The Debrief

Lawrence Block on Lenore Hart

2011-12-16T21:21:00.009+01:00

It is increasingly clear to me that St Martin's Press believes that if they simply ignore anyone who informs them that Lenore Hart is a plagiarist, the issue will gradually fade away. This is incredibly arrogant, highly irresponsible - and extremely frustrating. As explained elsewhere, this is not a borderline case or a grey area. The Raven's Bride blatantly plagiarizes an earlier novel, The Very Young Mrs Poe by Cothburn O'Neal. Hart followed many passages in O'Neal's novel sentence by sentence, sometimes tweaking a few words or changing the order around, but at other times repeating his sentences word for word. Please see my last two posts for many examples, including in the comments and at other blogs. This is brazen and extensive plagiarism.

And yet, despite this having being covered by the Associated Press, The Guardian, and The New York Times, St Martin's have continued to insist that black is white, and claimed that Lenore Hart is not a plagiarist. With a straight face. The idea that dozens of scenes are identical in theme, precise incidents and language is because Hart was working from 'the same limited historical record' is blown apart by the fact she copied many phrases and even sentences word for word from O'Neal's novel, with no quote marks or citations, and that O'Neal made several very specific historical errors, which Hart repeated verbatim. It is also obvious that St Martin's only made their weaselly statement at all because this was written about in the press. They were informed of this by others before me, once in April and again in May by someone else, and they ignored both of them. Now they are ignoring me, and anyone else who points this out.

So who couldn't they ignore, I wondered to myself earlier today. And then it hit me. Lawrence Block.

At 73, Block is a legendary figure, one of the great crime novelists of our age. And last month, he was the moderator of a panel at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York titled 'The New Faces Of Suspense'. One of these new faces was Q.R. Markham - Quentin Rowan. When it was revealed soon after that Rowan had plagiarized his novel, Assassin of Secrets, Block took the unusual step of writing an Amazon review for it, in which he made his feelings clear:

'There are plenty of good sentences in this book, but they're all the work of other writers. The author must be seriously disturbed; he quite deliberately stole everything in the book. And no, it's not an homage, not a tribute album. It's theft, and quite transparent; it should be off-sale by now, but it may take Amazon a while to take it down. The author, it turns out, has made a habit of this sort of thing throughout his "career." Let us not encourage him.'

Remembering this a few hours ago, I contacted Lawrence Block and informed him of Lenore Hart and The Raven's Bride, providing him with some links and asking him to make a statement about it in the hope that it would make a difference and help resolve this. 'Lawrence Block condemns Lenore Hart' is, I think, news that would be impossible for St Martin's Press to ignore.

And here's his reply to me, which I have just received:

'Jeremy, thanks for this. I had indeed followed your blog in connection with the Quentin Rowan debacle. I can't say I was taken in by him, as I just had a quick glance at his book before the panel on which we both appeared, read enough to know it wasn't anything I wanted to read more of, and at the event itself found him sort of an odd duck; we didn't really connect. When it all went pear-shaped a couple of days later, I was surprised and dismayed, but heartened by our mutual publisher's quick withdrawal of the book.

I can't imagine why St. Martin's doesn't do the same. What this woman has done, clearly, is sit down with a book and rewrite it. That's marginally acceptable when you're writing a term paper for a high school history class, but rather less so when you're foisting a novel upon the public.'

Thank you, Mr Block. And, indeed, that is precisely what Lenore Hart has done. Can some enterprising journalist or 16 now run an article on this, and hopefully bring this affair, finally, to an end? Because I don't have Lady Gaga's email address, and I have a book I need to finish.

Accidental Mountweazels: Lenore Hart is a proven plagiarist

2011-12-13T17:58:00.034+01:00

If you've read my last post, and are following me on Facebook or Twitter, you will know by now that St Martin's Press has finally issued a statement about Lenore Hart, claiming that she is not guilty of plagiarism:

'In April 2011, when these allegations first came to our attention, Ms. Hart supplied a detailed response, which cited her research into biographical and historical sources, and explained why her novel and Cothburn O’Neal’s “The Very Young Mrs. Poe” contain certain details of place, description and incident. As Ms. Hart explained in her response, of course two novels about the same historical figure necessarily reliant on the same limited historical record will have similarities. We have reviewed that response and remain satisfied with Ms. Hart’s explanation.'

I have a copy of Lenore Hart's defence, and while it is extremely long (around 18,000 words), it does not explain any such thing. Saying something doesn't make it so. The Raven's Bride is not just plagiarized from Cothburn O'Neal's novel The Very Young Mrs Poe, but blatantly so. It's not a borderline case, or in any way debatable. As indicated already by The World of Edgar Allan Poe and revealed in greater detail by Archie Valparaiso on his blog, it's not that Hart worked from the same sources as Cothburn O'Neal, using the same historical facts. The historical record for many of the events in both novels is very limited indeed, and O'Neal therefore had to surmise a great deal. In doing so, he got several extremely specific facts wrong. And Lenore Hart repeated them.

From The Very Young Mrs Poe:

'The train crossed the Appomattox after sunset but pulled into the Petersburg depot before dark. Their host, Mr. Hiram Haines, publisher of the Petersburg American Constellation, was waiting with his wife. He was a cheerful, balding man...'

From The Raven's Bride:

'We crossed the Appomattox after sunset and rolled into the Petersburg depot before full dark. As we descended from the car Eddy spotted our host, Hiram Haines, the cheerful, balding publisher of the American Constellation...'

This is obviously plagiarism simply from the extraordinary number of similarities between the sentences. Of the 37 words in O'Neal's two sentences, Hart repeats 21 of them: crossed, the, Appomattox, after, sunset, into, the, Petersburg, depot, before, dark, host, Hiram, Haines, publisher, of, the, American, Constellation, cheerful, balding... If you plug the phrase "crossed the Appomattox after sunset" into Google Books - and note that the phrase is not about Edgar Allan Poe or his wife - of the 15 million books scanned by Google it only comes up with one result: The Very Young Mrs Poe.

But even more damningly, and totally contradicting Lenore Hart and St Martin's Press's defences, Cothburn O'Neal invented several details of this scene. Very little is known about Edgar and Virginia Poe's honeymoon other than that it took place in 1836 in Petersburg and that they stayed with Hiram Haines. O'Neal invented his account of their journey there.

In April, Lenore Hart defended the similarities between these scenes thus:

'I'd like to point out first that Eddie and Virginia have no choice but to "take a train" to Petersburg because that - aside from riding horseback - was how you GOT from Richmond to Petersburg in 1835.'

Actually, no it wasn't. St Martin's Press has taken Hart's word on this, and much else. But they should have looked closer. Because unfortunately for Lenore Hart, Cothburn O'Neal got this wrong - he took the detail that they went by train from Mary Phillips' 1926 biography of Poe and invented an account of the journey from whole cloth. But it was in fact impossible to take a train from Richmond to Petersburg then, because the line wasn't completed until 1838.

Cothburn O'Neal also speculated in his novel that Hiram Haines was cheerful and balding, neither of which can be found in any historical source.

Once we get onto this train, which did not exist historically, there's a near-identical scene in which the conductor recognizes that the couple are newlyweds and takes them to the ladies' coach, where they can sit together. Here's the scene in O'Neal's novel:

'He asked permission of the half-dozen lady passengers to bring them aboard. "If you ladies don't object," he said, "I will close my eyes to company rules and allow the groom to sit in the ladies' coach with his lovely bride."

"We would be delighted to have them with us," a self-appointed spokesman assured him. All the others agreed and subjected Sissy to as thorough a scrutiny as she had ever stood before. She felt that she passed inspection. At least there were no audible tongue-cluckings or obvious stares of disapproval. It was difficult to determine the age of a young lady, especially if she were reasonably well filled out and modestly veiled.

"I must ask you not to smoke, Mr. Poe" the conductor warned in parting. "Smoking is restricted to the gentlemen's car on the rear."

"Thank you," Eddie said. "I seldom smoke."'

And here it is in Hart's novel:

'"Going to flout company rules, folks, and seat you all in the second coach." He grinned at Eddie. "Already cleared it with the ladies aboard."

When we climbed up no one looked askance or asked how old I was. Of course, if a female is veiled and reasonably well filled out it's hard to tell her exact age anyhow. The conductor left after admonishing the groom, "Smoking is restricted to the gentlemens' car at the rear, sir."

And Eddie, who had just been withdrawing one from the fistful of huge Cuban segars Tom Cleland had presented him with after the ceremony, sheepishly slid it back into his coat pocket. "Thank you for the information," he said. "In any case, I seldom smoke."'

This is very obvious plagiarism, but the real smoking gun is Virginia Poe's clothing. That she's veiled might be expected. But Hart also used precisely the same unusual phrase as Cothburn O'Neal to describe her: 'reasonably well filled out'. Not well filled out, or reasonably filled out, or quite well filled out, or even some entirely other choice of words: had some flesh on her bones, was fully grown, was reasonably mature-looking for her 13 years, or any of hundreds of possibilities. No, it's word for word the same as in O'Neal's wholly invented scene, 'reasonably well filled out'.

