Since it's become absolutely certain that last Friday's phone call between Judith Regan and HarperCollins attorney Mark Jackson was about problems surrounding the publication of Peter Golenbock's 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, the question now is: With Regan gone, is Harper interested in going to bat for Golenbock? Regan's attorney, Bert Fields, claimed in an interview with Hillel Italie of the AP that Harper may well consider the book unpublishable, but a Harper spokesman will concede only that it's "under review."

Now, I haven't seen the entire book, but as I've said before, what I've seen doesn't seem so terrible or even that far off from the real-life Mickey Mantle. (Well, apart from the whole Marilyn Monroe thing.) But considering some of the novels that HarperCollins has considered publishable, like Eve Pollard's Jack's Widow, which uses the fictional rape of Jackie Onassis as a dramatic plot point, Golenbock would've had to have come up with genuinely Sadean levels of perversity for there to be a real problem here.

Maybe that original PW Daily story about the novel was right about where the perceived threat lies: "The Mantle family, which oversees the Mantle estate and manages licensing projects, might stand to incur financial damage if Mantle's reputation is irreparably sullied." (Funnily enough, while browsing in a bookstore this weekend, I stumbled onto Mickey Mantle: Stories and Memorabilia from a Lifetime with The Mick, a recently published tribute book co-written by two of Mantle's sons which comes with pull-out reproductions of Mantle memoribilia like the scorecard from his '63 comeback game, exactly the sort of product which might be jeopardized in such a scenario.) Speaking not as a journalist here, and certainly not as a lawyer, but as somebody who occasionally runs with whatever ideas pop into his head, if the party holding the license on a dead celebrity decided to challenge the publication of a novel featuring that dead celebrity, it could certainly be one hell of an interesting intellectual property case (and would create quite the chilling effect if those license holders were somehow to prevail). I have no idea whether that wild hypothesis has any bearing on what's actually going on with regard to Harper's "review" of the Golenbock novel, but it's certainly interesting to think about, no?