The Insincerest Form of Flattery

Coming to this blog for up-to-the-minute analysis of the day's events would be like asking your Magic 8 Ball who shot J.R. Timely I am not, nor am I particularly analytical (unless perhaps you'd like to debate the merits of post-revival Doctor Who, in which case I have a thesis or two I'd be happy to lay on you -- like, was Russell T Davies trying to turn the Doctor into Jesus or what?).

Yet every so often I'm dragged kicking and screaming into the here and now. Usually it's to promote something. Occasionally it's because I want to share a recent(ish) experience. And once or twice it's been because I actually felt inspired to turn off Doctor Who, roll up my sleeves and get frakkin' topical on y'all.

Well, once or twice is now twice or thrice. Prepare yourself for a blog post that's been ripped from the headlines. Last week's headlines, mind you. And not big ones. Maybe 24 point on, like, page 12. But headlines!

Such as this one from the Wall Street Journal -- Spy Thriller: 'An Instant Classic' Vanishes Amid Plagiarism Charges. You can either click on the link if you're unfamiliar with the Quentin Rowan/Q.R. Markham saga or skim through the rather haphazard overview that follows shortly. (If you are familiar with -- and already sick of -- the Rowan/Markham thing, skip down to where it says "And the beginning." Or just forget about me and go see what Marmaduke's up to today.)

So. There was this dude. Quentin Rowan. And his first novel came out this month under the pseudonym "Q.R. Markham." It was this retro spy thing called Assassin of Secrets and it got great blurbs from top-notch thriller writers like Jeremy Duns and Greg Rucka and Duane Swizzlebizpovichinski. The critics loved it, and though the initial print run was only 6,500 -- roughly the number of James Patterson books the printers throw away every day because the dust jacket's been over-trimmed half a millimeter -- it seemed destined for a few best-of-the-year lists and perhaps even some award nominations. Hurrah! Well done, Mr. Rowan!

Only not. It was actually well done, Mr. McCarry, and well done, Mr. Gardner, and well done, Mr. Ludlum, etc. etc. etc. (and etc. etc. etc. some more). The only thing Rowan had done well was pick passages to steal from at least 13 other books and then stitch them into something cohesive. Which is quite a feat -- like quilting up a beautiful Old Glory out of the scraps you found in the dumpster behind Jo-Ann Fabric. But still, you don't pull that off and then say, "Like my new flag? I designed it myself." No. Because there's this woman named Betsy Ross who's going to kick your thieving ass, and I for one will be cheering her on.

Let us all now pause to imagine a gray-haired matron in a bonnet and shawl bitch-slapping this guy until he cries.

Ahhhhh. I like it.

Back to our story. Some sharp-eyed readers noticed Rowan's cribs and Duns spotted their discussions online and alerted Rowan's publisher and the publisher pulled the book and that's when we got all those 24-point headlines on page 12. The End.

And the beginning. Because very quickly the headlines started to change. Instead of "Unscrupulous Jackass Brings Chaos, Embarrassment Upon Publisher, Colleagues," we got this: 'Assassin of Secrets': Plagiarism scandal or cutting-edge work of genius? And this: Brooklyn Plagiarism Scandal Is a Hoax. And this: The New Yorker Thinks This A-Hole Has "Done a Bang-Up Job" Critiquing the Creative Vacuum at the Center of the Modern Thriller. (Actually, that last one wasn't a headline, it's more of a synopsis. The real headline was too boring.) If you scroll down through the comments on these stories (always a dangerous thing, I know), you'll find plenty of folks chiming in with sentiments of the "What's the big deal?" and "The guy's a genius!" varieties. And just this morning, I've learned, the host of this show was asking, in all seriousness, what Rowan had done wrong.

W.

T.

F?

Do we really need to have this conversation? Does someone actually have to step forward and say, "It's despicable to take credit for someone else's work"? Should that person also be obligated to explain, at length and in depth, why you shouldn't steal candy from babies or kick sleeping dogs?

I guess so. And that makes me sad.

So let me say it: It's despicable to take credit for someone else's work. Quite obviously, I have no problem with art that takes its inspiration from other art. I love that, in fact. You take something you admire and you put a new spin on it -- FUN!!! At the same time, though, you need to give props. My prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is dedicated to Jane Austen. The first name in the acknowledgments for Holmes on the Range is Arthur Conan Doyle. This is the respect you show to those who've inspired you. It's the respect you owe to any writer because, if you're a writer yourself, you know how very, very painful it can be to get those freakin' words on the freakin' page. To steal the product of that pain is to deny it.

Quentin Rowan was making money off the hard work of others, but to me that's not the worst of it. A writer has to tear words, bloody and screaming, from his brain. (Nice image, eh? Can you tell I've written zombie novels?) That's a chunk of him- or herself in that book. To copy and paste it and put your own name on it is, to me, an act of contemptible betrayal. How could any artist steal another's work when they've felt the agony of creation first-hand?