Here's how Lenore Hart explained this remarkable set of coincidences in her defence in April:

'It’s clear here both O’Neal and I did the same research into rules and customs of southern railroad travel circa 1839. The “second coach” was usually designated the “Ladies’ Car”, and the conductor, to comport himself as a gentleman, would have to ask the ladies’ permission to invade their space. But also this was often the First Class car. The “rule” my conductor is talking about is that the young married couple only had second-class tickets, not first class -- very expensive. But he will let it slide. Smoking cars had just been introduced (via Europe) so it’s unlikely Poe would know this – a minor embarrassment to him before his new bride. The custom of giving wedding cigars to new grooms should not require citation, I think -- and like any guy, he just wanted to smoke them. Again, we have a passage of commonplace social interaction in a 19^th-century mode of transportation, where you can almost predict in any book, film, or TV series, what the characters will talk about. A honeymoon trip on a train with people joshing the newlyweds. The usual. Take out what’s different about the two passages, and what’s left is clichés.'

Well, no. The scenes are both taking place in 1836, not 1839, on a train line that did not exist then, with a very precise set of events happening in the same order, using many of the same words. In some cases, the exact same words:

'reasonably well filled out'
'reasonably well filled out'

'"Smoking is restricted to the gentlemen's car on the rear."'
'"Smoking is restricted to the gentlemens' car at the rear, sir."'

'"In any case, I seldom smoke."'
'"Thank you," Eddie said. "I seldom smoke."'

There are many other examples of such undeniable and precise similarities in Hart's novel. In The Very Young Mrs Poe, O'Neal describes the following scene on this impossible train journey to Petersburg:

'As the train pulled out of the depot and onto the bridge across the James River, Eddy pointed out Gamble’s Hill rising to the right above the State Armory and the ironworks situated on the banks of the canal. He shouted the names into her ear. But when the train stopped for a few minutes outside Manchester, just across the river, they were both mute again.'

And in The Raven's Bride, again on this same impossible journey on a non-existent train, Lenore Hart has the following:

'As we chugged away from the confines of Richmond, Eddie leaned over and shouted the names of landmarks into my ear: “Gamble’s Hill. The State Armory, there. Oh – and the Tredegar Iron Works.” By the time we stopped briefly at Manchester, on the opposite side of the James River, he’d fallen silent again, either out of names or out of breath.'

There's no debate here. These aren't coincidences, and it's not about working from 'the same limited historical record'. That's just bluff from a liar who has been caught, accepted by a publisher neglecting its duty. This is open and shut plagiarism, and it is shameless, blatant, extensive and proven. By insisting that black is white, Lenore Hart is compounding what she has done: the decent thing now would be to admit frankly that she plagiarized this novel, admit to whatever other plagiarism she is guilty of if that is the case, apologize whole-heartedly, and resign from her creative writing teaching role at Wilkes University.

St Martin's Press is in no way to blame for the fact that Lenore Hart is a plagiarist, but by denying what is clear to anyone who can read they are behaving irresponsibly and arrogantly and doing their brand untold damage. It's time to stop supporting Lenore Hart, who is a liar and a fraud, and to do the right thing by their readers and the estate of the writer she stole from: withdraw The Raven's Bride and issue a statement condemning Lenore Hart's plagiarism. The longer this goes on, the worse it gets.

The Raven's Bride

2011-11-16T04:29:00.055+01:00

It's half-past three in the morning here in Stockholm, and I'm wired. A problem has arisen, and I have thought about it a little and this post is my solution.

There have been a lot of articles about the QR Markham/Quentin Rowan affair, and some have mentioned me, and this blog. One such article appeared in The New York Observer, and another in The Huffington Post. I noticed that at the foot of both those articles someone had made the following comment:

“Earlier this year, Lenore Hart's "The Raven's Bride" contained many passages that were a direct lift from a 1956 novel, "The Very Young Mrs. Poe," by Cothburn O'Neal. She got away with it--I suppose because O'Neal's novel is so little-known--and no doubt Markham believed he could get away with it as well.

I wonder how many other cases of blatant plagiarism are lurking out there?”

That's something I've also wondered. I hadn't heard of either book, or of this at all. And I could have simply ignored it, especially as I have been very caught up with the Rowan stuff and am at a crucial stage in my current book, that stage being I have to deliver it very soon. And while I have now been involved in helping to expose two fairly high-profile cases of plagiarism, that has never been my plan or intention. I read about Johann Hari on Twitter one day, like a lot of other people. I spotted a reference to Assassin of Secrets in a James Bond forum, and it was closer to home, as I had blurbed the book and my last blog post was a Q and A with the man. I really really really dislike plagiarism, but it's not some campaign of mine, despite all appearances to the contrary.

But I can't leave a comment like that sitting there. Why should Quentin Rowan be exposed, and someone else - if they are a plagiarist - not be, simply because nobody bothered to google it to follow up?

So I googled it, and it brought up this blog post. I haven't read either book. None of the examples were quite as stunningly verbatim as Rowan's when I started plugging his phrases into Google Books. But I read it again, carefully. And yes: Lenore Hart is a plagiarist.

I started tweeting about it, and the author of that blog post and some other people started discussing it. Hart is a well-established and well-respected novelist, published by St Martin's Press. The allegations on that blog were drawn to her attention several months ago, and she wrote an astonishing and utterly bonkers 18,000-word response, arguing why all the similarities noted between her novel The Raven's Bride and the 1956 novel The Very Young Mrs. Poe by Cothburn O'Neal were all perfectly explainable and not at all due to rampant plagiarism on her behalf.

Her defence is as unconvincing as it is prolix. I haven't read The Raven's Bride, which received a starred revew from Publishers Weekly, or The Very Young Mrs. Poe, but the examples speak for themselves. However, bearing in mind this very long document, I wanted to think of a quick way to get this book withdrawn. With the Rowan book, I emailed his editor citing several examples. I don't know Hart's editor, I don't own either book, and I don't want to spend days working through it - only for Hart to reply with an 18,000-word defence that bores people into submission, which is what I suppose happened last time. St Martin's have also previously been informed of Hart's plagiarism by at least two parties, and from what I've been told never even bothered to respond in either case.

So I'm not going to go that route and potentially waste a lot of time. Instead, I'm hoping to shine some more light on it in this post and, knowing that some bloggers and journalists may now be reading this blog because of the Rowan stuff, am leaving it up to you lot. Search, and you will find incontrovertible proof that Lenore Hart is a plagiarist. She has written quite a lot, including under pseudonyms, and I suspect some of that work may be plagiarized as well. But even if not, The Raven's Bride most definitely is, and St Martin's should withdraw it, just as Little, Brown responsibly did with Assassin of Secrets when it was brought to their attention. I can't spend the time going through the weeds on this. But here are just two quick examples (of many) that prove she is a plagiarist, followed by her amazing defences of them. Oh, and do read this interview, in which she is shameless enough to be condescending about the novel from which she stole.

From The Very Young Mrs. Poe by Cothburn O'Neal, 1956:

'Beyond Hopewell and the confluence of the Appomattox, the James grew narrower and wound in great loops around Bermuda Hundred. Further on, the current was swifter, foaming against gray boulders and lush green islands which twisted the channel torturously.'

From The Raven's Bride by Lenore Hart, 2011:

'Beyond the confluence of the Appomattox, the James grew narrower and wound in great loops about Bermuda Hundred. The current ran more swiftly there, shoving its relentless force against gray rocks and lush low peninsulas which twisted the channel into a shallow treacherous serpent whose narrow back we must ride.'

That first sentence is very nearly verbatim from O'Neal, and is blatant plagiarism. It alone should be enough to have this novel withdrawn. But Hart, instead of raising her hands and saying 'Okay, you got me, I'm a plagiarist, here's my mealy-mouthed apology admitting what you've already discovered and I'm off to Columbia for a few months', decided instead to try to defend it, thus:

'When I Googled the “confluence of the Appomattox and James” phrase I got 1,960 hits, in documents ranging from historical society pamphlets to real estate brochures. When I added the word “Hopewell” the number rose to 26,200 results.'

Extraordinary. Because after taking the words "the James grew narrower and wound in great loops" from The Raven's Bride and entering them in quotes into Google Books, I got just one hit, which was The Very Young Mrs. Poe by Cothburn O'Neal. Fancy that.

Anyway, Hart went on in her defence, Googling is for the birds:

'I didn’t need to do this, though, since my husband has taken our sailboat across the Bay and up the James on research cruises for both his historical books and mine. Bermuda Hundred was the site of the first incorporated town in the colony of Virginia, a known treacherous spot even today, and the river does in fact loop around it, in a serpentine way. So I suppose could have said “snaked.” But I didn’t.'

No. But I don't think that is really the point. And 'Bermuda Hundred was the site of the first incorporated town in the colony of Virginia' is plagiarized from Wikipedia. Yes, in her defence against allegations of plagiarism, Hart plagiarized.

