficult but important: he wanted an identity separate from his own, one that might break the writer’s block he had faced. He connects “Stark” to crime writer Donald E. Westlake, who published a series about the professional thief Parker under the name Richard Stark. Thad recalls Westlake’s reported division between writing on sunny days and letting Stark take over on rainy ones, a comparison he associates with his own difficult period between 1973 and early 1975.

The gravestone’s dismissive epitaph also sits beside the harder-edged fiction that gave Stark his readership. Thad describes Parker as nearly a killer robot, driven by a single goal and little else; the interviewer recognizes a resemblance to Alexis Machine, the central figure in the first and last George Stark novels. The grave’s plain declaration therefore works in two registers: it is a comic epitaph for a manufactured authorial identity, and a pointed label for the violent fictional world attached to that identity.

The cemetery plot and its later meaning

The marker was placed in a plot at the cemetery that belonged to the town’s First Selectman, Danforth “Buster” Keeton. At the time, only the neighboring plots containing Buster’s father and uncle were occupied. Thad asked cemetery worker Steven “Digger” Holt if a photographer could set up the false gravestone for what he called a “trick shot.” Digger agreed, and later remembered the Beaumonts repeatedly posing over it while Myers directed the session.

The prop left traces beyond the photographs. When Digger later returned to the plot, he recognized it as the place where the People crew had staged the image. He recalled the photographer’s high heels leaving round marks in the sod; as he looked at those fading impressions, he noticed other, fresher marks. The contrast turns a location previously remembered as a set for a publicity image into a place where the remembered staging and a new disturbance occupy the same ground.

That change gives the gravestone its importance beyond the article. The prop itself is false, and no body was buried beneath it for the photo shoot, but its placement supplies Digger with a specific memory that helps him identify the plot later. What began as a magazine-ready imitation of a grave becomes part of the physical history against which the cemetery’s subsequent events are recognized.

Image, performance, and the boundary of fiction

The gravestone is at once a disposable theatrical object and a durable reference point. In the feature, it turns a pen name into a corpse and makes the Beaumonts perform a burial that never occurred. Later, the plot’s location and the remembered marks around it matter independently of the photograph. The object’s meaning shifts from staged celebrity image to evidence of where the staging took place, even though the stone remains a fake.

Its epitaph distills the story’s uneasy relation between author and creation. Thad devised Stark as a separate identity for writing; People recasts that separation as a funeral tableau, complete with dates, flowers, tools, and a grave marker. The joke depends on readers recognizing that the man being buried is not a conventional real person. But the later return to the cemetery complicates the joke: the fabricated death has acquired a setting, a visible inscription, and consequences in the same world as the people who posed beside it.