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

While I do think he did it for the attention, I don't think this was the kind of attention he wanted.

He explained that in his first email to me, in which he said his agent had sent his Sixties-set spy thriller to several publishers, and that he was using the pseudonym QR Markham for the book: 'Markham is, of course, a little nod to Kingsley Amis' 'Colonel Sun.'' I said I loved the nod. I was never under any illusions that it was *influenced* by Bond, and indeed by Cold War spy thrillers. So are my own novels, so I didn't see anything peculiar about it, and in fact welcomed it. I like 60s-set spy thrillers that are inspired by James Bond, obviously. You'll see from the recent thread here on who IFP should get to do the next Bond novel that I firmly suggested Markham/Rowan as the next Bond author! Little knowing he was in fact several of the last few, mashed together with some lovely prose from Charles McCarry to spice it all up.

I haven't read all of the post-Fleming Bond novels, clearly, for various reasons I think are valid: a lack of time and a fear doing so will limit my own creativity being two (the latter pretty ironic, considering). But I suspect that even if I have, my memory isn't that great and I still would have missed this. He also could just as well have chosen to rip off Modesty Blaise novels, or Matt Helm or Joe Gall or any other series like that, most of which I have read a few of but forgotten the details. I think his idea, though, was to basically assemble a 'cool' spy thriller that combined tons of elements of the genre he liked, from Bondian villains and girls to more realistic commentary on espionage. Very similar to The Killing Zone, but I think he just used better sources, and stitched them together with more intelligence. Still unforgivable, though.

Thanks for all the kind comments.

Be interesting to hear Rowan's side of things as I don't believe he thought he'd get away with this. Accepting that, what was his aim? Maybe he was making some point about how generic spy stories tend to be.

Incidentally, it used to be a fairly regular occurrence for feature writers to send well-known novels to publishers, and then print the rejection letters they received, causing huge embarrassment. Maybe that's one reason why publishers insist on approaches from agents these days.

Erica, while I don't see how he can think that he would not eventually be caught, other than that he was deluded, I don't buy for a minute that he was making any sort of point about how generic spy stories are. He told me he admired McCarry's writing, and used it for around half the book - and that writing is very far from being generic. I can also think of better ways of making that point than risking being sued by Ian Fleming Publications and Robert Ludlum's estate. He also plagiarized a short story in the Paris Review in 2002, and has yet to reveal the point of that. No, sorry, I don't buy that at all. I explain why more, and include a long passage from the novel, in the blog post I linked to yesterday. See if you think you would have spotted what I didn't! :)

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

Hmmm, well I have no idea about Rowan's mental state. Has he gone to ground? I ask as I'm surprised no one has pressed him for his side of things. Or have I missed the relevant piece?

BTW, I wonder if this isn't fairly common in genre novels? I'd be surprised if all the erotica and slush romance is original, particularly as most of it's published pseudonymously.

Yes, he's gone to ground. All internet presence deleted, anyway. Not sure why no local papers have found him, but there you go.

I suspect it may well be very common. I only realized today that Little, Brown also published a novel in 1980 that plagiarized The Rachel Papers! And pre-Google, this sort of thing was also much harder to spot - see my example of The Manchurian Candidate on my blog.

Some commentators find the episode amusing, as I must admit I do:

Quote :

What next? Will Quentin Rowan – QR Markham – slink into ignominious obscurity or will he brave it out, defending his work as an exercise in postmodernism taken to its logical extreme? That way celebrity might lie. He should give it a go.

Finally, let no one say that QR is without talent. Not only is he evidently a careful and judicious reader, but he has moments as a writer. Where, for example, James Bamford wrote the dull sentence, “he removed a key from his trouser pocket”, QR jazzed it up: “he removed a key from a small compartment inside the heel of his left shoe”. An improvement , as I’m sure you’ll agree.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/allanmassie/100057800/borrowing-from-bond-the-amazing-q-r-markham-plagiarism-scandal/

Yes, I saw that appallingly pretentious, deliberately contrary, ill-researched, muddle-headed and condescending piece: 'No doubt QR’s behaviour is very disreputable, but I admit to a feeling of admiration. He has evidently worked extremely hard, and industry is always worthy of praise.' Um... no. Not really. Not when it's plagiarism. There is nothing to glorify here, and the only person at fault is Quentin Rowan. It is that simple.