Hart should know full well what plagiarism is. A good clear definition can be found in this 2008-2009 PDF prospectus from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania:

'Plagiarism is defined as taking and using the writings or ideas of another without acknowledging the source.'

In the same document, you will also find Lenore Hart listed as that year's Visiting Assistant Professor of English. As well as being an acclaimed novelist, she does a lot of teaching of writing, and is currently on the faculty of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

Next example. The protagonist of both novels is a real but rather obscure historical figure - Edgar Allan Poe's wife Virginia. Cothburn O'Neal told his story of 'the very young Mrs. Poe' in the third person, and Lenore Hart tells it in the first. So O’Neal:

“She turned to look out across the basin toward Federal Hill.”

And Hart:

“I turned away to look out across the basin toward Federal Hill.”

You can't coincidentally write a sentence that similar to someone else's. It is plagiarism. But Hart defends it, and in style. She points out that

'...my Virginia is looking AWAY from the familiar (Baltimore proper). and the past, toward the unknown (the shipping channel) that would soon convey her to her new life. The one in which she imagines she would soon, magically, become “fully a woman,” as she calls it. However, as she looks she also notes the incoming cargoes of doomed shellfish and dead waterfowl bound for market (all on the properly-identified commercial fishing boats of the era) and begins to feel terror. She suddenly, briefly is unable to breathe – this will become an important repetitive motif in my novel. In fiction, whether historical or contemporary, it is considered ideal to SHOW emotions through actions and imagery, rather than to summarize or baldly explain them, as in a nonfiction essay. If my goal was unclear... then perhaps I was too subtle here.'

No, Lenore Hart. You were not too subtle here. You just added the word 'away' to another writer's sentence, and it is just one of many, many examples of your blatant plagiarism.

Can I now hand this over to someone else, please? I think this deserves to be exposed, and this book withdrawn at once, but I really don't have the time or energy to work on it any more at the moment. Over to you, bold bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers, journalists, editors, agents, publishers...

Highway Robbery: The Mask of Knowing in Assassin of Secrets

2011-11-10T14:58:00.075+01:00

In Martin Amis’ debut novel, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973, precocious teenager Charles Highway sits exams to study English at Oxford University, after which he is interviewed by one of the professors in his rooms. Dr Charles Knowd begins the interview by asking Highway if he likes literature. “What kind of question is that?” asks the young man. Knowd replies:

‘“For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot... ‘in their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messiness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc. etc.’ This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the ‘faked inhumanity’ of the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land – a point you owe to W. W. Clarke – which, it seems, is just a bit too messy all of a sudden. Again, in the Criticism paper you jeer at Lawrence’s ‘unreal sexual grandiosity’, using Middleton Murry on Women in Love, also without acknowledgement. In the very next line you scold his ‘overfacile equation of art and life.’”

He sighed. “On Blake you seem quite happy to paraphrase the ‘Fearful Symmetry’ stuff about ‘autonomous verbal constructs, necessarily unconnected with life’, but in your Essay paper you come on all excited about the ‘urgency… with which Blake educates and refines our emotions, side-stepping the props and splints of artifice’. Ever tried side-stepping a splint, by the way? Or educating someone urgently, for that matter?

“Donne is okay one minute because of his ‘emotional courage’, the way he seems to ‘stretch out his emotions in the very fabric of the verse’, and not okay the next because you detect... what is it you detect? – ah yes, a ‘meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling, tailoring his emotion to suit his metrics’. Now which is it to be? I really wouldn’t carp, but these remarks come from the paragraph and are about the same stanza.

“I won’t go on... Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it...ruthlessly, for your own ends...”

To play with the phrasing of Dr Knowd’s assessment of Charles Highway, Quentin Rowan has, I think, used others’ literature ruthlessly for his own ends (if you haven’t followed this story, please see my last post). But in doing so, he did, curiously, also create something that had ‘a life of its own’, and to adopt a pseudo-academic tone, what one might call a mask of knowing and an unearned, one could say, automatic resonance.

Apart from taking the piss out of the inevitable academic study of this book that I think will soon appear, what do I mean by that? Let me try to explain, in terms which I hope are not pseudo-academic, self-serving or forgiving, but an honest attempt to understand why I liked the book so much, and why it ‘worked’, at least for a time. Since the plagiarism in Assassin of Secrets has come to light, I’ve seen remarks from several people wondering how on earth it was not spotted earlier, by his agent, his editors, reviewers, or Greg Rucka, Duane Swierczynski and myself, all of whom praised the book and are now angered at having missed what it was. I haven’t gone through every line of the book, but it seems clear that the vast majority of it, pretty much down to every paragraph, was stitched together from other works: at least a dozen in total. But even if you weren’t familiar with the works he stole from, some have asked, surely it must have been obvious that the book was not original because it would have been totally incoherent?

Well, no. It is a coherent novel. The plot is not its driving force, as it might be in a crime story, and in many ways it read to me like a collection of set scenes, which of course was what it was. But that feeling – absent the knowledge that it was plagiarized – was part of its charm. I don’t believe that the book was a post-modern experiment to expose the publishing industry or anything of that sort, as some have inevitably suggested, simply because ruining your own career and having to pay your advance back in the process is not all that fun an experiment. Was Richard Condon doing the same when he plagiarized I, Claudius in The Manchurian Candidate? Or was he, more likely, simply plagiarizing and hoping nobody would spot it, as indeed in that case nobody did for many years. (I don’t know if anyone has examined the book in more detail since 2003, but I suspect there may be a lot more plagiarism in it, and probably in Condon’s other novels, too.)

But a great part of the appeal of Assassin of Secrets, to me anyway, was what I felt to be its post-modernism, albeit in a very different way. It reminded me of several other novels – sadly, not the ones he plagiarized! It reminded me in parts of Cockpit, Jerzy Kosinki’s 1975 novel about a former spy called Tarden, which contains a lot of dazzling writing but reads as fragmentary excerpts. This is perhaps not all that surprising, as Kosinski has also been exposed as a plagiarist (long after he was published, and won many awards), and Cockpit is now thought to have been a compilation of pieces by several unknown writers Kosinski commissioned and then assembled, partially helped by a young Paul Auster.

It also reminded me in parts of David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive. Like Cockpit, that film is compelling not for its plot, which is unfathomable or non-existent, but in the way it plays with our memories of and feelings for genre conventions. Both Cockpit and Mulholland Drive feel like dreams, where narrative rules are abandoned, leaving dead-ends that allow the reader or viewer to step in and find their own resonances. It also reminded me in parts of Inception, which does have a coherent plot (I think) but does much the same. At one point in that film, Cobb and his team have to infiltrate a guarded clinic – that’s plot. But Christopher Nolan could have placed that clinic anywhere, and the plot would have been the same. He decided to place it in a snowy mountain fortress, I think so he could have fun exploring, almost in isolation of the plot, our memories of and expectations of a James Bond film.

The plot of Assassin of Secrets was more coherent than Cockpit or Mulholland Drive, but not as coherent as Inception. It worked, and held the attention, but it was not the chief appeal: it was understood that it was a vehicle for spy shenanigans around the world. The book also reminded me of Tunc and Nunquam, two linked novels by Lawrence Durrell that play with spy thriller conventions, and James Bond, and leap about all over the place. There is a plot, but it’s not what I primarily find enjoyable about those novels, the latter of which, incidentally, features a snowbound clinic, and of which The Observer’s critic wrote: ‘There are times when one wonders if one isn’t reading some unholy coupling of Swinburne and Ian Fleming.’

It was the style that I liked most about Assassin of Secrets. That style was predominantly taken from the American spy novelist Charles McCarry, at least five of whose novels Rowan plagiarized: The Tears of Autumn, Christopher’s Ghosts, Shelley’s Heart, The Last Supper and Second Sight. I’ve read the first two of those mentioned several years ago, and remember next to nothing about them other than that the protagonist is a CIA officer who is also a poet, that I enjoyed them, and that the prose was wonderful. Much of what I admired in Assassin of Secrets, I now realize, was McCarry’s prose, which looks to take up roughly half the book, although that may not have been the case with the draft his agent submitted to publishers. On July 2 2010, shortly after he was offered a two-book deal by Little, Brown, Rowan wrote to me via Facebook:

‘Now I s’pose I wait for them to summon me to sign some contracts and then I’m working with the editor. Can’t remember if I told you, but besides changing the title, he wants me to change a few scenes he thought too Bond-like. If they’re really going to stick me with this new title, I’m thinking of proposing ‘An Enemy of War’ instead. Even so, it’s quite forgettable.

Trying to take it easy now and celebrate but mind is mostly racing miles ahead of me. Luckily, I’ve already started the second book...

All the Best,
Quentin’

‘Too Bond-like’ is quite something, as most of the published novel that is not plagiarized from McCarry is plagiarized from Bond novels. Presuming he was telling me the truth, I wonder how much Bond was in his original submission to his agent. But perhaps this was a lie designed to put me off the scent, although it seems an odd way to do that. We had discussed our favourite authors in the genre before. On May 4 2010, he had emailed me:

‘Have you tried Adam Diment? or James Dark (Don’t think that was his real name, but his spy is named Mark Hood). I’ve found them both pretty enjoyable, though a little light-weight. One thing I’ve found in my research is that there really aren’t that many American spy novelists who are any good. Perhaps only Charles McCarry. Though I suppose there are good American thriller writers, their prose is usually slightly awful. Take Robert Ludlum, for example.’

