Holy freaking CRAP. That is by far the worst/most glaring example of obvious plagiarism I've ever seen. My jaw actually, literally dropped open when I got all the way to the end of that massive list of evidence and I saw, "...and that's only through page 17." THAT MUCH in seventeen pages?
I know editors in X genre can't possibly be experts in the prose of every single book in their genre, but it really seems like somebody ought to have caught this before it got this far. I mean, this isn't just a few lines here and there, like in the Viswanathan case or the Cassie Edwards stuff. This is, like, THE ENTIRE BOOK, or just about, has been written as a composite of five other writers' works. So far. At page 17. I really wonder that nobody recognized any of this material before. But I guess it just goes to show, nobody can have an in-depth knowledge of everything in a genre. Yikes.
I often worry that I am inadvertently copying the particular arrangement of two or three words, or using a phrase I've read in another book, because I have the kind of memory that will pull up little bits of information like that without necessarily attaching a source to them. I don't ever want to be accused of plagiarism, though, so whenever the little warning bell tinkles in my head and I think I may have heard what I just wrote somewhere else before, I drop what I'm doing and Google the hell out of it to be sure I wasn't inadvertently inspired.
That -- the lapse of memory and the inability to positively identify where a particular phrase or line or scene came from -- is the excuse some past plagiarizers have tried to use. And I am sure in some cases where the similarities are there, but pretty small and extremely infrequent, it's a legitimate brainfart on the author's part.
Q. R. Markham is going to have a hell of a time coming up with an excuse for THIS, though. Wow. He must have typed up his manuscript with three or four other spy novels propped open all around his computer.