And yes -- I know we're talking about spy novels here, not "Requiem Mass in D Minor." But that doesn't matter. Art is art, stealing is stealing. And while we're on the subject of spy novels, let me add this: Rowan's con job is in no way a reflection on modern thrillers or the people who write and edit them. Despite all the gloating and schadenfreude from certain quarters, no one is a fool for having been fooled. Because:

(A) Assassin of Secrets isn't a typical modern thriller. It's a Cold War spy adventure that seemed to be paying homage to the great Ian Fleming tradition. Reading it, you'd think it was meant to feel a little Old School and pastiche-y. That was supposed to be the fun of it.

(B) Most of the novels Rowan stole from were well over twenty years old. I simply don't buy that anyone (aside from a hardcore fan) can be expected to remember passages from a book they read so long ago. Especially when, again, you'd be thinking that this new book should feel a little familiar, in a comfortable old shoe kind of way.

(C) What Rowan did was crazy. He landed a legitimate agent who sold his book to a major publisher with whom he signed a binding contract in which he guaranteed that he'd written everything in the book himself. Not only will he have to give his advance back, he's set himself up for a doozy of a lawsuit. Printing books is expensive, you know, as is shipping them around the country, pulping them and giving readers refunds. Bringing all that down upon yourself is self sabotage at such an insane level I don't see how it could have been anticipated.

(D) As Jeremy Duns has pointed out elsewhere, Rowan also slipped plagiarized material into literary journals and even the Huffington Post (as detailed here), but no one takes that as proof that, say, The Paris Review has become a parody of itself. Yet somehow it's "delicious" when the editor of a genre book is hoodwinked -- and perhaps put out of a job. No, I say. That's not delicious. On the contrary, the taste it leaves in my mouth is very, very bad indeed.

O.K. I think this is out of my system now. I let this kooky scandal distract me the past week when I should have been focusing on something else: outlining my next novel. It's hard work, this sitting-and-thinking-thinking-thinking thing. I'm creating something out of nothing, and it hurts.

But it's my pain...and by god, no one better try to call it their own.

Comments

[Mark]

I hadn't heard about this one at all, but even before I got to your thoughts, I was with you.

But it goes back to schools, where parents and students don't see anything wrong with plagarising papers. And I've got the friends who are teachers to prove it.

It's sad that people don't consider stealing of art to be stealing any more.

Now go outline that next novel. I want to be able to read the words from all that blood, sweat, and tears.

[Amy Dobek]

Bravo, my dear. Your essays always rock. I'm in agreement with you completely. My own best friend argued with me just last Christmas that she should have the right to download anything out there that she wants to. She went all self-righteous and nutty about the Metallica/Napster lawsuit because she felt that if she wanted their songs, she should have them. I was FLABBERGASTED (such an underused word, IMHO). I simply could not make her see reason. Could. Not. and that shocked me as much as anything.

Mark is right in that it's a parent problem (though I don't blame schools). I am in a master's program and worked on a paper recently with a fellow student did not know how to properly cite her work. She put quotes around a paraphrase, did not put them around a direct quote and basically butchered the English language (but that's another lengthy issue). She was absolutely ignorant and worse, apathetic about her ignorance. Stunning.

[Steve]

I hear you, guys. It does seem like we've done some backsliding on plagiarism as a culture. And maybe it is tied in with those mp3s your friend likes to download, Amy. It's so easy to steal these days it doesn't even feel like stealing. (The audio versions of my novels are available at illegal torrent sites all over the Web. Who knows how much money that's cost me? Me with the two kids and the dog who needs surgery! For shame!) But there's a bright side. As we saw here, technology has made it easier to *catch* thieves, too. So take heed, would be plagiarizers -- Google's got your number. Do yourselves a favor and put in the effort to WRITE, dammit.

[Jeff Q.]

Having actually read Rowan's "book" before it was shown to be a fraud, the revelation was not terribly surprising.
I read a ton of books and his just lacked a soul. The main character had no personality and was just a straw man to go through the motions. It felt off the whole way through and was a struggle to finish. That the book was a Frankenstein's monster was a definite "a-ha" moment.
I get that the people who blurbed and reviewed the book liked it, but I have to think it was more for what it was suppose to be, some type of 60's era throwback, than for being a novel that hung together in any great way.
The whole thing is such a mind blowingly stupid thing to do, it's still hard to believe.

[Steven T.]

Frankly, I'm always shocked that some one would think this type of cut and paste job is easier than writing an actual novel. I could have written something like Markham's book in a couple of months. Cutting and pasting would easily have taken me a couple of years.