I have read a few novels by Adam Diment and James Dark (though please don’t test me on them), and told him so. I also told him that I had read some McCarry and enjoyed it, but that I hadn’t read all his work – perhaps at this point he decided to add more McCarry into the book.

Quentin Rowan’s emails to me were, either accidentally or by design, well aimed. I share his view of Ludlum, who of course he also plagiarized in Assassin of Secrets. I think it may be that he knew I would share these views, as I have probably spouted them somewhere online in the last decade, and he was simply parroting them back at me. Or he may have genuinely felt this way – in which case why did he plagiarize Ludlum, if he thought his prose was ‘slightly awful’? Well, not all of Ludlum’s prose is that, of course. Ludlum has sold over 200 million books, so he was doing something right. And I think that was primarily two things: premise, and pace. By the first, I mean Ludlum had some terrific premises, most notably that of The Bourne Identity, of a government assassin who has forgotten who he is and is being chased by his desperate employers. As I explored in this essay, it is clearly inspired by Ian Fleming, who I think in turn may have taken the premise from two previous writers. But Ludlum made it his own, and made it exciting. On pace, Ken Follett has written that a story ‘should turn about every four to six pages’. McCarry does not subscribe to that idea; Ludlum sometimes has several major turns in one page. These are often rendered in hackneyed and laboured prose and signalled by internal dialogue in italics with exclamation points, but they have their own intensity that sweeps you up and keeps you reading.

And Ludlum didn’t always write in hackneyed prose. Those bits tend to stand out and irritate me, but he also wrote plenty of vivid and evocative descriptions, sometimes overly florid but sometimes judged just right. He was notorious for making mistakes about guns, but his fight scenes are usually gripping. He was also extremely prolific, perhaps making detection seem less likely. It looks to me as though Quentin Rowan took several passages from Ludlum that he thought fitted his purposes. They provided his hero with some muscularity – the stereotypical secret agent who can kill everyone in the room using a toothpick. Assassin of Secrets also reminded me of Trevanian, incidentally, who parodied this sort of thing brilliantly in Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction and The Loo Sanction, often in such a deadpan style that it was not noticed.

Yes, it reminded me of a lot of books, and the wrong books to boot – but there are a lot of books out there. His protagonist, Jonathan Chase, is (was?) an amalgamation of attributes: like many of Ludlum’s protagonists, he is determined, fit, and repeatedly evades death with consummate skill, often in close combat with opponents. This came back into fashion with the film version of The Bourne Identity in 2002, meaning that segments taken from old Ludlum novels now seem up-to-the minute even when, perhaps especially when, transferred into a Cold War setting. Jonathan Chase is also up against a vast villainous organization who meet in a secret headquarters in a Casablanca market accessed via a steel passageway. If you’ve read Raymond Benson’s 1999 James Bond novel High Time To Kill, you may recognize that this is where he took that from, but I read that book in 1999 and interviewed Raymond Benson about it, and didn’t notice. Rowan, relocating all the action to the late Sixties, combined Benson’s scene with one from McCarry’s Second Sight. Rowan’s villain, The Mirza, looks precisely like Benson’s villain, Le Gérant, and speaks many of his lines verbatim. But he also resembles McCarry’s villain Yeho, and speaks many of his lines verbatim. Likewise, Rowan’s character Neville Scott is a mix of McCarry’s character Horace Christopher and Benson’s character Dr Steven Harding.

McCarry’s characters are much more recognizably realistic than Benson, Ludlum or Gardner’s – he was writing a different sort of spy novel, and it doesn’t contain fist-fights or underground lairs, but is rather more concerned with lie detector tests and elaborate deception operations that play out like chess games. Rowan took elements of both, and combined them into a stew that in hindsight may seem obvious (especially if you were not fooled originally!), but which I genuinely found not just coherent, but compelling. Here’s an example of how he did it, with a passage from page 9 of Assassin of Secrets in which an American agent, Number One, is drawn by a beautiful woman on a train to her compartment, whereupon she attacks him:

‘With a shout, he delivered a kick to the blond woman’s chest, knocking her back. The blow was meant to cause serious damage, but it landed too far to the left of the sternal vital-point target. Number One was momentarily surprised that she didn’t fall, but he immediately drove his fist into her abdomen. That was his first mistake – mixing his fighting styles. He’d been using a mixture of karate and traditional Western boxing, whereas the female had picked a system and stuck with it. He kept on, though, lunging away, and smelling her stinking Je Reviens perfume, but he knew these sensations were only a dream. In reality they were floating in a skiff down the Seine, listening to a tinny phonograph record of a girl singing in French. How beautifully the girl sang, how the river smelled of the flowers that turned its torpid waters into perfume, how much like his own mind and voice were the mind and voice of this chanteuse! It was uncanny.

Someone seized his lower lip and twisted. The pain changed his idea of where he was. His right eye focused, briefly, and he glimpsed the blond woman’s eyes. She was on top of him now, thrusting her forearm into Number One’s neck, exerting tremendous pressure on his larynx. With his right hand, the American fumbled in his pants pocket, attempting to get at his insurance policy. The blond managed to elbow him in the ribs, but this only served to increase his determination. She managed to get her hands around the man’s neck, but it was too late; Number One deftly retrieved the twenty-ounce Mk 2 “pineapple” fragmentation grenade from his trousers and pulled the pin.

She dived through the compartment door and fell to the floor in the hallway. Afterward, the assassin known as Snow Queen thought that she remembered the flash of the explosion lighting the flat face of the American spy and the blast lifting his thick black hair so that it stood on end. The noise was a long time coming. Before she heard the explosion, like the snap of a heavy howitzer, she saw the whole body of the train car swell like a balloon full of water. The glass blew out and the compartment door cut through the rest of the car like a great black knife.

Concussion sent blood gushing out of her broken nose. She could hear nothing except a high ringing in her ears. All around her, mouths opened in noiseless screams of terror. She lay where she was with her eyes open.

In a few hours a policeman wearing a lacquered French helmet liner leaned over her and spoke. The blond woman pointed to her ears and said, “I’m deaf.” She heard nothing of her own voice but felt its movement over her tongue. The policeman pulled her to her feet and led her out of the debris. She would have been killed by the fire truck that roared up behind them if the Frenchman had not pulled her out of the way.’

Is this coherent? I thought it was, and thoroughly enjoyed it: a close, terse, vividly painted fight, but also spinning off unexpectedly to a dream sequence, and ending with a superb piece of description of an explosion and its aftermath. I was hooked, and wanted to read on.

The scene is constructed entirely from three other passages, one by Raymond Benson and two by Charles McCarry. Here’s the scene by Benson, from Zero Minus Ten:

‘With a shout, he leapt in the air and delivered a Yobi-geri kick to Bond’s chest, knocking him back. The blow was meant to cause serious damage, but it landed too far to the left of the sternal vital point target. Michaels was momentarily surprised that Bond didn’t fall, but he immediately drove his fist into Bond’s abdomen. That was the assassin’s first mistake – mixing his fighting styles. He was using a mixture of karate, kung fu, and traditional Western boxing. Bond believed in using whatever worked, but he practiced hand-to-hand combat in the same way that he gambled. He picked a system and stuck with it.

By lunging at Bond’s stomach, the man had left himself wide open, enabling Bond to backhand him to the ground. Giving him no time to think, Bond sprang on top of him and punched him hard in the face, but Michaels used his strength to roll Bond over onto his back, and, thrusting his forearm into Bond’s neck, exerted tremendous pressure on 007′s larynx once again. With his other hand, the young man fumbled with Bond’s waterproof holster, attempting to get at the gun. Bond managed to elbow his assailant in the ribs, but this only served to increase his aggression. Bond got his hands around the man’s neck, but it was too late. Michaels deftly retrieved the Walther PPK 7.65mm from the holster and jumped to his feet.

“All right, freeze!” he shouted at Bond, standing over him, the gun aimed at his forehead…’

Here is the passage from McCarry’s Second Sight:

‘Patchen kept hearing Maria Rothchild’s voice and smelling the smoke from her stinking Gauloises Bleues cigarettes, but he knew these sensations were only a dream. In reality he was floating in a sampan on the River of Perfumes, listening to a tinny phonograph record of a girl singing in Vietnamese. Vo Rau translated the lyrics: “She says that God is the smallest thing in the universe, so small that he cannot be imagined; he does not wish to be imagined, so he fills the sky with the stars that are his uncountable thoughts and we look not at the place where he is, but at the places where he has never been.” Patchen nodded sagaciously; this much of the truth he had already perceived. How beautifully the girl sang, how the river smelled of the flowers that turned its torpid waters into perfume, how much like his own mind and voice were the mind and voice of Vo Rau! It was uncanny.

