January 19, 2000
Web posted at: 4:47 p.m. EST (2147 GMT)

(CNN) -- W.E. Butterworth is the first to admit it. He gets paid very well to do what he loves.

Or in his own words, "I found the goose that had laid the golden egg."

You don't recognize his name? How about Alex Baldwin, Walker E. Blake, Edmund O. Scholefield, Eden Hughes, Allison Mitchell, James MacDouglas, Blakely St. James? How about the name W.E.B. Griffin?

They're one and the same, and they're the names on the title pages of more than 11 dozen books. They are all W.E. Butterworth, though when discussing his writing he prefers to go by the Griffin nom de plume.

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Churning out paperbacks

How did he come to write under so many names? Did it just happen that way, or did he have a plan? There was no plan, he says.

He was working for the Army at Ft. Rucker, Alabama, when he penned his first book, titled "Comfort Me With Love." He says he finished it in three weeks and soon sold it. In the mail came a check for $1,000.

W.E.B. Griffin will be our Online chat guest on Friday, January 21, at 12 noon ET

Pretty soon he was busy churning out original paperbacks. At his Army job he was working full time and making $5,000 a year, "and I was getting that for a book," he exclaims.

So he churned out more paperbacks: "No French Leave" by Webb Beech and "The Love and the Lost" under the name Walter E. Blake. In 1961 he finally decided to resign his Army job and dedicate his time to writing.

When the publishing industry changed, he changed with it, and the words flowed -- books for children, books for teen-agers, another called "The Wonder of Astronomy," all using pseudonyms. Meanwhile, a novel he'd written was purchased and produced for television on "Bob Hope's Chrysler Theater" in 1964. That job earned him $35,000.

He tried his hand as a ghost writer, and was successful. "I was making a very good living as a ghost writer. It paid very well, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people. (He prefers to not name those for whom he ghosted books.)

A little thing called 'M*A*S*H'

Then someone wrote a book called "M*A*S*H" in 1970. The highly successful book spawned the film version and, later, the seminal television show starring Alan Alda. But that did nothing to make money for Pocket Books, so they came up with the idea to produce a string of paperback sequels to the original book.

"The first 'M*A*S*H' book was written by a doctor, Dick Hornberger, but he wanted nothing to do with any sequels," Griffin says. But he did agree to let someone else write them, subject to his approval.

So various writers tried their hand at the job. None were accepted by Hornberger. "I was proposed almost as a last resort, but Hornberger liked what I wrote," Griffin says. "I got the job, and we had a lot of fun with those M*A*S*H books." He says he earned $50,000 for the first sequel, titled "M*A*S*H goes to New Orleans," and was given half of all royalties for the dozen following versions he penned. By Griffin's count, each sold more than a million copies.

But those M*A*S*H tales, while about people in the military, really had little to do with the real military. When the man known as the "ultimate pen for hire" later took his turn writing military tales, he become the favored writer for soldiers and sailors around the world.

'The Brotherhood of War'

The idea for a series of military novels didn't come to him initially. It began, he says, when he read what he calls "an arrogant" book about the U.S. Army that was on the best seller list. Griffin didn't like it. He thought he could do better, so he sat down and knocked out a book about Army officers. At the suggestion of his editors at Putnam, he took that story and expanded it into five separate books, which in 1982 became "The Brotherhood of War" series.

The series, eventually eight titles, sold well and Griffin wrote "The Corps," his 1986 series about the U.S. Marine Corps. Then came a series about the police, titled "Badge of Honor," the "Men at War" trio, and the series he's still writing: "Honor Bound."

The collections were well received, with readers flocking to buy his tales of ordinary people doing great things in extraordinary times. The military books alone have sold well over 20 million copies.

Griffin says he didn't have to look far to find models for his characters. "My characters are composites of people I knew in the service. These people had principles and character."

And as a veteran and citizen, he says he worries about the modern U.S. military. "I hear all sorts of horror stories. The captains and majors -- those who would be tomorrow's generals -- are getting out," not willing to put up with what Griffin thinks is unnecessary political correctness.

"I've got a lot of friends in the military. I make a point of meeting the new non-coms. A lot of the complaints I've heard come from them."

"You can't have wimps in the military," he says. Of course, his books made that point years ago.