The strange case of Q.R. Markham

By now, many of you have probably heard of the truly bizarre case of Q.R. Markham, the nom de plume of a Brooklyn novelist whose debut thriller, Assassin of Secrets, was recently exposed as an insane patchwork of plagiarized passages from other books. In his author photos, Markham himself looks something like a character out of a Nabokov novel, so it’s perhaps fitting that this scandal differs from other instances of plagiarism both in scope and in kind: dozens of thefts have been identified so far, from such famous novelists as Charles McCarry, Robert Ludlum, and James Bond author John Gardner, all but guaranteeing that the fraud would quickly be discovered. (One of the lifted passages was allegedly six pages long.) The sheer massiveness of the deception, which also extends to much of the author’s other published work, suggests that unlike most plagiarists—who tend to be motivated by laziness, carelessness, or cynicism—Markham was driven, instead, by a neurotic need to be caught.

Of course, as with James Frey and the Harvard student I still like to think of as Opal Mehta, after the exposure comes the inevitable justification, and Markham doesn’t disappoint. In a fascinating email exchange with author Jeremy Duns, who provided a glowing blurb for the novel in happier times, Markham claims that his actions were motivated by “a need to conceal my own voice with the armor of someone else’s words,” as well as, more prosaically, the pressure of rapidly turning around revisions for his publisher. The latter rationale can be dismissed at once, and novelist Jamie Freveletti has already skewered it quite nicely: every working novelist has to generate rewrites on short notice—I’m doing this for my own novel as we speak—so invoking time constraints as an excuse makes about as much sense as blaming the physical act of typing itself. More interesting, at least to me, is the implication that assembling this novel of shreds and patches ultimately became a kind of game. Markham writes:

I had certain things I wanted to see happen in the initial plot: a double cross, a drive through the South of France, a raid on a snowy satellite base. Eventually I found passages that adhered to these kinds of scenes that only meant changing the plot a little bit here and there. It felt very much like putting an elaborate puzzle together.

Now, on some level, this kind of puzzle construction is what every genre novelist does. The number of tropes at a writer’s disposal is large, but finite, and barring a really exceptional act of invention, which has happened only a handful times in the history of the genre, much of what a suspense novelist does consists of finding fresh, unexpected combinations of existing elements and executing them in a surprising way. If anything, Markham’s example highlights one of the weaknesses of the suspense genre, which is that the underlying components—like the ones he lists above—have become rather tired and predictable. Doesn’t every spy novel contain a double cross, or a raid on some kind of secret base? In his neurotic fear of originality, Markham simply took it to the next logical step, so it’s tempting to read his case as a kind of demented experiment, a sweeping indictment of the artificiality of the spy thriller itself.

But this gives him too much credit. Assassin of Secrets is a kind of distorting mirror, a looking glass in which various players in the publishing world can see uncomfortable reflections of themselves. Markham’s editors and reviewers have clearly been wondering, as well they should, why they didn’t detect this deception much sooner, and what this says about their knowledge of the genre in which they make their living. And for other novelists, Markham stands as an emblem of what I might call a culture of empty virtuosity, in which a book that mechanically recombines exhausted tropes can be acclaimed as the work of an exciting new voice, when it merely contains, as James Wood once unfairly said of John Le Carré, “a clever coffin of dead conventions.” I love suspense, and much of its pleasure lies, as Markham says, in the construction of elaborate puzzles. But it can also be more. And if nothing else, this Frankenstein monster of a novel should remind us of the fact that we owe it to ourselves to do better.