Someone seized Patchen’s lower lip and twisted. The pain changed his idea of where he was. Maria Rothchild said, “Wake up, David.” His right eye focused, briefly, and he glimpsed Maria’s face.’

And here’s the passage from McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn:

‘Afterward, he thought that he remembered the flash of the explosion lighting the flat face of the Chinese boy and the blast lifting the boy’s thick black hair so that it stood on end. The noise was a long time coming. Before he heard the explosion, like the slap of a heavy howitzer, he saw the whole body of the car swell like a balloon full of water. The glass blew out and one door cut through the crowd like a great black knife.

Concussion sent blood gushing out of his nose. He could hear nothing except a high ringing in his ears. All around him, mouths opened in noiseless screams of terror. He lay where he was with his eyes open.

In a few moments a policeman wearing a lacquered American helmet liner leaned over him and spoke. Christopher pointed to his ears and said, “I’m deaf.” He heard nothing of his own voice but felt its movement over his tongue. The policeman pulled him to his feet and led him toward the end of the street. He would have been killed by the fire truck that roared up behind them if the policeman had not pulled him out of the way.’

Fairly astonishing. I think it is too easy to say with the benefit of hindsight that the joins are easy to spot in the scene above. I don’t think that is the case, even reading it again now. It is also well established that combining different pieces of one’s own writing can create fresh and surprising effects and resonances, and I think thrillers often thrive on this sort of dotting about and unpredictability. It can be highly effective, and I think it was in this scene and many others. So I think it would be dishonest to claim that this subterfuge should have been obvious to any editor, or reviewer, or, well, me: even if you had happened to have read all three of these novels – and I had only read one – I think it would be chance if you spotted it. It took a certain amount of intelligence and ingenuity to have pieced these passages together to make a coherent and readable scene, and moreover Rowan did this for the entire novel, using over a dozen sources for his unholy but also illegal coupling. This example, I think, illustrates the technique he used for much of the book: action and dialogue from Bond and Ludlum novels are interspersed with poetic flourishes and descriptions from across McCarry’s work. Jonathan Chase’s entire backstory is also taken from McCarry’s Second Sight, and grounds the character in a surreal but convincing espionage reality.

It took some ingenuity, but that ingenuity is still very limited, and in my view doesn’t even begin to equate with the talent and work of those he plagiarized. I suspect I could, if I wanted, create a novel in this way. I couldn’t write the original passages, though – that is quite another order of ingenuity, and how long Rowan took to piece passages from books together to make it read convincingly doesn’t matter in the least: it was a Charles Highway-style robbery of several other writers’ ideas, and unfortunately I was not familar enough with his sources to perform a Dr Knowd on him: I’m fairly widely read in the genre, I think, but I haven’t read every spy novel ever published, don’t have a photographic memory, and quite simply wasn’t looking for this. And while I think the idea to do this was cunning, albeit totally unethical and absurdly unlikely to have remained undetected for long once it reached thousands of eyes, I don’t agree that it would have been easier to have written the novel from scratch. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t do that, which is why he cut and pasted the whole book. Clever forgery does not stand on a level with original creation, and having good taste in which spy novels to plagiarize isn’t much to laud, either.

Some have said that plagiarism, derivation and influence are on a sliding scale, and I agree. Some newspapers mistakenly reported that Rowan plagiarized Ian Fleming, but it’s a thought-provoking error, as part of the reason I enjoyed it was because in many parts it read like a pastiche of Fleming, only played straight – a kind of Bond novel in inverted commas. And in some ways, that is what the post-Fleming novels are, because they are indebted to the original creation and trying to find new takes on it while having fun with what we all associate with Fleming’s books and the films adapted from them. Outside a James Bond novel, a villainous organization meeting in a secret headquarters reads as Bond pastiche. It is also the case that Ian Fleming was taken to court for plagiarism, and settled, and that he sometimes refashioned premises and ideas from other writers, as I’ve written about. In You Only Live Twice, James Bond’s philosophy is quoted as ‘I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.’ As John Pearson revealed in his 1966 biography of Fleming, this line was Jack London’s, and Fleming used it without attribution.

One can argue what is acceptable behaviour in such matters, but I think it is clear that Fleming is on the end of the scale marked ‘sometimes derivative’ while Assassin of Secrets is at the other end, marked ‘straightforward plagiarism’. It’s a fascinating and bizarre thing to have done, but please don’t make the mistake of thinking there was anything admirable in it. The honest publishing professionals who paid him and spent their time promoting him, creating artwork for him, arranging events for him and all the rest in good faith, and the talented writers whose work he so shamelessly stole, deserve more respect than to glorify his actions as some noble anti-establishment ruse, piece of performance art or any nonsense of that sort. Rather than seeking fault with his victims, it would be much more responsible to condemn Rowan’s fraud and theft.

Assassin of Secrets

2011-11-09T00:43:00.007+01:00

It’s dunce’s cap time for me.

Eagle-eyed followers of this blog may have noticed that the last item I posted here has vanished overnight. It was a question-and-answer session between myself and Q.R. Markham, the author of a new spy novel, Assassin of Secrets. As is now being widely reported, that novel has been withdrawn by its American publishers, Mullholland, an imprint of Little, Brown. It will also be withdrawn by Mulholland in Britain, on the grounds of plagiarism. As I gave a fulsome blurb for the book (along with a couple of other writers), and a Google search for the author’s name brings up this blog, I’ve already been contacted by one newspaper, and I don’t want this to drag out. I would also like to explain how this happened from my vantage point, and make sure that nobody wastes more time on this. Naturally, I’m embarrassed to have fallen for the deception, and wish I’d spotted it sooner.

In May last year, I received an email from someone called Quentin Rowan, a bookseller in New York who had also published poetry in The Best American Poetry of 1996 and a short story in Paris Review. He said he was a fan of spy thrillers and had enjoyed my first novel, Free Agent, which he had liked for its ‘merging of Bond-style action in the field with Le Carre-like behind-the-scenes/HQ intrigue’. He also mentioned that he had a blog about spy fiction, and that he had written a spy novel set in 1968, titled Spy Safari, for which he had an agent who was already seeking a publisher for it.

I found the email flattering, of course, and thought that Mr Rowan was a very astute young man with excellent taste in spy fiction. The fact that his novel was already represented by a reputable agent also made me think that he was not simply buttering me up to read his unpublishable mess. We exchanged some friendly emails, in which I offered him some advice on the rather nerve-wracking process of waiting for responses from publishers, and soon after I invited him to submit a guest post to this blog, which he did (and which I’ve since removed, for reasons that will become clear). Swimming, I thought. Uplifting. The internet: a collegiate place, after all!

In July, two months after he had first contacted me, Quentin announced that his novel had sold to a major publisher, Little, Brown. He was taking the alias Q.R. Markham, and the book would now be titled Assassin of Secrets. Some time after that, he asked if I would like to read the book with a mind to endorsing it if I enjoyed it, and I readily agreed.

I really did enjoy the novel, which seemed to me to combine all the familar tropes I like about spy fiction into one book, but to use some wonderful imagery and language to do so. I gave it the best quote I could, calling it an ‘instant classic’ (I am blushing). I agreed to help him promote the book by doing a question-and-answer session with his publisher for use on their website, which we did a few months ago together in Google Docs. As with the book, I was impressed at Quentin’s knowledge, insights, and command of language. Our exchange was published online just a few days ago.

Yesterday, while perusing a James Bond forum, I noticed that someone had started a discussion about Assassin of Secrets. Initial commenters were impressed by the excerpt on the publisher’s site (as I had been), but one commenter was not, noting that several passages seemed to have been taken verbatim from Licence Renewed, the 1981 James Bond novel by John Gardner. My eyes goggled. Verbatim? Really? I went to my bookshelf and took out Licence Renewed – which I should say I haven’t read in several years. And by gum, the commenter was right. It was indeed verbatim. He had changed ‘James Bond’ to ‘Jonathan Chase’, the name of his protagonist, and Ann Reilly, Gardner’s character, to ‘Francesca Farmer’, but otherwise entire sentences were identical: ‘Then he saw her, behind the fountain, a small light, dim but growing to illuminate her as she stood naked but for a thin, translucent nightdress; her hair undone and falling to her waist – hair and the thin material moving and blowing as though caught in a silent zephyr.’ The exact same sentence in both books. I took another sentence at random in the chapter, put quote marks around it, and entered it into Google Books. It was verbatim from another Bond novel, Zero Minus Ten, by Raymond Benson, which I haven’t read. Another sentence: verbatim from Second Sight by the American spy novelist Charles McCarry, which I also haven’t read. Another sentence: verbatim from The Prometheus Deception by Robert Ludlum, which I have read, many moons ago. He seemed to have taken most of his action scenes and dialogue from post-Fleming Bond novels (at least six of Gardner’s), and added long poetic descriptions from several of McCarry’s books, as well as the back-story for his protagonist. A bizarre personal playlist of his favourite moments in the genre, I guess, all sewn together with the magic of Controls C and V.

