Rowan’s author photograph showed a young man with puffy cheeks wearing a shearling coat, peering out from behind vintage sunglasses.

“Is it me or does he kinda look like Alfred Molina?” someone wrote.

“Yes—in a photo shoot circa ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ ”

“I think he looks a lot like a guy who’s in serious trouble.”

Originality is a relative concept in literature. As writers from T. S. Eliot to Harold Bloom have pointed out, ideas are doomed to be rehashed. This wasn’t always regarded as a problem. Roman writers subscribed to the idea of imitatio: they viewed their role as emulating and reworking earlier masterpieces. It wasn’t until the Romantic era, which introduced the notion of the author as solitary genius, that originality came to be viewed as the paramount literary virtue. Plagiarism was and remains a murky offense, “best understood not as a sharply defined operation, like beheading, but as a whole range of activities, more like cooking,” the English professor James R. Kincaid wrote in this magazine in 1997. Imagine a scale on one end of which are authors who poach plot ideas (Shakespeare stealing from Plutarch) and on the other are those who copy passages word for word: Jacob Epstein, who cribbed parts of his novel “Wild Oats” from Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers”; the Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose novel plagiarized chick lit.

Rowan’s method, though—constructing his work almost entirely from other people’s sentences and paragraphs—makes his book a singular literary artifact, a “literary mashup,” as one commenter put it, or spy fiction’s Piltdown Man. Thomas Mallon, the author of “Stolen Words,” a book about plagiarism, described “Assassin of Secrets” as “an off-the-charts case” both in the extent of the plagiarism and in the variety of Rowan’s sources. “It almost seems to be a kind of wikinovel, with so many other writers unwittingly forced to be contributors,” he noted. The book’s most obvious forerunner is Jonathan Lethem’s 2007 Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” which was cobbled together from other texts (with a list of sources) as a meta-literary stunt. Other commenters compared Rowan to musical samplers such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse, and to Kathy Acker, whose postmodern novels use plagiarism to make a statement about what Roland Barthes called “the death of the author.”

Some celebrated “Assassin of Secrets” with ironic tributes. “Mr. Markham/Rowan is now my hero,” someone wrote on Champion’s site. “What might have been just another disposable piece of banal commercial trash has now been lifted to the level of art.” Others, including this magazine’s Book Bench blog, wondered if it was just a clever trap—a misdirection, as a spy might put it—meant to expose the staleness of the genre. Even Rowan’s pen name turned out to be an allusion. Kingsley Amis used the pseudonym Robert Markham when he wrote a Bond continuation novel in 1968. Could the whole thing have been a hipster’s prank, or a viral marketing campaign? A blog post appeared with the title “Is the ‘Assassin of Secrets’ Scandal a Hoax?”

A week after the book was recalled, I went to a Williamsburg coffee shop to meet Quentin Rowan. I found him sitting at the front of the shop near two young men wearing patent-leather boots. Rowan had on khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt that was tight at the waist. (He describes his style as “seven parts preppy to three parts nineteen-seventies.”) His voice is somewhere between a whine and a whisper. While we spoke, he often trailed off, mid-sentence. “I can’t talk much about legal stuff,” he said.

By then, the mystery about whether Rowan was, so to speak, an authentic plagiarist had been solved. Two days earlier, he’d sent a series of apologetic e-mails to Jeremy Duns, who posted them on his blog. “I just wanted to make the best ’60s spy novel I could,” Rowan wrote, adding that he was not “playing a prank.” He signed off, “Gosh I wish I could do it all over.” He was picking up the odds and ends of his life. Little, Brown asked that he pay back his advance—fifteen thousand dollars, for two books—and reimburse the company for the book’s production costs. He was no longer welcome at the bookstore. He’d been about to move in with his girlfriend, a lawyer, but she broke up with him, and he was planning to move to Seattle. Rowan said that for the past fifteen years he had been dreading being discovered as a plagiarist—“Lots of waking up in the middle of the night and looking in the mirror.” Now he seemed dazed. “I couldn’t really envision it, to be honest,” he said. “I couldn’t envision what it would entail, except humiliation.”

Rowan grew up in Park Slope. His mother, Stephanie Rauschenbusch, a granddaughter of the Christian theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, started a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Columbia before becoming a painter and a poet. His father, Lou Rowan, was a writer who ran with a downtown arts crowd in the sixties and seventies. He helped found the Friendly Local Press, which published the poets George Oppen and Michael Palmer. For years, he worked as an English teacher at Friends Seminary, on Sixteenth Street, but in the late seventies he gave up teaching and writing to become an investment manager, at Bankers Trust. “I think it was really hard for him to stop writing,” Rowan told me. “He felt out of touch hanging out with businessmen, and they all saw him as an odd duck.”

Rowan, an only child, went to Friends, and his mother enrolled him in art classes. “He was fabulously talented as a young artist,” she told me. “He could draw a fully articulated hand and the entire body.” Rowan’s father got in the habit of giving him books above his reading level: at thirteen, he carried around DeLillo and Pynchon. “As a kid, I had this sense of expectation,” Rowan said. “It was one of those weird things where I thought my parents would be disappointed if I just went and became, like, a doctor or a lawyer.”