[Brian Thornton]

Great essay, Steve. Absolutely agree with you on this. Gotta ask though, if it's possible for me as a teacher to do a two minute Google search to root out the otherwise casual and rampant plagiarism of my students (likely far more tech-savvy than Q.R., given that he's more a member of our generation than of theirs), wouldn't you think that an editor at Little, Brown might bother to do the same thing?

I'm pretty sure McCarry's "Tears of Autumn" is available for searches through Google Books, for example, and I'm positive Ludlum's works are. Who in this day and age, doesn't get something this retro vetted?

[daisyj]

I'm going to take it one further, and say that I don't think what he did was even that impressive, or that unique to spy thrillers. I'd bet money that if I had the time and the ego, I could take a couple dozen literary novels from twenty years ago, outline them thoroughly and then assemble a reasonably cohesive new novel from the parts and pass it off as my original work.

And agree that the disturbing part is less that he did it-- arrogant, greedy assholes are hardly a newly-discovered species-- than that so many people want to celebrate or apologize for him. I don't care how little respect you have for a genre, you should at least respect the authors enough as creative people to not treat their work as some sort of interchangeable factory product.

[Jonathan Turner]

The blogerati notwithstanding, this is not a hoax. This is a fraud.

A hoax is done with the expectation that it will be found out, and with the intention of making a point. The "Social Text" hoax of some years back is a relevant example; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair .

A fraud is perpetrated to benefit the fraudster, at the expense of others. That was evidently Rowan's intention. To argue that there's something laudable in this is equivalent to saying that the man who steals your life's savings has done you a favor by pointing out your vulnerabilities.

[Steve]

Interesting insight, Jeff -- and it totally makes sense that Rowan's protagonist would lack soul. If he had any personality at all, the Cuisinart approach couldn't have worked.

I agree that this must've been a *lot* of hard work, Steven. Which makes it all the more crazy.

I hear you on the Googling, Brian, but I still think we should cut the editors some slack. If it happens *again*, however, the publishing company will only have itself to blame.

I'm with you on the disrespect to genre writers, Daisy. As you point out, this could've just as easily been done with a bunch of decades-old "literary" novels. Hmmm...but I wonder. Would we then be gloating that the literary emperor was wearing no clothes?

I hadn't heard of the "Social Text" hoax, Jonathan. Interesting stuff. I suppose I should stay consistent and condemn any attempt to abuse an editor's good faith. But still...that's pretty funny.

[Obscure Perfessor]

I teach history at Obscurity State University of the Midwest. And I really believe I get almost no plagiarism from my students.

We have an institutional subscription to something called turnitin.com. It checks papers not only on the google, but against journal articles, classmates, and anyone who has ever turned in a paper to the database. And I tell them if there's plagiarism, I drop the F on them and file a formal report with the provost recommending suspension.

The good news is that I haven't had a plagiarism case since using turnitin. They get it. Problem: access to the service costs us about $1O,000 a year, which is ok for a university but not for a publisher.

[Patrick Sandberg]

To those that would defend Rowan, please send me your paychecks. I am now taking credit for your work, be it garbage hauling, novel writing, or brain surgeoning. See what I did there? Isn't that clever of me? Bet you wish you'd thought of it first! Perhaps in order to cover his legal expenses, Quentin Rowan and Jayson Blair can co-author the next J.K. Rowling book together.

[Richard Prosch]

Good post, Steve. As you (and folks above) have alluded to, the amoral stance of the culture is perhaps even more disturbing than this slimeball's antics. Was a time in my salad days when such ambivalence toward wrong-doin' would've made me shrug, maybe sigh, maybe throw up my hands. Now it just makes me want to throw up.

[Steve]

Given that several more cases of plagiarism have been uncovered recently, Obscure Professor, I'm guessing publishers are going to start ponying up for turnitin (or something like it).

http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/11/ravens-bride.html

Plagiarism detection services might be expensive, but recalling and pulping books is going to cost more in the long run.

I think both Rowan and Blair should go to work for James Frey, Pat. He's in the market for schmuck writers eager for an easy sellout:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Frey#Full_Fathom_Five

And believe me, Rich -- I'm trying my best not to barf, too. In fact, just typing the words "James Frey" makes me feel a little...a little...oh, no!

BLLEEEEAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

[Eoin Riedy]

Reminds me of a book on kitsch I read a long time ago (no, not the one with the naked woman on the cover that is always turning up in used bookstores). Referring to pornographic writing, as opposed to genuine erotic literature, it noted that pornography has only a perfunctory beginning, the bulk of the work being the middle, and little or no real ending. Moreover, the middle is generally a pastiche of other pieces; much less material is actually written than is published. It really doesn't matter to the readers, of course. Perhaps Mr. Rowan missed his true calling.