Crispin Hershey

Crispin Hershey is a fictional character from David Mitchell's novels. Once a renown writer nicknamed "The Wild Child of British Letters", he sees his fame gradually fading away after an harsh review of his last novel. He will seek revenge on the reviewer but his actions will have disastrous consequences which will haunt his whole life.

Biography
Crispin Hershey is the son of famous film director Anthony Hershey and his wife Tiffany.

His parents divorced when he was 10 years old, after his father gave away the main role of his next movie to Raquel Welch after years of promising his wife that this role was written for her.

Novels
Crispin Hershey's debut novel published while the author was still an undergraduate. Crispin admits at some point struggling for wit since that book.
 * Wanda in Oils
 * Red Monkey

Not much is known from this book.

 * Dessicated Embryos

Crispin Hershey's masterpiece. His most work, he is often mentionned during the chapter. Its plot is a mystery, but it is revealed that its structure is "symmetrical", echoing Cloud Atlas. This makes sense if we see Crispin Hershey as David Mitchell's evil twin, since Cloud Atlas seems to be the work that our author will be best remembered for (so far). Crispin Hershey's latest novel, published in 2015. A few random elements of the story seem to indicate a comical and satirical tone for the novel. The protagonist, Trevor Upward
 * Echo Must Die

According to Crispin Hershey, the novel is a "half-fantasy", which was David Mitchell's own early description of The Bone Clocks during a discussion he had with Lana Wachowski : this could mean that if Crispin Hershey is the author's alter-ego, Echo Must Die could be the Übernovel's stand-in for The Bone Clocks.

In his own twitter account, Crispin Hershey (and maybe David Mitchell involuntary) mistakenly refers to the novel as Echo Dies First, before correcting himself.

Short Stories
The Voorman problem is a short story about a psychiatrist asked to come to a asylum to meet a certain Voorman, an inmate pretending to be God and having already converted several patients in the hospital. The doctor confronts Voorman who gradually convinces him that he might indeed be divine...
 * The Voorman Problem

The Voorman Problem is first mentionned as a "foreign" movie in Number9Dream seen by the Japanese protagonist Eiji Miyake. Almost all the story and dialogues are presented, with an open ending. The Voorman Problem is then mentionned again by Soleil Moore, and we learn that it was originaly a short story (or a novel) written years ago by Crispin Hershey, meaning that this must have been written before 2001, the year where Number9Dream takes place. The Siphoners is mentionned briefly by Crispin Hershey, who redacts it during the events of the Bone Clocks. He calls it his "best story" in years. From what is mentionned, the story corresponds to the subject of David Mitchell's same-titled short shorty : in a pre-apocalyptic landscape, a couple of anthropologists see their personal supply of petrol being taken away by ravers. Within the Bone Clocks, this short story is prophetic as the last chapter will see a very similar ending for the world.
 * The Siphoners

This would reconciliate David Mitchell's universe, since the Siphoner, written before the Bone Clocks, includes many ideas which will be recycled in the later novel. But before of this recycling, time and place doesn't match the year 2045 mentionned in The Bone Clocks. If we are to believe that The Siphoners, written by David Mitchell, is supposed to be the exact same short story by Crispin Hershey, that would make The Siphoners a fictional story inside the Übernovel, and would therefore not be canon. It would just happen to be a sort of prophetic vision by Crispin Hershey, which tend to happen in David Mitchell's novels (see Vyvyan Ayrs vivid dream announcing the future in Cloud Atlas).

Memoirs
The only known memoir of Crispin Hershey. It is mentioned by journalist Maeve Munro who takes a quote from it saying that Crispin Hershey has dubbed "incestuous" the process of writers using a novelist as a protagonist, an idea which was eventually taken by Hershey himself later in his latest novel Echo Must Die.
 * To Be Continued

Inspiration
Many reviewers have commented the uncanny series of links with real-life contemporary writer Martin Amis. The titles of his novels indeed greatly echo those of Crispin Hershey : Dessicated Embryos sounds a lot like Dead Babies, while Red Monkey seems to be a reference to Yellow Dog.

During many interviews with journalists, when pressed on that point David Mitchell always answered that he had never intended to dress an unflattering caricature of Martin Amis. He admitted that Crispin was actually a caricature of himself, putting an emphasis on his own evil side. Dessicated Embryos would also, according to him, not be a hidden reference to Amis' Dead Babies but the title of an Eric Satie composition. The reader can