Spy novel pulled for plagiarising Gardner, Benson, Ludlum and McCrary

Quote :

Mulholland Books pulls 'Assassin of Secrets' over copied passages



Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown, has pulled its novel "Assassin of Secrets" after passages were found to be copied from other spy novels. The book was a first novel from Q.R. Markham. The paperback original was published Nov. 3.

In a statement, Michael Pietsch, executive vice president and publisher of Little, Brown and Co., said: "Upon investigation, it was clear the passages in question were lifted, and Little, Brown determined that the only course of action was to immediately recall books from retailers across the country."

The passages in question, which were not shared with the press, were lifted from James Bond books by Ian Fleming and thrillers by Robert Ludlum and Christopher McCrary, the Associated Press reports.

In October, Markham wrote an essay for the Huffington Post titled, "9 Ways That Spy Novels Made Me a Better Bookseller." Markham wrote that he writes under a pen name and that he is co-owner of Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers in Brooklyn. In his essay, he wrote, "Once I'd gotten into the mindset of a Cold War-era superspy, it was hard to leave. I began to notice certain similarities between my day job and my night-time work. I found myself not only making decisions the way Chase would, but recognizing where the methodology came from, whether it be Ian Fleming's M., Le Carre's George Smiley, or Nicholas Hel's Go teacher." Markham's tumblr has also been taken down.

In the statement from Little, Brown, Pietch said, "We take great pride in the writers and books we publish and tremendous care in every aspect of our publishing process, so it is with deep regret that we have published a book that we can no longer stand behind. Our goal is to never have this happen, but when it does, it is important to us to communicate with and compensate readers and retailers as quickly as possible."

The company will give full credit to wholesalers who return the book, and it has asked consumers to seek refunds for the book from the retailer where they bought it.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/11/mulholland-books-pulls-assassin-of-secrets-over-copied-passages.html

It didn't plagiarise Fleming (I really hope I would have spotted that!), but it did plagiarize at least two Raymond Benson novels and at least six John Gardner ones. I feel a total chump, and am very embarrassed to have been duped by it. I explain how it happened, and the background to it being withdrawn today, on my blog: http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/11/assassin-of-secrets.html Please be gentle with me - yes, I should certainly have spotted this, and am feeling very sore with myself at the moment.

Sorry about the mistake. The LA Times article was misleading, as it said:

Quote :

The passages in question, which were not shared with the press, were lifted from James Bond books by Ian Fleming [...]

I'll read your blog shortly. I've got to say, this looks like a very clever dupe.

Yes, sorry, Sharky, I didn't mean that you had done anything wrong - it's been incorrectly reported. I just gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, which I hope will be more accurate (and stop the story dead!).

And I see that 'AMC Hornet' is also a member of this forum. Whoever you are, sir or madam, I owe you a pint for drawing attention to this and in the process savign me from having much more serious egg on my face if this claptrap had been published across the UK on Thursday with my toally idiotic quote on the cover.

Off to read all the post-Bond novels to become a proper Bond fan...

Jeremy

A long day, and I'm off to bed in a sec. But I see you, Loomis, lurking below the line here. :) And I've read your comments in the CBN thread, which I can't reply to for reasons I think are pretty well-established by now. I read the novel, obviously, and genuinely enjoyed it. It's hard to explain how it worked, but he had gelled large chunks of plots from various novels, I think mainly Licence Renewed and For Special Services from Bond, and a novel I've not read, Second Sight by Charles McCarry, to give it enough of a flow. He changed names of organizations and weapons and locations, but keeping the basic 'machinery'. Hard to explain, and impossible to see now because the plagiarism is going to be groaningly obvious to everyone who looks at it with the knowledge of it, but in a way it worked as a kind of prose poem about espionage in the Cold War, and the plot was disjointed and indeed a sort of greatest hits package. Inasmuch as plagiarising an entire novel from more than a dozen others can be called clever, this was. Hey, Kirkus gave it a starred review, and believe me, they ain't easy. McCarry's prose from old (and rather obscure) novels was largely behind the acclaim, I think.

If you want to know more, email me, or we can discuss it here.

Jeremy

Jeremy,

Thanks for your candor, prompt action, and strong principled stand against plagiarism.

Thank you for that, Major - but AMC Hornet is the real star here. He'd not just read but remembered clearly several Gardner novels, which unfortunately I hadn't. But I acted as fast as I could when I realized.

Thank you for your generous praise, Jeremy.

I think, though, that I was merely the first to spot something that would have no doubt been noticed anyway. If Terminus hadn't posted a link to the promotional exerpt and roused my curiosity, hopefully someone else with an equally OC memory would have said something.

I'm just glad that the offence was spotted early enough to help avoid a stain on your professional reputation.

