AUTHORS SHOULD NEVER die. Especially not successful ones. They should stay alive, keep writing, risk intellectual irrelevance and declining popularity, defend their droit morale, sue imitators and pour scorn on the idea of sequels, prequels, responses, commentaries and parodies.

If Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, hadn't died 13 years after her only novel was published in 1936, her estate might not feel quite so ready to commission authorised rip-offs. It is clear from her letters that she had a healthy horror of the industry that her novel inspired.

Half a century has passed and in other zones of popular culture a bestseller is now defined as a concept that can support at least five cloning attempts and spawn a global plague of plastic toys, digital games and chocolate frogs. Bean-counters abhor a vacuum.

Gone with the Wind, with sales of 28 million and counting, just can't be left with The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird in the noble brotherhood of literary one-hit wonders.

Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett, published in 1991, was successful but critically damned. Then, without the estate's blessing, came a hostile response, The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, told from the viewpoint of the love child of Scarlett O'Hara's father and her black nurse, Mammy. It was intellectually applauded, but rates just one star on Amazon.

Its promotion rested on savaging the original for racism. The charge hardly sticks; as a poor young writer, Mitchell volunteered at a black educational project. As a rich writer, she supported the college that educated Martin Luther King and Spike Lee. She lived in a city so racist that it wouldn't invite the black cast to the film's premiere. All this was ignored and the need to defend the author drove her estate to set up a protective trust.

That trust has now given its blessing to Rhett Butler's People by Daniel McCaig, a respected historical novelist with a white moustache that sits on his lip like the rim of sugar on a mint julep, giving him a resemblance to Colonel Sanders. “Readers will get inside Rhett's head as he meets and courts Scarlett O'Hara in one of the most famous love affairs of all time,” promises a New York Times review quoted on the jacket.

Clearly, the trustees are not great students of the love story. The last place readers want to be is inside a romantic hero's head, of course. Imagine Heathcliff's take on Wuthering Heights. Imagine Mr Darcy's perspective on Elizabeth Bennet. Imagine Maxim de Winter's account of his second marriage. At one point in this book, Rhett Butler wonders if he and Scarlett were lovers in a previous incarnation. No, no, no.

In a Woman's Hour poll of romantic heroes, Butler tied with Darcy at the top of the list. They are both bad boys with good souls, the male equivalent of the tart with a heart, a species as fantastic as the unicorn, a fatal ideal that has made many a victim stay in an abusive relationship. They're not real, that's the point. A romantic hero has only one significant dimension.

In fairness to McCaig, he seems to realise that he's attempting the impossible and abandons Rhett's point of view as soon as Scarlett flounces out of the library at Twelve Oaks. The narrative then wavers uncertainly between half a dozen characters, including Rhett's younger sister and his love child by the madame, Belle Watling, unhappily named Tazewell. Not that any of these inventions have dimensions either.

History is McCaig's thing. There's lots of history — meticulous, authoritative, laborious. This is a decent book, at least. Yes, Frank Kennedy gets a good showing — how did you guess? There are careful attempts to confront stereotypical notions; for example, Rhett's father is a rice planter and you learn a lot about rice plantations in this book.

McCaig is a dab hand with detail, which leads the reader to start second-guessing his choices. Rhett's steed is called Tecumseh, the name of a Shawnee chief, and of General Sherman, whose troops torched Atlanta and whose speeches Mitchell paraphrased in some of Rhett's original dialogue. And the horse is a gelding. Hmm. What can McCaig mean by this?

If there was a prize for national self-parody the American South would just about win it over the Republic of Ireland The Ah-

declayah accent, the magnolias, the Blanche Dubois concept of femininity, it's real, all of it. So in fictionalising a setting that you couldn't make up, McCaig had a challenge. But I regret to note that he seems to have declined it.

If you were playing cliché-bingo with this text, it would be a short game. Galloping horses, page 1; calling “whippoorwill”, page 2; duel, page 3; Spanish moss, page 7; flogging scene, page 19.

Meanwhile, the love story is in trouble. Romantic fiction, written by women for women, was the samizdat of the oppressed in pre-feminist days. I know, I was there. Those days are gone. Chick-lit is dead and nothing has emerged to carry the flame. Romantic novels are losing readers all over the developed world. We just don't believe in unicorns any more.

Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig
Macmillan, £17

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