I had hoped that this problem, awful as it was, only affected the opening of the novel, but as I looked into it more I quickly realized that the whole novel was ‘written’ this way – I was finding it hard to find sentences that had not been taken verbatim or near-verbatim from other sources. I came across a scene that was, apart from the names of characters and locations, precisely the same as one in Gardner’s For Special Services. Then I found a scene that was, word for word apart from the names, the same as one in Licence Renewed, for six pages straight.

I considered emailing Mr Rowan to ask him what in blue blazes he was thinking, but decided not to waste any more time corresponding with him – it would make no difference what excuse he came up with. The evidence was incontrovertible, and it was also rather late in the day for explanations. The novel was due out in Britain this Thursday, and my name and now clearly idiotic recommendation was prominently displayed on the jacket. I immediately emailed the publisher, explaining the situation and giving the example from the Bond message board and all the others I had found, and asking them to remove the Q&A I had done with him from their websites – he had of course also plagiarized many of his comments in it, from Dream Time by Geoffrey O’Brien, which was also the source for much of his book’s prologue – and to withdraw the book.

This they have done, and very quickly, as well. I think they acted promptly and professionally, and I don’t attach any blame to them for any of this. It’s embarrassing enough as a Bond fan to admit that I didn’t spot massive lifts from these novels. (And ironic in its way, too, as two repeated topics of this blog have been the literary James Bond and Johann Hari’s plagiarism.) I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect a publisher to check through the thousands of thrillers out there to make sure a book on submission was not a collage of others’ work from start to finish. The idea that anyone would do such a thing never even crossed my mind until last night. I am, of course, embarrassed and irritated at having been duped, as it seems so very very obvious now, and disappointed at having wasted time on supporting someone whose writing I admired, when really it was the writing of John Gardner, Charles McCarry and several others.

I also find the whole thing fairly mind-boggling, and have no idea how Mr Rowan thought he could get away with it. He got rather lucky with me in that, although I’m a huge fan of spy fiction, these days I rarely read it, ironically enough because since starting to write spy novels I don’t like to expose myself too much to others’ takes on it in case some of it rubs off on me and I subconsciously start to echo what I have read elsewhere. I’ve read at least five of the books he plagiarized, but in all cases I did so long enough ago and I’ve read enough other books in the genre that I didn’t recognize the passages taken from them in a new context, even when they were so brazenly stolen. He managed to get it by Little, Brown, Hodder, me and several others (the book had starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly), but it’s not as if nobody else has read any James Bond novels or Robert Ludlum, so I don’t really get it. Someone had already noticed from the short excerpt published online. Sooner or later, others would have been reminded of scenes in other books, too, and the game would have been up. Some are now combing through the book trying to find what he plagiarized. I wouldn’t bother – it looks to me like pretty much every sentence in it was taken from elsewhere, so you’ll simply be wasting your time.

It’s such a bizarre thing to have done that I can’t fathom the reasons for it. But I do know one thing – I won’t be blurbing any more books for a while.

I spy with my little eye

2011-10-27T12:51:00.002+02:00

An interesting article in Nature on how a US intelligence agency is studying whether social media can predict social unrest.

After 10 series spanning nine years, British spy drama Spooks has come to the end of its run. There were several articles about it in the British press, but my favourite was this one in The Daily Telegraph by spy novelist Jon Stock (perhaps because I'm mentioned in it).

Who said the KGB was dead? A good old-fashioned honey-trap spy scandal.

It's silly season for articles about the next James Bond film - well, when isn't it, really? Ben Child of The Guardian has his cake and eats it, using an article in The Sunday Express which he bemoans as smacking of 'join-the-dots journalism' as the basis for his own article, in which he joins, um, precisely the same dots.

Unbelievable stories

2011-10-17T23:43:00.002+02:00

Early in John le Carré’s The Russia House, the novel’s narrator observes that Americans ‘lack the instinct to dissemble that comes so naturally to us British’. Recently, I’ve been wondering if there’s not something in this, and also if there isn’t something in the British psyche as a result that leads us to be apathetic towards and sometimes even accepting of deception.

A case in point: when The New York Times discovered that one of its reporters was a serial plagiarist, the journalist in question swiftly lost his job and the newspaper devoted 18 pages to its investigation of what he had done, taking full responsibility for it. But when the British broadsheet The Independent was confronted with a similar problem regarding its star reporter Johann Hari earlier this year, it faffed about for several months before refusing to publish the findings of its investigation, instead offering its readers a self-serving quasi-apology from Hari, along with the news that he was to go on a journalism course in the US before returning to his job as though nothing had happened.

Something about this seems very British to me – as if the idea of admitting that someone is a liar and a cheat is in itself disreputable, rather than the honourable course of action. This tendency seems particularly rife when it comes to matters concerning the Second World War – perhaps because Britain’s self-image is so tied up with its role in the war that Brits in general, and the British media in particular, are reluctant to ask common-sense questions about its history, or purported accounts of it.

This came to mind again this morning because a book has just been published in Britain by two authors who claim to have discovered evidence that Adolf Hitler survived and died an old man in Argentina. It’s getting an enormous amount of attention, with an interview with one of the authors already playing on Sky and another lined up with Sir David Frost. Luckily, some people are prepared to step forward to point out that it’s a nonsensical conspiracy theory and not worth publicizing.

Something else that has caught my eye is this week’s Sunday Times paperback non-fiction chart. Sitting on top of it is a book called The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, by Denis Avey and Rob Broomby. Back in April, I helped historians Guy Walters and Adrian Weale write an article about this book, in which we raised several questions about its central claim. In the book, Second World War veteran Denis Avey, working with journalist Rob Broomby, recounts an astonishing story. He claims that during the war he was imprisoned by the Germans at E715, a labour camp very near Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz, and that he decided to smuggle himself into that concentration camp overnight on two separate occasions, in order to witness the treatment being meted out to the Jews.

It’s sensational stuff, but our research uncovered several major discrepancies in the story. However, despite these, and serious reservations about the book from the head historian at Auschwitz, former prisoners-of-war from E715 and Auschwitz, the World Jewish Congress and others, the book’s publisher stood by the book. And, clearly, it’s still selling by the bucketload, unquestioned by readers. It has also been sold to publishers in the US, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain, and Mr Avey has been honoured by the British government as a ‘British Hero of the Holocaust’.

But since our article was published, we have discovered that Denis Avey has told two unreconcilably contradictory versions of his experiences during the war.

On July 16 2001, Mr Avey gave a long interview to the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. In that interview, he described his experiences during the war in great detail. However, he gave an inexplicably different account of what he had done than the one that appeared earlier this year in The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. For example, he told the Imperial War Museum that he had witnessed the death of a Jewish prisoner – who were called ‘stripeys’ by the British PoWs – while he was laying heavy cables:

‘It was winter. It was about eight foot down. I used to work with the political prisoners and the stripeys alongside us. The roll had stopped for some unknown reason, and we stood up looking, and there was one of the stripeys up there, and of course one of the SS feldwebels approached this chap. Immediately addressed by the Waffen SS, these political fellas had to take their hat off straight away and stand to attention. And he stood to attention telling this feldwebel something. And he hit him right across the face and knocked him straight into a pit, and as he fell so the roll of the cable rolled over him, and killed him. And I remonstrated with this – like an idiot – with this feldwebel, and he didn't say a word. He jumped down in the pit well and hit me straight across the face with this Luger. And nothing was said. Nothing at all.’1

This incident also appears in The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, but with a very different outcome. In the book, Avey claims that while he and others were laying cables a Jewish youth, perhaps 18 years old, removed his cap and stood to attention when an SS officer approached, and the officer hit him in the face. Within a few seconds, the blood was flowing ‘uncontrollably’:

‘The boy managed to haul himself back to attention mumbling something in a language I couldn’t place.’2

The boy was struck savagely again, and managed to pull himself up again. Watching this, Mr Avey claims that he became enraged and shouted at the SS officer, calling him an ‘untermensch’. And as a result, the beating of the boy stopped. However, some 10 minutes later, when Mr Avey had finished his work, he climbed out of the trench and began to walk away. The same officer came up behind Mr Avey without warning and hit him in the right eye with the butt of his pistol. Mr Avey fell to the ground and blacked out for a few seconds. When he had recovered consciousness he found that his eye was closing up, and that the officer had gone. ‘I never saw what happened to the boy,’ he concludes, ‘but he can’t have lived long. If those head injuries didn’t kill him he had been marked out and would die soon anyway.’3

Both accounts cannot be true – they directly contradict each other. And this isn’t a small detail or the sort of thing one might misremember: one either sees a boy knocked into a pit and a cable rolling over him and killing him, or one doesn’t.