Alan Massie's piece is one of the ones I was responding to in my blog post. The one you might want to read as you are evidently interested in this? :) Seriously. It might make you see it a little differently. Link above.

I'm hoping that Quentin Rowan will turn out to be Johann Hari.

BTW, I see John Gardener's son also took exception to Allan Massie's piece.

I found on average for some strange reason it seems to be far easier to adopt a pose of amused repletion if one's ass isn't concerned at all by whatever. Proof of course would be the amount of relaxed good humour on display if the one in question was indeed affected himself. Must say that's quite an example of cheap dumbness IMO.

Perhaps you're not familiar with Massie's work. Relaxed and genial is his habitual style, whether he's writing about the revival of fascism or the hazards of pulp fiction.

Which is fine, of course - but he's still wrong. :) I can see it has some amusing aspects, of course, but Massie's piece is intellectually very lazy, in my view. I also find it odd how some people decide to side with the obvious sleazebag, as some kind of cool counter-intuitive thing. Some good examples of that can be seen on the CBn thread on this, I think. Yes, there's something amusing about it. But I'm very pleased the book is withdrawn, and don't see Quentin Rowan as some sort of counter-cultural publishing-sticking DJ Shadow post-modern genius whose hard work we should admire. He's just an intelligent but rather pathetic bookshop clerk whose father is a writer but can't write himself, and so he decided he would plagiarize a lot of others' novels. The pose that this is somehow cool, and either blaming those who he fooled and ripped off or somehow implying that there is something admirable and modern and wonderfully avant-garde in this, is in itself adolescent and Charles Highway-esque. Again, in my view, which of course is of someone who he fooled.

Yep, you're right. I'm really not familiar with him.

But I bet he'd be a good deal less forgiving and looking for intellectual subtext in essentially a plain old deceit and rip-off if it was his work that had been stolen and his reputation that had been damaged. Sorry 'bout that, old boy. But as far as I'm concerned such opinions are mainly cheap talk by dumb asses.

Hmmm, well I won't defend Rowan, but I would like to hear why he did it. As for Massie, he is a very prolific writer and I imagine it was more a case of 'we need 800 words in two hours' than him being being intellectually lazy. That kind of output is about filling space - 'Yesterday's Papers' and all that.

Well, some sort of explanation by Rowan really is missing here. But what would it be?

'I was hungry for fame, greedy for money and suffering from obesity of the mind (common civilisation malady) so I couln't be bothered to do my own work so I just put my name on the works of others. Dreadful sorry! Please forgive me!'

I think that'd not really change a lot.

Well, Massie makes a good point: the mechanics of taking the work of so many writers - as opposed to just the odd passage - and then melding them into a coherent plot sounds quite challenging. I'd be interested to take a look at the book just to see how he did it.

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

Mind? Of course not. It's good stuff.

Thanks, Loomis.

Erica, why don't you, um... read my blog post in which I show how he did it? Link in post above. :)

I also lose my command of grammar ranting at this absurd 'essay', which I find way off beam.

http://flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/plagiarism-update-disgraced-assassins-sells-like-hot-cakes/

Kennon wrote:

Well, some sort of explanation by Rowan really is missing here. But what would it be?

We may never know. He's disappeared.

I still stand by my theory that he did it because he wanted attention. Not the kind of attention that comes with being exposed for serial plagiarism, but the kind of attention that a legitimate writer gets.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Well, Massie makes a good point: the mechanics of taking the work of so many writers - as opposed to just the odd passage - and then melding them into a coherent plot sounds quite challenging.

It does, which is why I'd be interested in looking at ASSASSIN OF SECRETS.

I think this guy was somewhat delusional. It does seem he did really want to play at being a spy-novelist, despite the fact that he was bound to get caught, in this connected Google-books search-age we live in. It seems though that he set aside that reality, and soldiered on anyway, with the faint hope that he might get away with things, or at least with a determination to enjoy his notoriety while it might last. The glowing reviews he managed to solicit from the likes of Jeremy:P might have made it all worthwhile in the short term. But once the dream ended and he had to wake-up, he slithered away. He had his 15 minutes and now its gone. He may have hoped to extend the fantasy longer but it was not to be.

[quote="Erica Ambler"]Incidentally, it used to be a fairly regular occurrence for feature writers to send well-known novels to publishers, and then print the rejection letters they received, causing huge embarrassment. [quote] That is funny.

