“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.

“I Want to Impress”

You knew this was going to happen--eventually. Quentin Rowan, aka Q.R. Markham, whose debut spy novel, Assassin of Secrets, was yanked from store shelves after it became clear that parts of it were plagiarized, has begun to apologize for his actions. Not in a big way, but in a strangely satisfying, small manner. UK thriller writer Jeremy Duns, who had taken an early interest in Assassin in Secrets, has recently carried on a correspondence with Rowan/Markham, in which the latter doesn’t justify his actions, but seeks to explain them. Here’s part of what he wrote:

When I was 19 a poem I wrote in high school was chosen for The Best American Poetry 1996. Up until that time I was an indifferent writer, a dabbler really, at the best of times. I was in college and like everyone trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. (Mostly I just wanted to play Rock music.) I took this anthology business as a sign that I 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. I didn’t really plagiarize poetry, it was when I switched to fiction (God knows why) at the age of twenty 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.

Many times through my twenties I stopped trying to write altogether, because once I got started on something that felt good enough for publication, I would inevitably start wanting to make it “better” and start stealing things. Therefore, some things I did in the past ten years are perfectly clean and others, obviously, aren’t. There was a need to conceal my own voice with the armor of someone else's words.

This is what happened with Assassin of Secrets, or Spy Safari. It started out as something fun and just for me. A much sillier, more parodic kind of thing. ( I should state that it was initially inspired by my long-time love and study of the genre, not any kind of contempt for it.) Then I decided maybe I could do something with it. But the minute I got an agent and started showing it to people who suggested changes, I began to distrust the quality of whatever real work I’d done on it. So I started ripping off passages from spy novels in my collection that fit. 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.

You can read the entirety of Rowan/Markham’s explanation here, as well as his responses to some of Duns’ excellent follow-up questions about the plagiarized novel.

(Hat tip to GalleyCat.)

Copy That

The mini-scandal surrounding first-time novelist Q.R. Markham (aka Quentin Rowan), who’s been accused of plagiarizing the work of previous authors in his new spy thriller, Assassin of Secrets, continues to be fed by the print and online press. The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the controversy here, while Edward Champion looks at the numerous read-alike passages here.

READ MORE: “Q.R. Markham’s Plagiarism Puzzle,” by Macy Halford (The New Yorker); “Assassin of Secrets” and “Highway Robbery: The Mask of Knowing in Assassin of Secrets,” by Jeremy Duns (The Debrief); “The Markham Affair,” by Duane Swierczynski (Secret Dead Blog); “Borrowing from Bond: The Amazing Q.R. Markham Plagiarism Scandal,” by Allan Massie (The Telegraph).

From Sources Near and Far

• This is a sad and pretty bizarre turn of events. “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,” reports Jacket Copy, the Los Angeles Times’ books blog. “The book was a first novel from Q.R. Markham. ... 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.” Mulholland Books is a fine publisher, and there was very much to like about Markham's first novel. I’m sorry to see this plagiarism scandal erupt. Read more about the affair here and here.

• Check out the latest update of the Thrilling Detective Web Site.

• Blogger Ivan G. Shreve Jr. reminds me, it was six decades ago this last weekend that “the film Detective Story [starring Kirk Douglas] was released to theaters--a movie adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s 1949 Broadway stage hit about a dedicated police detective ... who’s a little too dedicated, to the point of harboring a world view in which matters are dealt with in purely black or white terms.” Shreve provides a thorough write-up about that 1951 film here.

• I don’t think I ever saw the 1988 TV pilot Remo Williams, based on the series of action/adventurer paperbacks, The Destroyer, created by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir. However, David Foster recently found a couple of clips from that teleflick on YouTube and has now posted them in his Permission to Kill blog. I’m not sure I am a better person for having watched these belatedly ...

• Meanwhile, Yvette Banek points me toward a number of old Charlie Chan movies available on the Web.

• Once more, flip-flopping Republican presidential contender Willard Mitt Romney demonstrates that he’s completely out of touch with reality. Only someone, like him, worth more than $250 million would refer to federal employees--who, by the way, do not make more money than he does--as “servants.”

• R.I.P., former heavyweight boxing champ Joe Frazier.

• I mentioned last month that British author P.D. James has penned a crime-fiction follow-up to Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice. Now James tells The Daily Telegraph “why she decided to combine her two literary passions to produce a sequel which opens with a brutal murder at Pemberley.” (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• The intersection of P.G. Wodehouse and crime fiction?

• Finally, author Max Allan Collins offers a heartfelt tribute to his friend, actor Michael Cornelison, who appeared in such TV series as Remington Steele and Hill Street Blues, and also “play[ed] Pat Chambers to Stacy Keach on the two New Adventures of Mike Hammer audio novels,” before dying last month at age 59.