Even more troublingly, Denis Avey also told the Imperial War Museum that he smuggled himself into Auschwitz II – Birkenau – rather than Monowitz, as he claims in his book. And he told the Museum that he accompanied a Jewish prisoner called Ernst Lobethal into Birkenau so that Ernst could show him the treatment of the prisoners there:

‘So over the days and weeks we arranged to have an ‘umtausch’ – an exchange. I went in to Birkenau with Ernst and this stripey got into my uniform and got into E715 for the night. And I went with him to Birkenau and slept alongside him, as was the position of this other fellow, and in this way I got the information, very surreptitiously again.’4

Ernst Lobethal features in the book, but there is no mention that he was involved in arranging for Mr Avey to go into any camp, let alone that he was with Avey when he did it. Neither did Ernst Lobethal mention this astonishing event in his testimony to the Shoah Foundation. Again, Mr Avey’s testimony to the Imperial War Museum directly contradicts what he has claimed in his book – they cannot both be true. If you’ve done something as extraordinary as break into a concentration camp for the night, you remember if you did it alone or accompanied – and if you don’t remember, you’re not a reliable witness and shouldn’t have your memoirs published by reputable firms.

The smoking gun that proves that Mr Avey is an unreliable witness, though, is the following part of his account to the Imperial War Museum:

‘And the whole thing was to discuss things with him (Ernst), find out the treatment and what was happening. Now he told me of an Australian POW that was working in Birkenau, and sure enough he did. I tried constantly to contact him. I couldn’t. I don’t know why – I couldn’t. And you know what he did? He was an escaped POW. They picked him up just going into Switzerland in civilian clothes, and they interrogated him because of the civilian clothes, and they wanted to know how he got the clothes, how he got the map, how he got the compasses and he wouldn’t tell them. He’d got my temperament and he was an Australian to boot as well. And of course he caused a lot of problems, and they beat him badly, and then they sent him to Auschwitz-Birkenau. You know what he did? He stoked the crematoria. He stoked the crematoria for twelve months. I tried to contact him after the war: I couldn’t, but then I found out he’d written a book called “Stoker”.’5

It is perhaps unsurprising that Mr Avey failed to find this man, because he is referring to Donald Watt, author of the memoir, Stoker: the Story of an Australian Soldier who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, published in 1995. Mr Watt’s key claim in that book, that he was a stoker in the crematoria in Birkenau with the Sonkerkommandos, has been revealed to be a hoax. An investigation into it by Yad Vashem, Israel's official documentation and research centre on the Holocaust, concluded that Mr Watt had ‘at no time been a member of the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz-Birkenau’.6 The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum also investigated Mr Watt’s claim, and their report concluded that there was no evidence in the records that he had been a stoker in Auschwitz, and neither was there any evidence that he had ever been in Auschwitz at all.7 In 1997, Professor Konrad Kwiet, the resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum and former chief historian of the Australian war crimes commission, wrote an article titled Anzac and Auschwitz: The unbelievable story of Donald Watt, in which he presented even more evidence against Mr Watt’s claim, including that his official Service and Casualty Form kept by the Australian Army revealed that he had been discharged from Stalag 357 in April 1945, and that there was no evidence that he had ever been in Birkenau.8

Donald Watt’s claim that he was a stoker in Birkenau has been debunked as a fabrication by a host of institutions with acknowledged expertise on the Holocaust, including the historians at Auschwitz itself. Denis Avey’s claim that he switched places with a Jewish inmate in Birkenau and tried to seek out Donald Watt in that camp cannot therefore be true: his story relies on another man’s fabrication.

In addition, the story of searching for Watt is nowhere to be found in The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. Why, then, did Mr Avey claim this in 2001? If the account he gave the Imperial War Museum is true, and he really did go into Birkenau to try to find Donald Watt, the contradictory account he gives in The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz of entering Monowitz, with no mention of searching for Watt, must be untrue. And if the account in the book is true, the account he gave the Imperial War Museum must be untrue.

Either way, at least one of Denis Avey’s accounts about his experiences during the Second World War cannot be true. He is therefore an unreliable witness, and all his claims about switching places with an inmate to enter Auschwitz are therefore suspect, including that in his book The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. Readers and the media should be pressing his publishers to acknowledge this fact, explain why the co-author Mr Broomby ignored the testimony to the Imperial War Museum, and withdraw the book from circulation as soon as they can.

Alternatively, we can all just look the other way and pretend it never happened. After all, he, his co-authors and his publishers are only telling stories about the Holocaust and making money from it. Nothing wrong with that, is there? It’s not like that usually gets any attention, is it?

Notes
1. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Interview with Denis Avey, 16 July 2001, Accession number 22065.
2. The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avey and Rob Broomby, Hodder & Stoughton, March 2011, p164.
3. Ibid., p165.
4. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive interview.
5. Ibid.
6. Quoted in Konrad Kwiet, ‘ANZAC and Auschwitz: The Unbelievable Story of Donald Watt’, International Network on Holocaust and Genocide, 12, no. 3, pp. 13–18.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.

With many thanks to Guy Walters and Adrian Weale.

Johann Hari’s latest apology: some thoughts

2011-09-15T01:26:00.037+02:00

I’ve written a few articles on this blog about Johann Hari recently. Hari has now, after several months of outright denial and two rather self-serving articles claiming very limited wrongdoing, finally admitted that he is a plagiarist:

‘I’ve written so many articles over the years laying bare and polemicising against the errors and idiocies of other people. This time, I am writing an article laying bare and polemicising against the errors and idiocies of myself. If you give it out, you have to take it. If you demand high standards of others, you have to be just as damning when you fail to uphold them yourself.’

I’ve been hoping he would do this for some time, so it’s refreshing to see him finally step up to the plate, admit everything he’s done wrong and apologize for it wholeheartedly.

Except... has he?

Hari starts his article with a bold and emotive claim that he is going to lay bare all his failures, but he immediately steps back from doing just that:

‘I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

But I was wrong. An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter. If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write “she has said,” instead of “she says”. You write “as she told the New York Times” or “as she says in her book”, instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere. If I had asked the many experienced colleagues I have here at The Independent – who have always been very generous with their time – they would have told me that, and they would have explained just how wrong I was. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask.’

Sadly, I think Hari has completely missed the point here, or pretended to. First of all, what he describes having done – though he avoids using the word – is quite simply plagiarism, of the kind that any journalist would usually be sacked for on the spot. But he hasn’t been sacked by The Independent, or chosen to resign. Instead, he’s off to the States for a four-month journalism course, after which he will be welcomed back to his old job.

Secondly, he has by omission minimized what he has done wrong, conveniently not mentioning some of the accusations that he invented episodes in his articles from whole cloth. I think he has chosen instead to admit to only what he feels has been proven beyond any doubt, and is hoping enough people will say ‘Leave him alone now’ that he’ll get away with the much more serious stuff.

But even if he is only guilty of what he now admits to, the arrogant and stupid thing wasn’t neglecting to ask his colleagues about this practice of his – it was arrogant and stupid (and dishonest) to do it at all. It’s not some mysterious journalistic ‘convention’ that you don’t pretend words others have written or said elsewhere were said to you, and you don’t need to ask other journalists about it to be let in on the secret. Anyone over the age of five knows that copying others’ work is wrong.

It also looks like Hari is not going to explain precisely what he did in which articles, and that neither will The Independent. Compare this to the New York Times’ reaction when they discovered what Jayson Blair had been up to: a very thorough investigation and explanation to their readers of what he had done, published in full within a fortnight. You can read it here – and yes, that’s 18 pages.

In continuing to claim that he was only trying to clarify the positions of ‘some people’ he had interviewed over the years, has Johann Hari really laid bare what he has done? Was this, as he seems to suggest, an occasional pecadillo done through ignorance of obscure journalistic practices, or has he plagiarised on a much greater scale, in many articles, for years? His interviews with Antonio Negri, Gideon Levy, Gareth Thomas, Hugo Chavez, Malalai Joya, George Michael and Ann Leslie all have quotes lifted verbatim or near-verbatim from other sources – and those are just the examples that have been discovered by bloggers and others so far. (None by The Independent, who only opened their investigation once several of these examples came to light.)

In a few of those cases, Hari plagiarized articles that had been written by his subjects. In others, he plagiarized previous interviews with them by other journalists. And in none of the cases does it look like this was something he did simply because his interviewees did not express an occasional point clearly enough: there’s far too much plagiarized material for that to be plausible. Let’s take his interview with George Michael. Here are a few quotes Hari has from Michael:

‘He leans forward on the virgin-white sofa in his Highgate office and teases open his childhood scars. “It’s only when the kids are in their late twenties that families really face up to what they are. You’ve gone out into the world – you’ve probably got a family of your own – and you’re finally in a position to look back and see if your own family was normal. I suppose enough of the damage your parents have done to you has left you by then too. It was at that age I realised how dysfunctional my childhood was.”

His mother toiled 24/7 at two kids and three jobs, and George remembers her searing, bitter hated at having to work in a chip shop because “she was obsessively clean and she could never get the smell of fish out of her hair or off her skin, no matter how hard she scrubbed.”’

That’s a vivid memory of his mother, articulately expressed. But here’s what George Michael said on camera in an interview for the documentary A Different Story, which had just been released:

‘Mum and Dad worked in a fish and chip shop along here. My mum said it was the most disgusting period of her life, because you know how clean Mum was. She said you just couldn’t get the smell of the fish out of your hair, off your skin.’

