Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, Recent Updates | Tagged: james bond

Look! It Moves! On TV! by Adi Tantimedh #125: The Man Who Ripped Off Bond

Published Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:00:08 -0600

There was a minor upset in the world of publishing last week: a debut spy novel had to be withdrawn by its publisher for plagiarizing James Bond novels.

ASSASSIN OF SECRETS by QR Markham was meant to be the first novel in a series about a new superspy character who will protect his country "at all costs". Well, I should bloody hope so. I don't remember a superspy character that wasn't willing to succeed "at all costs." Hell, James Bond was always out to shag the girl "at all costs".

Portrait of the author as a cut-and-paster:

Anyway, ASSASSIN OF SECRETS was about a hunt for a secret organisation that killed spies, hence its title. So far, so on-the-nose. However, within the first month of its US publication, diligent fans of James Bond combed through the book and found entire passages copied wholesale from at least six Bond novels by the late John Gardner, including his first, LICENCE RENEWED. Further examination of Markham's book uncovered sections lifted from other Bond novels by Gardner's successor Raymond Benson and spy novels by Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry, the latter generally considered the American, right-wing counterpart to John le Carré.

The result of this revelation is the cancellation of the UK launch of the book, all copies of the US edition withdrawn from shops, probably to be pulped, credit and reimbursements offered to bookshops, and the embarrassed US publisher having to issue a public apology. The author will have to return his advance (if he hasn't spent) and possibly face legal action. Markham is a poet and bookseller in Brooklyn and known in New York literary circles, so it's fair to say that his reputation and any hopes he might have of a career and the prospect of Hollywood producers taking an interest in his book are toast.

The Guardian has the most detailed report of this story, including links to a website listing all the plagiarised bits, but even it doesn't have the answer to the big question: why would he do this? Did he really think he would get away with it? That he went to the time and trouble of cadging from that many books to put together his own is a staggering achievement in its own way. To me, doing this is the ultimate Cut-and-Paste Hell. Surely it would have taken a lot less time to just come up with your own stuff to write down rather than comb through what looks like about a dozen novels in order to steal whole passages from?

And you'd think he might have picked more obscure books to steal passages from rather than books that were bestsellers that sold in the millions and still have huge fanbases that would notice. But then the fact that he would plagiarise several books to write his own suggests a certain lack of imagination already, so why would he have the imagination to plagiarise something much less well-known and easily found?

I haven't read ASSASSIN OF SECRETS – I hadn't even heard of it until I read about it in the papers – but some people have said it's actually a good, fun read as far as spy novels go. It had glowing reviews until the plagiarism was uncovered. Is it an elaborate hoax? A gesture of contempt at the publishing industry? It doesn't seem so since the book was marketed as a straight spy thriller and the author cashed the cheque. Did he panic and experience writer's block? If he was honest and touted the book as a kind of bold literary experiment culled from the writings of other authors the way William Burroughs and Kathy Acker used to do (although when they did it, the results were entirely new works), he might have been hailed as a kind of postmodernist author of bricolage or literary mash-up in the age of what Roland Barthes called "The Death of the Author". Instead, he seemed to hope he would get away with it and got caught, and will now be a joke, a cautionary tale and a pariah with no hopes of a literary career.

If the writer didn't want to get caught, he should not have copied so overtly from obvious sources. Just look at how Hollywood does things. THE MATRIX lifted from William Gibson's NEUROMANCER, GHOST IN THE SHELL, Grant Morrison's INVISIBLES, ALICE IN WONDERLAND and 20 years' worth of Shaw Brothers kung fu films to create something new. They weren't direct steals of copyrighted characters or images but basic ideas, themes and visual motifs. Or take the new postmodern "fairy tales collide with the modern day" TV shows like GRIMM and ONCE UPON A TIME. It's open knowledge in Hollywood that the networks had been approached by Warner Brothers Television to produce a pilot and TV series adaptation of the Vertigo comic FABLES, but when no agreement was reached, they decided to commission their own versions of the concept, so the two new shows that are currently on the air are just different enough for charges of plagiarism to be in a grey area in the eyes of the law. It's obvious to everyone in the industry that they ripped off FABLES, but it would take very long and expensive lawsuits to make it stick, if that were to happen at all, and Warner Brothers Television have to decide whether to spend the time and money to pursue a lawsuit. The studios bank on them not bothering. Their lawyers have also probably cleared the scripts to make sure the shows can skirt charges of plagiarism. The trick here seems to be to make one's own version sufficiently different from the source, to paraphrase rather than directly quote, the latter of which is what QR Markham made the mistake of doing.

I wonder if ASSASSIN OF SECRETS will become a kind of cult collector's item, an artifact of literary theft. It now has that kind of cultural value. According to the Huffington Post, copies are now selling even better than ever at crazy prices from secondhand dealers, though the author and the publisher won't see a cent of these sales now.

I have a fascination with acts of folly, especially self-destructive acts of folly. There's always something we can all learn from them. The big one here, apart from "Don't rip off other creators", is "DON'T PISS OFF JAMES BOND FANS! THEY WILL HAVE YOU!"

Ripping myself off at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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