Quote :

QR Markham apologises for 'awful pantomime' of plagiarism
Assassin of Secrets author admits compulsion 'to conceal my own voice with the armour of someone else's words'

QR Markham, the debut novelist who stitched his spy novel Assassin of Secrets together from a multitude of sources, has spoken out for the first time since the plagiarism scandal broke last week, blaming his actions on an almost obsessive need "to conceal my own voice with the armour of someone else's words".

Markham, a pen name for the Brooklyn poet and bookseller Quentin Rowan, was exposed after readers on a James Bond forum spotted similarities to John Gardner's 007 novels in Assassin of Secrets. It was later discovered that he had also lifted passages from thriller writers Charles McCarry and Robert Ludlum, with practically the entire novel believed to be a patchwork of other writers' work.

Although his publishers in the US and the UK have pulled Assassin of Secrets from shelves, Rowan himself has remained silent as debate raged over his motives for plagiarism on such a wide scale, with – once the novel had reached a wide enough readership – no real chance of getting away with it. Was it just an elaborate prank? A postmodern comment on publishing? A form of performance art?

He has now, however, responded to the spy thriller author Jeremy Duns, who had provided a positive blurb for Assassin of Secrets and who spoke out about his embarrassment for not spotting the plagiarism last week. After apologising, Rowan told Duns that "I promise you that the inside of my head is not a pretty place right now and I am not sitting somewhere enjoying this or laughing about it".

In an email exchange published in full on Duns's blog, Rowan makes an attempt to explain why he did what he did. Aged 19, he says, a poem he wrote was chosen for The Best American Poetry 1996, and he took it as a sign he was meant to be a famous writer.

"However, unlike any normal person who works at something a long time and eventually gets good, I decided I had to be good then and there. Because I was already supposed to be the Best," he told Duns. "I didn't really plagiarise poetry, it was when I switched to fiction (God knows why) at the age of 20 that I began to distrust my own voice and began swiping other people's words or phrases because I thought they sounded better or more clever than my own. Perhaps if there had been no pressure to keep publishing it might have been different, but in my mind my course was set … There was a need to conceal my own voice with the armour of someone else's words."

This is what happened, he said, with Assassin of Secrets, which started life as "something fun and just for me", but when he began showing it to people who suggested changes, he "began to distrust the quality of whatever real work I'd done on it" and began to rip off spy novels in his collection.

"Somehow public scrutiny has always been the pressure point for me. Once I feel I'm doing the work for someone else's eyes, I begin stealing, because I want to impress," he said. "Once the book was bought, I had to make major changes in quite a hurry, basically rewrite the whole thing from scratch, and that's when things really got out of hand for me. I just didn't feel capable of writing the kinds of scenes and situations that were asked of me in the time allotted and rather than saying I couldn't do it, or wasn't capable, I started stealing again."

Sitting at his kitchen table with the books spread out in front of him, he typed them up word for word, looking for passages which would fit the plot he had dreamed up (which he then changed to make it more like McCarry's Second Sight "which was a whole lot more interesting").

"It felt very much like putting an elaborate puzzle together. Every new passage added has its own peculiar set of edges that had to find a way in. When I began to edit it for the publisher, that's when things really got out of hand. I was being asked to come up with whole new scenes to fit into the already stitched-up old ones. It really was like making Frankenstein's monster as people have commented. A kind of patchwork job."

Rowan says he went "deeper into denial" the more he did it, and "half of my time this past year was spent in a strange internal argument: Yes I can, no I can't. They'll figure it out! No they won't! It became like a strange schizophrenic form of gambling, and for some reason – viewing myself as a failed 'literary' writer – I saw this book as my 'last shot'. So even though what was left of my rational mind understood I would probably be found out, I still thought I had to bet it all on this one horse."

He rarely slept, he said, and felt "deathly ashamed" when signing books, "but I'd already thrown the dice so long ago by that point I felt there was nothing I could do but play the out the awful pantomime".

Rowan ends his confession with a wish that he could "do it all over", and another apology.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/15/qr-markham-apologises-plagiarism?newsfeed=true

Thanks Shark! Well that explains things then. The poor guy got in over his head and couldn't get out.

'Rowan says he went "deeper into denial" the more he did it, and "half of my time this past year was spent in a strange internal argument: Yes I can, no I can't. They'll figure it out! No they won't! It became like a strange schizophrenic form of gambling, and for some reason – viewing myself as a failed 'literary' writer – I saw this book as my 'last shot'. So even though what was left of my rational mind understood I would probably be found out, I still thought I had to bet it all on this one horse."

