Meet Park Slope's very own plagiarist!

[Rachel Day, The NY Daily News]

Quentin Rowan is not a fan of Jonathan Safran Foer. As a writer himself trying to make it big, Rowan grew "disillusioned" watching "wunderkind writers" like Foer make it big. "Nothing would up happening with anything I'd done," he told The NY Daily News. "There was a bunch of books by people who were technically my peers that felt showy and one-note. Maybe I had to dumb it down."

So Rowan decided to switch it up. While working at The Community Bookstore of Park Slope, he started paying attention to the types of books that customers were snatching up. Like thriller novels. These were doing so well that Rowan started reading them pretty seriously. Eventually, he was writing his own thriller novel between shifts at the bookstore. On Tuesday, November 3, 2011, Quentin Rowan's dream came true: he published his very first spy novel. Written under Rowan's pseudonym, Q. R. Markham, Assassin of Secrets graced the very shelves that surrounded him throughout his research and writing process.

But not for long.

See, Rowan studied thriller novels alright. So much so that he stole from some of the best authors out there: Ian Fleming, John Gardner, James Bamford, Charles McCarry, Raymond Benson, and Geoffrey O'Brien. We're not talking stealing storylines or stealing themes, either. He stole words. Sentences. Entire passages. Written nearly verbatim from some of the best books around. 

What was that about those "showy," "one-note," "wunderkind writers," Rowan?

In case you're curious for some proof to this allegation, Edward Champion, Managing Editor of the website Reluctant Habits, has a great round-up of all of Rowan's plagiarised passages. He includes the original sources as well, so you can do a comparison for yourself. It's pretty remarkable, when you see just how much was snatched. 

Rowan's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, is understandably shitting their pants over this. They've already pulled the 6,500 copies of the initial print run from stores (though some customers were still able to get some copies via Amazon.com, where apparently the book jumped from a ranking of 62,924 last Tuesday afternoon before the story broke to a ranking of 174 on Wednesday afternoon after the story broke). They're also offering a refund to anyone who bought the book. They've cancelled Rowand's second book in his two-book contract (duh). And they've released a bunch of "we fucked up" press releases (though nowhere in any of the press releases did I see an apology for picking the title "Assassin of Secrets" in the first place. WTF does that even mean? For shame, Little, Brown).   

In case you're feeling bad for Rowan, consider this: since the story broke on November 8, a few other cases of Rowan's plagiarism have popped up, including a Huffington Post piece and a 2002 piece in The Paris Review. Seems like copying other people's shit is this d-bag's MO. 

It's unclear whether Rowan is a Park Slope resident himself. All of the press reports simply say he's a Brooklyn native, and I'm way too lazy to investigate beyond that. He's an investor of the Williamsburg bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown, so there's a chance he might belong to that neck of the woods. Regardless, I do kind of love that he wrote pieced together the damn book while working at The Community Bookstore of Park Slope, and will now forever associate The Community Bookstore with him. Which is an improvement over what I usually associate The Community Bookstore with: the overpowering and constant smell of cat pee.