Of all the phonies, in all the world, who’d have thought one would walk into J. D. Salinger’s life and confect a sequel to the tale of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye?

At any rate, that’s how a court in New York sizes up the story. A US district judge yesterday told an author whose new book — 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye — was promoted as a sequel to Salinger’s 1951 classic that he cannot publish it in America because it too closely mirrors Salinger’s novel. Salinger sought to halt publication on the ground that it was “a rip-off pure and simple”. The sequel features a 76-year-old called “Mr C”, who escapes from a nursing home and revisits many of the same places in Manhattan that Caulfield did.

Even so, is Salinger being po-faced? Or does he have a fair claim for copyright infringement? 60 Years certainly isn’t the first novel to exploit another author’s characters. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea owed a debt to Jane Eyre. Flashman was spun out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. There have been James Bond sequels, though they have been written under the stewardship of Fleming’s estate.

Yet Salinger might justifiably wince were someone to make money from a movie of 60 Years that was billed as the adult adventures of Holden Caulfield. J. K. Rowling successfully sued a compiler of a guide to Harry Potter. So, legally, Salinger may have right on his side. But he need not exercise it. Chances are, 60 Years Later will only remind readers of the shimmer of Salinger’s prose. Great writing is hard to match, let alone beat. When an interviewer told Joseph Heller that he’d never again written anything as good as Catch-22, Heller replied: “No, but neither has anyone else.”