“I Struggled with Plagiarism in the Same Way Others Struggle with Smoking, Sex Addiction, Food Addiction, and Gambling”

Quentin Rowan, whose briefly acclaimed first spy thriller, Assassin of Secrets--published under the pseudonym Q.R. Markham--was ingloriously yanked from store shelves amid allegations that he had plagiarized parts of it from more famous works of fiction, continues to find excuses for his behavior. As Salon reports today,

In a new piece (ostensibly by Rowan himself) on the sobriety-centric site The Fix, Rowan blames it all on a manifestation of “addiction.” After admitting the high cost of his transgressions--“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”--Rowan traces the roots of his behavior back to the 1990s, when, he says, he was newly sober and “came upon a paragraph I liked from a short story by B.S. Johnson.” Before he fully realized the implications of his actions, he’d “transferred my obsession from drinking and drugs to plagiarism.”

Click here to read Rowan/Markham’s full mea culpa in The Fix.