There’s been quite a recent buzz about QR Markham’s recently published book “Assassin of Secrets,” but for all the wrong reasons — it’s apparently plagiarized from a blend of a dozen spy fiction authors including James Bamford, Charles McCarry, and Graeme Greene.
The author, whose real name is Quentin Rowan, has expressed profound regret, and explains in a comment that it’s all a result of wanting too much, too soon. In fact, he’s never really been into writing his own material, as plagiarism checks on his previous work also show plenty of evidence of cut-and-pasting. Even his pen name is borrowed: “Markham” was Kingsley Amis’ nom de plume when he wrote his James Bond novel, Colonel Sun.
The publisher, Little, Brown, is in the stew as well, as this is the second book in five years they’ve published that has been found to be largely copied — the first was “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” by Kaavya Viswanathan, which was plagiarized from several books by Megan McCafferty. Funnily enough, “Assassin of Secrets” is apparently quite a good read — after all, the text has an excellent pedigree — and the copies that were sold before it was recalled are going for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
Putting aside the outlandish idea that Little, Brown actively seeks out scandal by publishing books it knows to be plagiarized, it seems extraordinary that nobody noticed before it hit the shelves. Could this result from insufficient attention by overworked editors? Or is it genuinely very hard to detect plagiarism just by reading through a book?
Which leads me to wonder, Why don’t book publishers routinely run their authors’ manuscripts through plagiarism checking software?
A check for plagiarism seems like a trivial step for a publisher who will ultimately invest a huge amount of resources. In the long run, checking for plagiarism may save a great deal of embarrassment and lost revenue. Is it because the plagiarism detection software companies have focused on academic publishing and not the trade market? Or is it because there are cultural differences in attitude towards plagiarism between academic publishing and other writing domains?
Little, Brown did recall all copies of both books, which isn’t a laissez-faire response — but perhaps this story shows there is less willingness to uncover plagiarism committed by the authors of fiction as opposed to the authors of fact.
Tim. There appear to be two distinct notions of plagiarism concerned here: the unacknowledged attribution of words, and the unacknowledged attribution of ideas. In the case of Assassin of Secrets, the author appears to have committed both.
I’m less concerned with the attribution of ideas in fiction. Novels and film are largely composed of borrowed story lines, so formulaic in their reuse, that many are cliché. In these cases, does the original expression of an unoriginal text really matter?
On the other hand, originality is highly valued in science, and needs to be, if we are to advance scientific knowledge. The sociologist of science, Robert K. Merton, described it thusly:
[1] Merton, R. K. (1957). Priorities in scientific discovery: a chapter in the sociology of science. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 635-659. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2089193
Posted by Phil Davis | Nov 21, 2011, 10:46 amIf originality is so important, then why is everyone so excited by the PLoS ONE system of peer review lite, which leaves the issue of originality to the side as a criterion for publication?
Posted by Sandy Thatcher | Nov 22, 2011, 2:23 pmGood question, Sandy.
The skeptic would argue that journals that put no weight on novelty cannot advance our understanding of science. The proponent would argue that science is more like assembling a puzzle, and each piece adds to a greater understanding of the entire picture.
Posted by Phil Davis | Nov 22, 2011, 4:38 pmJust to be clear, you’re not saying that le Carré was a plagiarist. Correct?
Posted by Matt Marsteller | Nov 21, 2011, 11:24 amGraham Greene! ack!!
Posted by Gillian | Nov 22, 2011, 1:58 pmYou don’t even need to use a plagiarism-detection system to check out possible instances of copyright infringement. Just doing a Google search on some select sentences is easy for any editor to do, and that can unearth infringement readily. In fact, such checking is so easy now with Google Scholar that many copyeditors include spot-checking of quotations for accuracy by this method.
Plagiarism, as the appropriation of others’ ideas without attribution, is trickier ground, for sure. I documented one prominent instance by showing how Robert Darnton drew his idea for a multilayered, multidimensional document in his classic NYRB essay titled “The New Age of the Book” (March 1999) from an article written years earlier by Cornell librarian, Ross Atkinson. I know how Darnton acquired this idea because it was I who told him about Atkinson’s article. I don’t know whether Darnton ever went to look at the article, but there can be no doubt whatsoever that this was the source of what he talked about in his NYRB piece. But I am quite prepared to believe that Darnton simply forgot where this idea had come from since it was communicated to him by me in the course of a lunchtime conversation. I have no problem believing that Darnton simply forgot where the idea had originated, so that he could not include a citation to the source. Was Darnton therefore a plagiarist? By intention, I would say no; by inadvertence, I would say yes.
I lay out this comparison in detail in “A Post-Mortem for Gutenberg-e; Or, Why Ross Atkinson’s Dream Is Still a Dream,” Against the Grain (January 2009), which can be accessed here: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html.
Posted by Sandy Thatcher | Nov 22, 2011, 2:35 pm