The plagiarist Quentin Rowan, whose spy thriller Assassin of Secrets was withdrawn from shelves after James Bond fans discovered sections had been lifted from other writers' work, has posted a confession on The Fix in which he says copying was an addiction.
It was a paragraph of BS Johnson, swiped for Rowan to use in a short story when he was just 20, which started things off. "In retrospect," he says, "maybe that's when I transferred my obsession from drinking and drugs to plagiarism. My addiction didn't disappear; it simply morphed into something else."
Rowan goes on to chart his struggles to stay sober alongside a "mostly losing battle with plagiarism" which ended with "getting busted on the James Bond forum", vilification from "the media and the internet" and "love and concern" from friends and family. He ends by suggesting that plagiarism may come to be seen "if not as a disease, at least as something pathological", and beginning his life again "with a confessional on The Fix".
So is that the end of the chapter? After apologising for the "awful pantomime", is a public admission of this kind enough to turn the page?
