By this time, you've probably heard about the plagiarism scandal revolving around
Q.R. Markham's cut and paste, mix-tape of a novel
Assassin of Secrets, (don't bother searching this website for it, it's been pulled). If you haven't heard, you can read about it all over including right
here.
I hate to think about how much time I've wasted on writing this piece. I was going to construct a response/review that was entirely (wait for it) plagiarized. Wait, did I say
going to? Let me rephrase that. I
did put one together. It was all ready to go, but I thought better of it. After all, far nimbler scribblers than I have already perfected that technique. Have you given yourself the pleasure of reading
Jonathan Lethem's essay
The Ecastasy of Influence: A Plagiarism from Harper's magazine? By all means, go do so, I'll wait... (And what do you know? It seems Lethem's just released another collection of essays by that title, I'm on my way to pick up
The Ecstasy of Influence right now).
...We good? Wasn't that great? Now, would
you like to have a pale comparison, copycat piece with
your name on it floating around the internets? Me neither. Soooo, I've been wondering about the folks who read the book and enjoyed it before all the news broke. Is their pleasure tainted, poisoned or retro-actively void? Nah. Of course it's an entirely different equation for the editors, critics and fellow writers whose time, talents and good names have been so contemptuously used. Talk about a masculine-anatomical move. Go ahead, be angry.
I am.
However, aside from the widely recognized fouls of fraud and contract fracture, I doubt most folks have a problem with the book. Sure, as a writer I get being annoyed by it, but again most of that is due to the dishonesty of its presentation, and not the product or even the technique (let's face it, that's a
really difficult way to write a book - so far dozens of source texts have been discovered including work by
Robert Ludlum, Charles McCarry, James Bamford, Geoffrey O'Brien and especially
John Gardner's James Bond novel
License Renewed - I know, I know,
I'm looking up irony too. For specifics, check out
Edward Champion's blog
Reluctant Habits).
But... is there any denying that the collage, the mash-up is
the creative pop-medium of our time? In books, (
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). In music (really it's so pervasive and accepted, it's hardly worth mentioning here, but I'll point out the completely unauthorized
Grey Album -
Danger Mouse's
Jay Z/Beatles project). In film (
Carl Reiner's
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid or how about
Steven Soderbergh's
The Limey?). Going all the way back to
Andy Warhol's silkscreens (probably earlier), it's a thing. It's unstoppable.
I hope it goes without saying that I highly recommend availing yourselves of Markham's
influences (which according to the
Kirkus review include
Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and
William Gibson as well as
Spy vs. Spy and
Burn Notice) as much as I would suggest seeking out and enjoying
Alan Ladd's performance in
This Gun for Hire before (or after) it's doppleganger in
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Still...
I'll insert the close of my "original" plagiarism here:
The late Kathy Acker contended that text takes its meaning from context - and so she saw creative plagiarism as a valid literary form. She never hesitated to take a chunk from another author's book and put it in the middle of one of her own. Her reasoning was that, once placed in her book, the text she had appropriated meant something different than it had in the book she had taken it from, and, therefore, it was no longer the same story. It strikes me that it is an impressive achievement to create a compelling story by stitching together chunks of other books. I would find it an impossibly daunting task. If Markham created something original by doing this, I don't necessarily have a problem with it. (1) Markham wouldn’t be the only writer in recent years—the era of redefining what is meant by “intellectual property”—to use plagiarism to make a statement. If Markham is trying to comment upon the spy genre—on how it is both tired and endlessly renewable, on how we as readers of the genre want nothing but to be astonished again and again by the same old thing—then he has done a bang-up job. If he wants to comment on our current notions of discovery, to turn us all into armchair detectives, Googling here and there and everywhere to solve the puzzle, he is a genius. (2)
Nah, I'm pretty sure he was just stealing. (3)
(1) Barry Graham - Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky, (2) Macy Halford - The New Yorker, (3) Duane Swierczynski - Secret Dead Blog
Jedidiah Ayres writes original fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