Rowan’s parents divorced when he was two. His father remarried twice, acquiring stepchildren, and moved to Bronxville, then to Tarrytown. His mother remarried, too, and Rowan drifted between the two homes. According to his mother, he had a lot of friends in school but was also “easily bullied.” In high school, he developed a drinking problem and, he told me, a habit of “getting really high and just letting everything go and then getting obsessed with jogging, and jogging thirteen miles a day.”

The making of a plagiarist can be hard to distinguish from the making of a writer. Joan Didion has described learning to write by typing Hemingway’s fiction; Hunter S. Thompson did the same with “The Great Gatsby.” Rowan reversed the process: he was a writer before he was a plagiarist. He wrote his first poem, “Prometheus at Coney Island,” when he was sixteen, in a poetry workshop at Eugene Lang College, at the New School. In free verse, it describes the Greek hero soaring over southern Brooklyn: “Up over the swell of hot sugar / up over the swell of rubber . . . over the Coney Island gray water that will / make your shins itch.” Prometheus ends up “an avatar / of polka dancers.” Rowan remembers writing the poem in half an hour. After he read it to the class, the teacher asked if he knew what the word “avatar” meant. A couple of years later, when he was a student at Oberlin College, Rowan got a surprising letter: “Prometheus at Coney Island” had been chosen for the 1996 edition of “Best American Poetry.” When he was still in high school, he says, his mother had submitted the poem to a local journal called Hanging Loose, which published it. It then caught the eye of “Best American Poetry” ’s editor, Adrienne Rich. Rowan recalled the experience in his e-mail to Duns:

Up until that time I was an indifferent writer, a dabbler really, at the best of times. I was in college and like everyone trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. (Mostly I just wanted to play Rock music.) I took this anthology business as a sign that I was meant to be a famous writer. However, unlike any normal person who works at something a long time and eventually gets good, I decided I had to be good then and there. Because I was already supposed to be the Best.

Rowan became a creative-writing major and enrolled in poetry workshops. One of his teachers, David Young, recalled that Rowan was “a very pleasant and affable young poet” who produced middling work, but, because of the anthology, “people were inclined to make a little bit of a fuss over him.” Rowan was anxious. Deciding that he needed a better vocabulary, he found an S.A.T.-prep book called “Word Smart,” and began substituting big words for small ones. Later, when writing a story for a creative-writing class, he tried the same method—but this time he lifted whole paragraphs of prose that he found in bound copies of old literary journals (Transition, The Transatlantic Review) in the Oberlin library. The process felt “easy,” he wrote recently, on the addiction Web site The Fix. “The lifted paragraph perfectly fit my narrative. And it temporarily assuaged the awful feeling I had in my head that I was no good as a writer.”

The oddball jobs on Rowan’s résumé—knife salesman, telemarketer—mostly took place during the summers. The summer before his senior year of college, in 1997, he worked as an intern at The Paris Review. James Linville, who was then the magazine’s editor, recalled Rowan as an “ephebe type, almost Truman Capote-like.” In August, Rowan submitted a tale about futuristic pirates called “Innocents Abroad.” The story, it turned out, was largely copied from a 1913 sea captain’s memoir, “The Venturesome Voyage of Captain Voss,” which Rowan had found on his mother’s bookshelf. The language struck him as “hilarious,” and he copied passages and embroidered them with words from his vocabulary books, plus a few he made up, to create “an almost ‘Finnegans Wake’-y kind of thing.” (A sample passage: “The Milkround’s Jason was well up in the years, the devoir deltas lamboidal, eclaircissement imperforate, but was still a strong vessel.”)

Linville was unimpressed. But the story made its way to George Plimpton, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, who loved it. According to Linville, Plimpton occasionally liked to “throw the staff a curveball” with a whimsical editorial choice: “If it had something of the bizarre, or was what he would call un amuse, he would bite.” Plimpton pronounced the pirate story full of “wonderful energy,” Linville recalled. “It was the boss’s prerogative.”

Rowan was back at Oberlin when he learned that The Paris Review was publishing his story. He panicked at first, but when the story came out no one noticed the theft. He told me that he began to think, Well, maybe no one really checks these things. Two years later, he submitted another story to The Paris Review, called “Bethune Street.” The bulk of it came from “Dancing in the Dark,” by Janet Hobhouse, and “Going Native,” by the surrealist writer Stephen Wright. Rowan had also used a line from Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” (“Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago”), and another from “Brideshead Revisited.” This time, when Plimpton accepted the story, he requested that Rowan come to his house on East Seventy-second Street to work on it. “He was an amazing editor,” Rowan told me. “He knew all the stuff to do to make it work.” The Greene line had been buried in a few pages of detail, but Plimpton moved it up to the beginning of the story. Again, when the story was published, no one recognized the stolen bits.