JeremyDuns wrote:

A long day, and I'm off to bed in a sec. But I see you, Loomis, lurking below the line here. :)

Hey, Jeremy. Hope you're keeping well (and good to see you here on B&B). :D

JeremyDuns wrote:

It's hard to explain how it worked, but he had gelled large chunks of plots from various novels, I think mainly Licence Renewed and For Special Services from Bond, and a novel I've not read, Second Sight by Charles McCarry, to give it enough of a flow. He changed names of organizations and weapons and locations, but keeping the basic 'machinery'. Hard to explain, and impossible to see now because the plagiarism is going to be groaningly obvious to everyone who looks at it with the knowledge of it, but in a way it worked as a kind of prose poem about espionage in the Cold War, and the plot was disjointed and indeed a sort of greatest hits package. Inasmuch as plagiarising an entire novel from more than a dozen others can be called clever, this was.

I see what you mean (I think). "A kind of prose poem about espionage in the Cold War, and the plot was disjointed and indeed a sort of greatest hits package", eh? Sounds lovely - to us lot, at least (COCKPIT and SHIBUMI have pretty disjointed plots, do they not?), but I'd have imagined that such a thing would be pretty tough to sell, especially as a debut in today's marketplace. (I'm assuming, of course, that agents and publishers believe that the man on the Clapham omnibus is fundamentally after a good, solid plot that, well, fits together nicely and properly, as opposed to some kind of free jazz stroll through spy fiction's greatest hits.)

Anyway, kudos to you and to AMC Hornet.

Nice job, AMC Hornet. I suppose that others might have spotted the plagiarism, but you were the one who actually recognized it for what it was and called the "author" out. Well done.

Jeremy, I have to say thank you for the response you posted on your blog. it was measured, intelligent, and above all else, mature. Reading your thoughts on the matter, I have to say that I am bemused Rowan managed to cobble together pages of plagiarism from a dozen or more authors and works into a coherent whole, much less one that a publishing house would be willing to accept (but then, as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer have demonstrated, any idiot with a keybaord can write). I don't think you really did anything wrong - I think it's great that established authors offer young writers a hand getting their foot in the door, and for all intents and purposes, Rowan had the illusion of legitimacy. He just took advantage of your generosity.

JeremyDuns wrote:

the plot was disjointed and indeed a sort of greatest hits package.

I did kind of notice that when I read the blurb on Amazon:

Quote :

An elite spy risks his biggest asset to defeat an insidious international organization hell-bent on selling the most sensitive state secrets to the highest bidder.

Jonathan Chase, the CIA's top field agent, is sworn to protect and serve the United States at all costs. But after a brutal period of captivity during the Korean War, Chase developed an agenda of his own: to use his mastery of war to create peace.

His new target: the Zero Directorate, a cabal of rogue assassins who have embarked on a campaign to systematically interrogate and kill seasoned secret agents from across the globe.

But the Directorate has set an elaborate trap, and for Chase the whole mission involves an inescapable paradox. As the world's preeminent operative, the closer he gets to the cabal, the closer the cabal gets to their primary target.

My first thought was something along the lines of "wow, there's a lot going on here". There's at least four different plot threads in there, and two of them contradict one another (on one hand, "Zero Directorate" are trying to sell state secrets; on the other, they're trying to kill off spies).

I certainly have no claim to knowing Rowan, but I think this picture of him (which appears to have been intended for the jacked cover) is really rather telling:



He's got half-tinted Wayfarer glasses, a black and white filter, and an out-of-focus church (I think) that looks like it belongs in Russia or Turkey in the background. Looking at it, the first impression that I get is that he really wants to be taken seriously as a spy fiction novellist. And it really feels like he is trying way too hard to get that credibility. I think that might be what motivated him to plagiarise; he wanted to be like his heroes, and he wanted to be like them straight away rather than earn that reputation. He wouldn't have seen what he did as plagiarism; in act, he probably wouldn't have seen it as being wrong at all. Rather, I think he would have felt it was some kind of tribute to those writers, they had all influenced him in some way, and he was immortalising those influences. That's probably how he was able to carry out the deception for so long that Assassin of Secrets was on the verge of hitting shelves before the ruse was discovered - because he never actually thought of what he was doing as wrong.

Y'know, after all these revelations, I'm more interested in the novel than I was before.

Harmsway wrote:

Y'know, after all these revelations, I'm more interested in the novel than I was before.

Me too. It's going to be a collectable. It will probably now cost a fortune on ebay.

I've read every single post Fleming continuation novel, from Amis to Pearson to Wood to Gardner to Benson, MP Diaries, YoungBond, the newest stuff...all of it... and I'm sure I would not have caught the plagiarism. I read these books, and forget about them, whereas the Fleming novels are classics and they tend to stay with you, so I think I would have been duped as well. I've even read all of Ludlum's books, but I don't think I would have caught the Ludlum lift either. However its a big interconnected world out there, so all it takes is one guy with a web connection and the jigs up.....which makes me wonder; he surely plannned that he might get caught. Cheeky bugger. But it seems he was determined to go ahead with what now seems to have been an experiment; to see if he could actually get away with it.

