It’s one of the more puzzling plagiarism tales of recent memory: Q. R. Markham, the pen name of Quentin Rowan, a part owner of the bookstore Spoonbill and Sugartown, signed a deal with Little, Brown for a series of spy novels featuring a Bond-like hero named Jonathan Chase. The first of the books, “Assassin of Secrets,” was slated for release on the third of November of this year, and ahead of that date was reviewed and blurbed favorably by a number of reputable sources. Kirkus starred it and called it a “dazzling, deftly controlled debut”; Publishers Weekly praised the “fine writing”; and the crime novelist Duane Swierczynski deemed it “ambitious and audacious.”

The book was released and was selling moderately well until some time in the past few days, when an anonymous source contacted Little, Brown and pointed out instances of plagiarism. On the afternoon of the seventh, the publisher recalled all 6,500 print copies, sparking a run on the book (its Amazon ranking had gone from 62,924 on Tuesday afternoon to 174 by Wednesday afternoon), and launching a campaign to identify all the lifted passages. Dozens of passages from multiple books have now been catalogued, including one six-page stretch lifted from John Gardner’s “Licence Renewed.” (The most complete list can be found on Ed Rants.)

[#image: /photos/590953dbebe912338a37333e]In the hundreds of newspaper articles and blog posts that have been published on the subject of Markhamgate in the past twenty-four hours, one question appears over and over: How did Rowan think he’d get away with this, especially in the era of Google?

It’s the natural question, but in the spirit of playing detective I must ask: Is it the right one? We do not yet have all of the facts—Rowan and his agent have been silent since the scandal broke, and much of the book has yet to be mapped—but those we do have point to something much stranger and more richly textured than your run-of-the-mill plagiarism case. Consider:

As more lifted passages are identified, “Assassin of Secrets” is looking more and more like pastiche or collage, rather than a “novel,” as we properly understand the word.

An article by Rowan published on the Huffington Post on October 25th (and taken down on November 9th around 4 P.M. for plagiarizing passages from Geoffrey O’Brien’s “Dream Time”) reads like a warning. Rowan wrote (or sampled) about how reading spy novels had made him a better bookseller. He’d realized, he wrote, that the “Machiavellian tactics” he’d learned from Bond, M., and George Smiley, “could be employed in the seemingly innocuous world of book selling.” The article ran with a slide show entitled “Faking It.” Beneath a photo of Sean Connery, Rowan wrote that the spy doesn’t trouble too much with people’s opinions of him: “As a bookstore clerk … I find myself talking to customers as if they were children, the spy has no time for your trivial concept of what is real and what isn’t. “

If he is an artist whose intent is to dupe, he is a deft one. In 2002, the Paris Review ran his story “Bethune Street,” which contains a passage lifted from Graham Greene. The reviews of “Assassin of Secrets” read like near-misses, if not practical jokes on the part of the reviewers. These lines actually appear in the Kirkus review: “Containing elements of the 007 and Jason Bourne sagas, Graham Greene’s insular spy novels, William Gibson’s cyber thrillers, TV’s Burn Notice and Mad magazine’s classic Spy vs. Spy comic strip, this book is a narrative hall of mirrors in which nothing and no one are as they seem and emotion is a perilous thing to have.” Publishers Weekly notes that “the obvious Ian Fleming influence just adds to the appeal.”

There is, of course, one very strong argument against “Assassin of Secrets” being an elaborate ruse: writers typically want to sell their books, and Rowan’s has been recalled. Moreover, he has caused Little, Brown such embarrassment (and, potentially, financial loss) that “Assassin” is unlikely to be rereleased and the rest of the series will probably be cancelled. And yet, the revelation of plagiarism did turn the book into an sensation. Could this have been part of a plan? Did Rowan think that creating a highly readable plagiarism would benefit him?

Rowan 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. Those whose points have been well-taken, however, have generally been up-front about their borrowing. Among the best-known are Jonathan Lethem, whose 2007 essay in Harper’s, “The Ecastasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” comprised only lifted passages; and the British “collagiste” Graham Rawle, whose 2009 novel “Woman’s World” was “assembled from 40,000 fragments of text snipped from women’s magazines.” Both of these were praised for their meta properties: they worked on the story level and also critiqued and commented upon the stories they told through their acts of appropriation. If Rowan 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. (David Shields, whom James Wood wrote about last year in this magazine, might approve of his project.)

For all the fuss we make when a work is discovered to be unoriginal or untruthful, we are usually willing to forgive the culprit, so long as he or she keeps us entertained. In a his 1902 essay “The Psychology of Plagiarism,” William Dean Howells wrote of a journalist who had recently been pilloried for lifting another journalist’s work, but had moved on to bigger city and a job where he wielded more influence. Plagiarizing doesn’t injure the writer, Howells thinks, “a jot in the hearts or heads of his readers,” which is fine with Howells, because he does not consider plagiarism a sin: “It seems to deprave no more than it dishonors.” The only real qualm Howells has with plagiarizing is that so many plagiarists seem to think they will not get caught. This, he writes, is illogical:

You cannot escape discovery. The world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only too glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing their alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the court of parallel columns. You have no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the more indecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and wishes to display his erudition.

The world is still full of idle people reading books, and Rowan has most certainly been hauled to the bar, where sooner or later he will have to speak. What he’ll say is anyone’s guess: I can only promise that the words will be Googled the instant they fall from his mouth, and that if he hasn’t found his own by then, he’ll have to locate them quickly. A reproduction is only fun if there’s an original lurking underneath.