Spot the difference. It’s possible that this is one of those occasions Hari mentions in his latest apology. George Michael could have repeated this about his mother but said it in a more confusing way, and so Hari went back to the documentary. But that would be slightly odd because, as the quote from the documentary shows, George Michael is very capable of giving good unconfusing quotes spontaneously in face-to-face interviews. The lifted quote is not a ‘garbled chunk’. And it seems that several of the quotes in Hari’s interview are taken from ones shown in the documentary.

A Different Story:

‘I’m not presuming that cruising is dysfunctional, ’cause I don’t think it is as a gay man. But cruising as George Michael – there’s something vaguely dysfunctional about that!’

Hari’s article:

‘“I don’t think there’s anything inherently dysfunctional about cottaging – but cottaging as George Michael? Yeah, there’s something pretty dysfunctional about that,” he says, laughing.’

A Different Story:

‘It was like, “Oh my God, I’m a massive star, and I think I may be a poof. What am I going to do? This is not going to end well!”’

Hari’s article:

‘“I am becoming one of the biggest stars in the world – and I think I might be a poof. This cannot end well.”’

Either George Michael coincidentally said almost precisely the same things in several previous interviews, but for some unknown reason when he said them to Johann Hari it was in such a garbled way that Hari felt he had to go back and plagiarize the previous interviews. Or Hari is lying in his latest apology, and George Michael didn’t tell him these anecdotes at all, but Hari just took them from the documentary, changing a few words here and there to try to digsuise his plagiarism.

If this had happened in one interview, with only three quotes, the first option might be just about plausible. But the sheer scale of stolen quotes in Hari’s work suggests otherwise. Here’s an excerpt from Jon Lee Anderson’s 2001 interview with Hugo Chavez in the New Yorker:

‘“It is possible I have something of this . . . tragic sense of life,” he [Chavez] acknowledged. He recalled that on the eve of the 1992 rebellion he had said goodbye to his wife and three children, and led his soldiers out of their barracks. He was the last to leave. After locking the big front gate, he threw away the key. “I realized at that moment that I was saying goodbye to life,” Chávez said. “So it is possible that one has been a bit . . . imbued with that . . . ever since, no?”’

And here’s Hari’s ‘exclusive interview’ with Chavez from 2006:

‘The spectre haunting Latin America – the spectre of Hugo Chavez – furrows his big, broad brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die. “I will never forget – in the early hours, I said goodbye to my wife and three little children. I kissed them goodbye and blessed them.” He knew in his gut he was not going to survive that long, bloody day in 1992, when he and his allies finally decided to stage a revolution against the old, rotten order loathed by the Venezuelan people. “I realized at that moment that I was saying goodbye to life,” he says, looking away. “So it is possible that, after surviving, one has been a bit... imbued with that sense ever since, no?”’

Are we expected to believe that Hugo Chavez told Johann Hari the same story about ‘the night he knew he was going to die’ as he told the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson five years earlier, but that for some reason he suddenly became so much less articulate when talking to Hari that Hari had no option but to plagiarize Anderson’s article to get a cleaner rendition of it?

This is implausible for several reasons, not least of which the fact that in both Anderson and Hari’s articles the quote in question has ellipses, indicating hesitancy on Chavez’s part. But Hari claims he only did this when he was looking for clean, ungarbled quotes. This raises several questions, none of which Hari addresses in his latest apology. Why is it that his interview subjects express themselves so well when interviewed by others, and yet seem to become so garbled when he speaks to them that he needs to plagiarize other journalists’ work?

And, more importantly, what about Hari’s accounts can we trust? If some of the quotes in his articles are not the words Hugo Chavez or George Michael or Ann Leslie or Malalai Joya said to him, which ones are? How do we know that the bits in between the quotes are accurate? If Hugo Chavez gave Hari a garbled version of the same thing he said to Anderson, did he also look away when doing so, as Hari claims he did? How about the part when Chavez patted Hari on the knee – did that really happen, or is it simply dramatic effect to heighten the interesting quotes he has stolen? Once you start reading Hari’s interviews and taking away the plagiarized quotes, you realize that there’s very little of substance left to the articles, but much melodramatic looking away, cigarette-smoking and knee-patting from the subjects. The details of body language he uses to surround so many of his plagiarized quotes don’t suggest a writer searching for clarity in order to offer an X-ray of his subjects’ ‘finest thoughts’, but rather one who has deliberately and systematically misled his readers.

I fear Johann Hari’s latest apology is, rather like his last two, both manipulative and self-serving. If he is serious about regaining the respect and trust of his readers perhaps he should start by detailing, in The Independent or elsewhere, precisely which articles he did this with, to what extent, and be honest about why he did it. Taken as a whole, the plagiarism that has been discovered so far points to far worse than the occasional theft of prior quotes for the sake of clarity, but instead someone who has plagiarized major parts of many of his interviews, for over a decade. There are also still serious unanswered questions about whether he has fabricated quotes and even entire incidents in his articles on Dubai, the Central African Republic, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

I think Johann Hari’s latest apology is unconvincing and less than completely honest. He’s still trying to cover his back and minimise what he’s done, but I don’t think it is going to help him in the long term. I think it’s time he stopped dodging the most serious questions about his work and came clean about all of it, with an apology that does more than make himself out to be a naive soul whose only error was to care too much about clarity. His readers, and those whose work he has stolen, deserve a completely frank and remorseful explanation of his actions.

The Debrief Recommends: Existential Ennui

2011-08-01T16:45:00.002+02:00

A few months ago, I chanced across the blog Existential Ennui because it contained a very interesting guest essay about Dennis Wheatley by literary critic Michael Barber (whose excellent Paris Review interview with Kingsley Amis from 1975 can be read here). I was intrigued not just by the essay but by the subject matter of the blog, which seemed to range over a great deal of British and American fiction, including some rather obscure thriller-writers.

The site is run by editor and bibliophile Nick Jones. And as Nick has since very generously reviewed my own work, so I thought it was high time I pointed out his own. Today he has posted the first part of an exclusive interview with spy novelist Anthony Price - this is a real coup, as to my knowledge there are no other interviews with Price online, which is somewhat surprising considering how prolific he was. Price, like Joseph Hone, Adam Hall, Geoffrey Rose and several other brilliant British thriller-writers, has been sadly rather forgotten since the end of the Cold War, and it's fascinating to read his thoughts on publishing days gone by. Price also holds a secondary role in the thriller genre, I think, as a reviewer: I have dozens of books that have quotes from his Oxford Mail reviews on the covers. Indeed, as he tells Nick, it was through his reviewing that he came to fiction. Price's novels were, I've always felt, very English, and Nick's interview with him almost reads like a scene from one of his novels. In the second part, he has some great stories about the likes of Kingsley Amis and Terence Stamp.

Anyway, bookmark Existential Ennui if you're interested in thoughtful reviews, interviews and insights into book collecting and 20th-century publishing and design. You won't regret it.

How Johann Hari plagiarized the Daily Mail

2011-07-04T15:25:00.018+02:00

In 2004, Johann Hari interviewed Daily Mail journalist Ann Leslie. In his introductory paragraphs, he explained that he had affection for her, even though he regarded The Mail as 'a Mephistopholean font of evil'.

Curious, because Hari plagiarized enormous chunks of the 'interview' from an article Ann Leslie wrote for The Mail in 1997. The article was published on August 12 1997, and was headlined 'There are roses, foxhounds and schoolgirls in uniform'. Hari used 772 words of this article in his 'interview'. In the case of 227 words, he made it clear he was quoting from something Leslie had written before (although he didn't mention it had been in The Mail), which is remarkably brazen considering he plagiarized a further 545 words from the same article.

With those 545 words, he not only failed to attribute them to any article by Ann Leslie, but he also pretended she had said them directly to him. Here are all the parts of Ann Leslie's 1997 Daily Mail article and the corresponding passages from Johann Hari's 'interview'. I think these passages and the others in interviews with George Michael, Malalai Joya and many others speak for themselves: Johann Hari is a systematic and extensive plagiarist, and has been for years.

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997:

'He was my father's bearer, valet, and a man whom I loved more than anyone else after my father. He'd been my father's bearer even before my parents' marriage; taciturn, speaking little English, illiterate, but deeply noble, with the hawk-like face of a man from the legendary North-West Frontier, he and his family - had moved with us all over India and, much later, Pakistan.

Whenever I cut my knee, I ran to Yah Mohammed. When a deadly snake, a black krait, slithered into my nursery and my ayah (Indian nanny) ran screaming from the room, her ankle bracelets chattering in panic, it was Yah Mohammed who calmly killed the krait.

Yah Mohammed was always there if I was lonely, frightened, or leaving home again, for yet another distant boarding school.

And it was Yah Mohammed, I later learned, who had rescued me from a friend's garden during what became known as The Great Calcutta Killing, in 1946. The city was burning as Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other: Yah Mohammed, at great risk to himself, climbed over garden walls and hurried down alleys, carrying the little white missy baba to safety on his spindly back. He was, of course, a Moslem.'