A thought provoking comment n an article on Edrants compiling the number of plagiarisms in the first 27 pages of ASSASSIN OF SECRETS. i don't agree with it, but it's provocative and fairly astute nevertheless.

In defense of Q.R. Markham's plagiarism:

Dr. Edwin Poole wrote:

I can’t help wondering how this situation interfaces with some of the canonical tenets of postmodernism, such as homage, pastiche, and echoing. Isn’t the idea of the total originality of a work of art supposed to be one of the worst fallacies of romanticism? How can any spy novel, or any other type of genre novel, be totally original? Isn’t it possible to view blatant duplication of sentences as a form of irony, an intentional challenge to the obsolete and basically impossible tenets of “originality”?

What is the threshold here? How many plagiarized sentences are allowed in a book of fiction? Of history? Of humor? Is there an exact formula? Or is it merely guesswork? Is one copied sentence sufficient to ban a book? Or five? Or fifty? Is there anything in the Ten Commandments about this? Did the Buddha write a sutra on this subject?

I’m trying to suggest that we’re dealing with a very fuzzy frontier here, where judgments are being made on a case-by-case, ad-hoc basis with poorly defined criteria. Actually it isn’t at all clear to me that artistic considerations are paramount. Instead, the publisher is probably afraid of some kind of legal action being taken by the copyrighted authors that are being quoted. So the situation is not really one where artistic interests are paramount. Instead, publishers are more likely concerned with lawsuits and the judgement of courts and the payment of money.

Thus our high-minded indignation over “plagiarism” becomes merely an obeisance to the literary qualifications of a superior court judge who is much more interested in murder cases. Artistry? Creative integrity? These concepts will receive very short shrift in a court of law.

Isn’t the mere re-use of English words previously used by others a form of plagiarism? The only way an author can evade such accusations is to invent a private and personal language of his or her own. James Joyce tried that, but “Ulysses” is read by very few people today.

Let’s take a look at the classic madonna and child theme in Renaissance art. There are only so many ways of showing a woman holding a baby. Are we therefore to believe that almost all the madonna and child paintings from Renaissance Italy are plagiarized? Maybe so, but is this really a helpful concept in art criticism? How about those endless still life paintings of flowers in a vase? Are they also pieces of plagiarism? Should they be burned? Try that with your Cezannes and Van Goghs!

I’d be delighted to read a spy novel that was 100% plagiarized, with every single sentence blatantly borrowed from previous spy novels. It would be a hilarious tour de farce (yes, the A is deliberate!) and a fine example of the logical postmodernist response to the obsolete romantic notion of “originality.” I realize that for LEGAL reasons, such a book may be impossible to publish. But since when should we alow the lawyers to dictate the types of books we can write and read? That would be merely contemptible, but such is the apparent status quo today. The lawyers rule everything. William Burroughs, are you listening?

We should also note that the very concept of plagiarism is quite recent in literary history, not to mention the concept of legal copyright. And yet there were great masterpieces in the earlier, free-for-all days. Some of those grand old books were almost as good as the James Bond novels. Not quite as good, of course, because they didn’t make as much money. But good all the same. Maybe. Kind of.

Isn’t it wonderful that even today, when every kind of crap and garbage is being published and showered with cloudbursts of dollars, we can still pretend to be so highly moral when it comes to so-called “plagiarism.” Actually plagiarism is encouraged just as long as the relevant legal permissions are obtained. An exemplary case would be the endless parade of new Star Wars novels. The blatant copying of characters and situations from the original movies would be disgusting, except that the formal permission of licensing the product is carefully obtained. And presto! The foul crime of plagiarism becomes a profitable industry when the right signatures are obtained on the proper legal contracts.

It would seem that literary integrity can be bought and sold like lawn fertilizer. Plagiarism? You’re worried about plagiarism? Just pay me the money and everything will be okay.

So if Q. R. Markham had taken the trouble to get permission to satirize the spy novels that he quotes so literally, his book would be a delightful spoof, a “Blazing Saddles” sendup of the worn-out and hackneyed spy genre. Oh, but he didn’t do that, did he? Probably because he didn’t have enough money to buy the rights.

It all boils down to money in the end, and the high and mighty concept of artistic integrity has very little to do with the publishing of books. It’s the dollars, the euros, and the Swiss francs that matter! Instead of defending the integrity of an artist, we’re actually concerned about the profitability of a product.

When you can buy and sell integrity for the right price, IMHO it isn’t really integrity any more. Let the lawyers battle it out! I couldn’t care less.

http://www.edrants.com/q-r-markham-plagiarist/

Stupid pap. Probably did the same with his dissertation.

