the Assassin of Secrets Who Loved Me

Cafe Society
1

This was on the font page of the Wall Street Journal today. Someone calling himself Q.R. Markham has published a spy novel that “feels very much like James Bond” – because, well, it is. He plagiatrized directly from some John Gardner and Robert Benson Bond books (although not, as is so far known, from Fleming’s original novels), as well as from a host of other spy novels.

even better, apparently everything he wrote has stuff plagiarized from elsewhere:

http://debrief.commanderbond.net/topic/60689-assassin-of-secrets/page__pid__1171360
Markham, by the way is, as every Bond fan knows, the last name of the pseudonym used by Kingsley Amis in writing the first Bond novel after Fleming’s death, Coloenl Sun. but Q.R. Markham didn’t indicate that his work was supposed to be a pastiche or anything – it seems to be a straightforward case of plagiarism.

even the blurb he wrote for the Huffington Post on writing the book was cribbed from elsewhere, and The Huffington Post has pulled it from their website.

2

Maybe he did it unconciously?

Sometimes Stephen king gets his ideas from other stories, whether consciously or not. as i’ve mentioned before, you can sometime tell where it came from.

– Robert Sheckley was surprised when he read King’s The Running Man, and had to call Harlan Ellison. He was upset because the plot was plagiaristically similar to Sheckley’s The Prize of Peril, written in 1958 (and actually made into a German TV movie in 1970), long before King wrote The Running Man. They ultimately decided that King had probably read the story and forgotten about it, retaining the basic idea.

3

So does anyone else kinda wanna read the book and see if its any good?

4

Not a chance. Go to the sites I linked to – the quotes are almost word-for0-word identical. You don’yt just happen to fall into a situation like that.

I’ve remarked about King’s lifting of ideas befoe on this Board, including Sheckley’s Prize of Peril. There are plenty of other cases. But King never came close to copying the words of his likely inspiration.

5

No, seriously - this guy didn’t just rip off plot elements from disparate sources and use them to “create” something. There are sections as long as* six pages *which are reproduced verbatim, except for the replacement of characters’ names.

6

Cite for that last. This is from an author/reviewer whose effusive praise for the book was (embarassingly) blurbed on its jacket. He explains himself in his blog and describes going back and looking at it more carefully.

7

Heh. Click on my link. :slight_smile:

8

More news! Apparently the Book of the Month Club nominated Markham for their First Fiction award for best debut novel.

Markham stuff is being pulled rapidly from the Net, so here’s the relevant quiote:

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

Lots of foks are asking if this is for real plagiarism of some sort of meta-writing stunt. The consensus seems to be that Markham really did submit this in good faith, and that Mulholland Books is eating the cost of the recall, and not being very fond of Markham.

Here’s one of the more interesting blogs on it:

then there’s this:

I really do have to wonder, though, how easy or difficult is it to stitch together a coherent story from practically verbatim snatches (changing only the character names and occasional tenses) of other books.
Maybe we can make an SDMB contest of it – Construct A Story Using Only Parts of Other Writer’s Stories. Something made of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and H. P. Lovecraft would be irresistable.

9

Look, stealing ideas and plots is a time honored practice. There’s nothing shameful about turning in the 10,000th rehashed novel about cold war spies, or cowboys, or steely-eyed fighter pilots, or spirited governesses. It’s a living.

But copying verbatim? From dozens of different books? That sounds like more work than actually writing a book.

10

Whats “good faith” here? That he honestly meant to plagiarize and not get caught, or that he was plagerizing as some sort of meta-artwork?

I was wondering the same thing. It seems easier just to write your own novel, or at least, a novel ripping off the general plot and characters of other works then copying out large chunks of different books and trying to make them all fit togeather.
I’m honestly curious. I hope someone leaks it to the web.

11

If I decided I was going to plagiarize a bunch of books, I think I’d find some forgotten best-sellers from fifty years ago, instead of stealing stuff from a still popular and active franchise.

So I think I’m voting that its a purposeful hoax (or “artwork” or whatever).

12

Poor choice of words – I meant that he really did submit this as is as a work of his own, no intention of it being a 'meta" work intentionally cobbled together from snips from others and known by the reader and publisher to be such a work.

13

Ah, so you think he was honestly dishonest :wink:

I dunno. Amazon says “Body of Secrets” was published in 2001. Seems pretty crazy to think you can rip off whole sections of a work that recent expecting to get away with it. Especially given that people that like to read spy novels would also be the kind of people that would read books about the NSA.

But then, I guess its not like people never do stupid things thinking they’ll get away with it.

(actually, looking at your original link now I see it has some updates, including what purports to be an apology from Markham that does sound like someone caught ripping stuff off with the intent to pass it as his own rather then someone whose just committed a successful prank. So I change my theory, I suspect your right that he wasn’t expecting to get caught.)

14

Which cites several examples of similar plots but not one of similar words.

15

Damnit, the (obviously lame) joke was that I copied part of CalMeacham’s earlier post verbatim.

16

It was obviously lame, but only lamely obvious.

17

Mulholland Books has withdrawn the print edition of Markham’s Assassin of Secrets. If you go to the Amazon page, they don’t list the prices, and askl if you want to know when it becomes available (Hah!)

If you go to the kindle page you g4et this:

http://www.amazon.com/Assassin-of-Secrets-ebook/dp/B004QX07C8

At present, it says “pricing information not available”, which is probably polite for “you can’t buy this”
But what do they do with the e-copies that people have already bought? Is this like that notorious case of the illicit copy of 1984 that Amazon simply retrieved from all the kindles that bought it (while crediting their accounts)? If I bought this book from Amazon, will I lose it whenever I’m in range of a wireless internet connection and it synchs up?
What about the Nook edition?

18

Hit ‘like’ if you think that Markham looks like a fat John Lennon.

19

Actually, when I look at some of his pictures I think it looks unnervingly like a younger me.

20

Bump.

Because I’d like to get an answer to my question in post #17 – Are the e-book companies pulling this recalled book from their e-readers as they did with 1984?