In other words, "I was desperate to be somebody other than myself".

Quentin gets an entire article devoted to his alcohol addiction.

Quote :

Confessions of a Plagiarist

The “fake” spy novelist behind the biggest episode of plagiarism in our time was addicted to stealing from other writers. Three weeks after confessing his crimes, he opens up for the first time about what really happened—and how he stayed sober.


Portrait of the "author"
Home page illustration by Danny Jock

By Quentin Rowan

Just over three weeks ago, I was publicly exposed as a thief—someone who stole other people's words and tried to pass them off as his own. I copied and pasted passages from some of my favorite authors of spy and thriller fiction—Charles McCarry, Robert Ludlum, John Gardner, Adam Hall—and made a kind of collage out of them that was published under the title Assassin of Secrets by Little, Brown. I used a pseudonym, Q.R. Markham, that was itself borrowed in part from Kingsley Amis. The book remained on the shelves for just five days before thousands of copies were recalled and pulped. It received some good reviews, was picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and even made a best-of-2011 list. It was a dream come true.

Then on Monday, November 7, members of a James Bond web forum discovered that sections of my book had been lifted verbatim from a John Gardner James Bond novel called Licence Renewed. The following day, a prominent spy novelist, Jeremy Duns, who had actually been kind enough to blurb Assassin, read the forum and contacted my publisher. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story detailing my crimes. My bright new life as a writer of espionage thrillers suffered a sudden, violent death.

They call a person like me a Plagiarist. It’s one of the harsher words we have in our language. Perhaps not up there with Pedophile or Rapist, but not as far behind as you'd think either. For years, I’d been dreading being called that word, and marveled all the while that I'd somehow avoided being caught. I associated its three syllables strongly with public humiliation and shame. And though that’s exactly what I’ve received, the fact is I’m still here, still standing, and still sober for 15 straight years.

But in a very short period of time—we’re talking hours—the revelation of my crimes turned my life upside-down. I lost my job in the Brooklyn bookstore where I was a part owner, my beautiful girlfriend left me (and the apartment we were going to share), and my future in the only field I know anything about, books, came to ignominious end. Many of my friends and associates turned their backs on me right away. Others stepped forward to provide comfort and solace. Some felt like they had probably never truly known me and it made them uncomfortable. Others didn't need an explanation at all. One thing, I believe, they all felt was confusion. Why does a person do something like this?

I was trying to write a short story for the first time when I came upon a paragraph I liked in a story by B.S. Johnson called “What did you say the Name of the Place was?” I suddenly realized it fit my narrative perfectly. It was so easy to do, as easy as picking up a drink.

It’s a fair question. And since I’m only three weeks removed from the implosion, I can only really speculate on the answer. Why did I do it? I think the truth goes back to the late '90s, when I was newly sober (counting days, actually) in a small, mid-western liberal arts college with an astonishing library. That’s where I became a word thief: skimming through collected issues of old magazines like The Transatlantic Review and New World Writing and Eugene Jolas' Transition, bound in crimson hardcover. I was 20 years old, and trying to write a short story for the first or second time when I came upon a paragraph I liked from a short story by B.S. Johnson called What did you say the Name of the Place was? It was so easy to do, as easy as picking up a drink, if you think about it. The lifted paragraph perfectly fit my narrative. And it temporarily assuaged the awful feeling I had in my head that I was no good as a writer. In retrospect, maybe that's when I transferred my obsession from drinking and drugs to plagiarism. My addiction didn’t disappear; it simply morphed into something else.

I first tried to get sober when I was 18. I'd smelled up my mother's house with Pernod Anis after a nasty break-up, been caught, sent back to school, got drunk on the plane, and spent the week in a black-out. When I came to, another student took me to my first AA meeting. I remember vividly that I didn't want to drink afterwards.

Have you ever heard someone at an AA meeting say that you'll lose anything you put before your sobriety? Well this is a story about precisely that. Some months after my first meeting a poem I'd written in high school was picked for the Best American Poetry anthology. I was 19. My ego had already left the building. I should have been at my happiest, getting into my studies and rejoicing at the blowjob heaven of youth and possibility in those playground groves of academe. Instead, I spent sleepless nights trying to recapture whatever oddball inspiration I'd had that landed me in the Anthology. I manically tried to publish more poems, and eventually picked up a drink again. That run lasted several months, and it was not fun. I tried to keep my drinking secret from friends who'd seen me get sober, but I was a violent, fall down drunk. Suddenly I was back to paying people off for having broken their windows the night before, or their dishes, and generally making apologies for things I didn't remember doing.