JeremyDuns wrote:

A long day, and I'm off to bed in a sec. But I see you, Loomis, lurking below the line here. :) And I've read your comments in the CBN thread, which I can't reply to for reasons I think are pretty well-established by now.

You've made me have a look through your post history as I didn't know why you left CBn and was sad to not see you posting in that thread. Seems to be something about you not believing that Sam Mendes could be directing the next Bond film...? :)

JeremyDuns wrote:

I read the novel, obviously, and genuinely enjoyed it. It's hard to explain how it worked, but he had gelled large chunks of plots from various novels, I think mainly Licence Renewed and For Special Services from Bond, and a novel I've not read, Second Sight by Charles McCarry, to give it enough of a flow. He changed names of organizations and weapons and locations, but keeping the basic 'machinery'. Hard to explain, and impossible to see now because the plagiarism is going to be groaningly obvious to everyone who looks at it with the knowledge of it, but in a way it worked as a kind of prose poem about espionage in the Cold War, and the plot was disjointed and indeed a sort of greatest hits package. Inasmuch as plagiarising an entire novel from more than a dozen others can be called clever, this was. Hey, Kirkus gave it a starred review, and believe me, they ain't easy. McCarry's prose from old (and rather obscure) novels was largely behind the acclaim, I think.

Staggering stuff; quite amazing, really. I think I'd like to read it, in an odd sort of way!
Do you think it was easier for him to do it this way? Strangely enough it sounds a rather difficult task to me; to assemble mismatching parts like that.
Amazing of AMC to notice it, of course. Now you've been linked to in the Guardian even, AMC! :)

mtm wrote:

JeremyDuns wrote:

A long day, and I'm off to bed in a sec. But I see you, Loomis, lurking below the line here. :) And I've read your comments in the CBN thread, which I can't reply to for reasons I think are pretty well-established by now.

You've made me have a look through your post history as I didn't know why you left CBn and was sad to not see you posting in that thread. Seems to be something about you not believing that Sam Mendes could be directing the next Bond film...? :)

Check out Jeremy's first post here. It's a pretty hefty apology to danslittlefinger, and gives a fairly throughout account of that chapter in Cb.n's history.

Anyhow, welcome to B&B mate. :)

Here's the Guardian article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/09/james-bond-plagiarised-novel-qr-markham

I especially liked this quote:

Quote :

Lisa Moylett, Gardner's literary executor, also praised her author's fans for uncovering the plagiarism. "You don't mess with Bond fans: they watch and monitor everything and are a very well-organised community,"

Sharky wrote:

mtm wrote:

JeremyDuns wrote:

A long day, and I'm off to bed in a sec. But I see you, Loomis, lurking below the line here. :) And I've read your comments in the CBN thread, which I can't reply to for reasons I think are pretty well-established by now.

You've made me have a look through your post history as I didn't know why you left CBn and was sad to not see you posting in that thread. Seems to be something about you not believing that Sam Mendes could be directing the next Bond film...? :)

Check out Jeremy's first post here. It's a pretty hefty apology to danslittlefinger, and gives a fairly throughout account of that chapter in Cb.n's history.

Oof; glad I steered clear of all of that on CBn. I didn't want to rake anything up; just a bit of fun.


It's quite a story, isn't it; all of this Markham stuff? He's more famous than he'd hoped for. Still, might sell a few more Gardner reprints.
You don't think it's some kind of evil marketing scheme, do you? :)

Loomis (and anyone else interested), I hope you don't mind but I've tried to explain a bit more how I reacted to the novel on my blog, where I've also tried to address some of the nonsense that has been written about it elsewhere:

http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/11/highway-robbery-mask-of-knowing-in.html

I may have to check out some of this Charles McCarry's original work. He's getting some good PR from this flap.

JeremyDuns wrote:

Loomis (and anyone else interested), I hope you don't mind but I've tried to explain a bit more how I reacted to the novel on my blog, where I've also tried to address some of the nonsense that has been written about it elsewhere:

http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/11/highway-robbery-mask-of-knowing-in.html

Thank you sir, your pieces upon this affair have been a pleasure to read, and in my humble opinion add more depth to what actually happened.

Is even the 'Q. R. Markham' genuine? Y' know, given that 'Robert Markham' was Kingsley Amis' pseudonym for Colonel Sun.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Is even the 'Q. R. Markham' genuine? Y' know, given that 'Robert Markham' was Kingsley Amis' pseudonym for Colonel Sun.

Quentin Rowan, apparently.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Quentin Rowan, apparently.

Indeed, but given that Markham was the name used on the original print of Colonel Sun, and that Rowan plagiarised from the Bond continuation novels more than any other, do you really think that his use of "Markham" as his pen name is coincidence?

No, of course not. Rather seems like he wished to be found out.

Interesting experiment.