As book rollouts go, the one for Omid Scobie’s latest offering about the British royal family, “Endgame,” has been a hot mess — splashy, gaudy, tantalizing but ultimately a bit withholding — which is to say, par for the course for a putative tell-all account of the world’s most covered, least decoded family.
The withholding part involves an unconfirmed, thoroughly radioactive nugget that turned up in the Dutch edition of Mr. Scobie’s book, published on Tuesday: the identity of two members of the royal family who once reportedly expressed concerns about the skin color of the unborn child of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.
Mr. Scobie’s Dutch publisher, Xander, quickly withdrew the book from shelves and online sites in the Netherlands at the behest of the author and his agent, citing an unspecified “mistake” that it said would be corrected in time for the book to go back on sale on Dec. 8.
The family members are not identified in either the British or American editions, which were published by imprints of HarperCollins.
It all led to a nursery school’s worth of peekaboo headlines in London tabloids on Wednesday.
Persons:
rollouts, Omid, ”, Scobie’s, Prince Harry, Meghan, Mr, Xander
Organizations:
HarperCollins
Locations:
Scobie’s Dutch, Netherlands, Amsterdam, London