One night in the middle of January 1997, I was at a dance party in someone's living room. I was guzzling Genesee Cream Ale but couldn't get drunk. Everyone was saying, "Let's dance all night!" But I knew I couldn't dance all night. That little thought, trivial as it sounds, was my moment of clarity. If only I had recognized some more "can’ts" at that moment. The second time around I did all the things you're not supposed to do: met a girl, got into a relationship, found a sponsor who I thought was really cool rather than a good AA'er, and, most crucially, instead of taking it one day at a time I got obsessed once more with literary fame. The one thing I did manage to do is stay sober: it's been nearly fifteen years.

Over that same time period, I've fought a mostly losing battle with plagiarism. We’ve all heard in meetings the description of the alcoholic as the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. That was—is—me in a nutshell. I wanted recognition, I wanted praise, but I had no faith in my own abilities. I had grown so used to being thought of as a wunderkind that a kind of false self emerged, one that was confident and hard-working and thrived on adulation and encouragement. It was an image that was completely at odds with the fear, self-doubt, and dishonesty that occupied my skull.

Between the first piece of writing I stole in the library all those years ago and my fake spy thriller, I struggled with plagiarism in the same way sober people struggle with smoking, sex addiction, food addiction, and gambling.

I was a voracious reader and always marked passages I particularly liked or wished I'd written. Though the number of pieces of writing I published—poetry, fiction, book reviews—is finite, the number of sources I stole from seemed endless. For example, my short story Bethune Street, which appeared in The Paris Review, contained phrases and passages I’d lifted from Graham Greene, Robert Stone, Stephen Wright, Janet Hobhouse, and Howard Nemerov. That's all been discovered now. If you go online and Google my name you can find all kinds of Internet scholars making lists of the cribbed sources.

Between the first piece of writing I stole in the library all those years ago and the debut of my fake spy thriller, I struggled with plagiarism in the same way others struggle with smoking, sex addiction, food addiction, and gambling. Especially gambling, where you're always chasing your last thrilling high, regardless of the awful consequences. I tried to practice the first step with my obsession many times, to admit I was powerless over it and it was making my life unmanageable, but it never worked. I just couldn't let go of it. My whole identity had become that of an aspiring writer. I wanted to be famous.

Somehow, I managed to reduce the theft in my mind to a much more abstract thing. I was taking words that I wished were mine from writers that I loved. Charles McCarry, author of The Tears of Autumn, is my favorite writer of all time, in either spy fiction or literary fiction. Was I conscious of the fact that something I was doing would affect him in the real world? The answer is no. I couldn’t see that far ahead. I wouldn't let myself. Through a maze-like process of denial that I knew so well fro the rooms of AA, I was able somehow to push those thoughts to the background. The same goes for the rest of the long list of thriller writers I plagiarized: John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Adam Hall, Robert Ludlum, David Morrell, Daniel Silva, and more. These were individuals who had brought me pleasure and enjoyment as a reader; and had I been able to think of them as anything other than satellites in my monomaniacal orbit, I don't think I could have done it.

It wasn't any fun: I would look at the books on my shelf and think, "Oh, that's a great book. Oh, Wait a minute, I stole from it." And then I’d have to hide the book somewhere so it didn’t remind me I’d stolen from it. If the books were people, it would be akin to domestic abuse: I was hurting the ones I loved.

Throughout the process of compiling the series of unattributed quotations that made up Assassin of Secrets, my mind would occasionally turn to this: what if I'm found out? Since the plagiarism story broke, many people have speculated that this was a form of self-sabotage. I would probably agree. There was some kind of built in death wish to the whole process. Did I want to be caught? As hard as it's been, it's been a massive relief, spiritually, to know I never have to do it again. In AA, they say you're only as sick as your secrets.

So I guess I was pretty sick.

Before my book came out, whenever I thought about being discovered, I thought about killing myself.

Would I jump off the Williamsburg Bridge? Take pills? Slit my wrists? But when the dreaded call from my publisher finally arrived, I knew I couldn't end my life. In the five minutes between hearing I’d been busted on the James Bond forum and the big conference call with the publisher, I had to make a choice. I opened my window, and thought about climbing out. Then I paused for a moment. Maybe I'm just a wimp, but in that moment I realized there were too many people I loved on this earth to leave it. I'm still alive mostly because of AA.

So I shut the window and told the truth. I didn't deny anything. Some allegations had been made. Jeremy Duns, an author I admired and had, quite unfairly, asked to blurb the book, was the person who took it to my publisher. They told me what the allegations were and I copped to all of them. It was liberating. My publisher thanked me for not dragging things out any longer, and an hour or so later they sent out a press release stating that the book contained plagiarized passages and that all booksellers should return their copies. Customers could return their copies for a refund.

I spent most of that day crying. I called my parents and told them. I called my business partners at the bookstore and told them. I called my girlfriend and told her. I called my sponsor and told him.

My parents cried. My girlfriend left our new apartment and never came back. My sponsor said, "The only person who cared about whether you published a spy novel was you. It didn't matter at all to the rest of us. We're just your friends and care about you whatever you do."

People were calling me name I probably deserved to be called, like the worst plagiarist in history, a fake, a fraud, a douche, and a poor dumb bastard. They said I balls of steel and brains of lead, and looked like a fat John Lennon or Carlos the Jackal.

The realization that I was loved already and didn't have to fight to earn that love was mind-boggling. It was quite the opposite of my notion that I had to struggle to show the world I was worthy. As the days went by, however, my sponsor’s words proved to be true: people in my support group, both AA and non-AA, came out of the woodwork to wish me well, to check-in, to take me out to coffee. It was like being a newcomer all over again. The way it makes your heart hurt to see that people genuinely care.

The media and the internet called me names I probably deserved to be called, like the worst plagiarist in history, a fake, a fraud, a douche, and a poor dumb bastard. They said that I had balls of steel and brains of lead, and looked like a fat John Lennon or Carlos the Jackal. One commenter encouraged people to cut off my fingers. Another responded that "snuffing this loser" wouldn't be worth the "wear and tear on my silencer or the bullet." And this one, a favorite: "Odds are I could just hand him the gun and (at this point) he'd do it himself."

Everyone loves a train-wreck.

I was receiving so many phone calls from the press that I had to turn my phone off for a few days. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to write my friends on Facebook (when I still had a Facebook account) and even used an old college friend as bait. Everyone who left messages was very reasonable. Just wanted to chat, off the record, etc. My poor co-workers at the bookstore were especially bombarded. Certainly no one was prepared for that kind of attention. Especially me.

But in the rooms of AA, and among friends and family, people responded with love and concern. I suppose it's easy to see something in black and white if you don't know the individual involved personally. It's easier to make moral pronouncements rather than see human flaw or human weakness. I was that way before I knew I was an alcoholic. Before I knew this was a disease, I saw myself purely as a screw-up. Morally weak. Perhaps one day plagiarism will be seen, if not as a disease, at least as something pathological.

And it is thanks to the rooms of AA that I am still here, on my feet, on a different coast, starting my life over at 35. I guess it begins with a confessional on The Fix.

So here I am, ready to dodge bullets from the folks in the comments section. Fire away.

http://www.thefix.com/content/confessions-plagiarist-Quentin-rowan9278?page=all

Also of note, from August, three months before the exposé .

Quote :

THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach and ASSASSIN OF SECRETS by Q.R. Markham have both been nominated for the Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award.

This is an annual award given out to the best debut novel of the year. Last year’s winner was picked up by Publisher’s Weekly, The Huffington Post, Reuters, Shelf Awareness and others. Nominees receive special placement in the book club catalogs and online and the winner of the award is given a cash prize.

This year’s nominees are:
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Assassin of Secrets by Q.R. Markham
Bent Road by Lori Roy
Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner
Miss Timmins’ School for Girls by Nayana Currimbhoy
Bed by David Whitehouse

The Art of Fielding (International): A Novel
Chad Harbach
Trade Paperback — B 9780316187510 $12.99
September 7, 2011
Open Market

To see fantastic advance praise for The Art of Fielding follow this link to a post on our website.

Assassin of Secrets
Q.R. Markham
Trade Paperback — 9780316176460 $14.99
November 3, 2011
Open Market, Excluding Europe, Exclusive Asia

In Q.R. Markham‘s Assassin of Secrets, 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.

http://www.hbg-international.com/?p=7309

When's the award given out, and can a novel be pulled from the list of nominees?