A year ago, Coachwhip
republished the entire Inspector Norton Kane series by "Roger
Scarlett," a shared penname of Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page,
who had the misfortune of being the victim of "the most glaring
piece of plagiarism ever to exist" when the pseudonymous "Don
Basil" copied The
Back Bay Murders (1930) almost word for word – shamelessly
published it as his own under the title Cat and Feather
(1931). Our resident genre historian, Curt
Evans, wrote a great piece on this remarkable
case of plagiarism.
In my never-ending quest
to satisfy my crippling impossible crime addiction, I stumbled across
the promisingly titled The
Locked Study Murder (2017), a self-published novel, written
(or so I thought) by Stephen M. Arleaux – which immediately had my
interest. My fellow locked room fanboy, "JJ" of The
Invisible Event, has showed us in his ongoing series "Adventures
in Self-Publishing" that this corner of the publishing industry
has some hidden gems. So I began looking into this particular title
and writer when a feeling of deja-vu came over me.
The plot-description of
The Locked Study Murder sounded awfully familiar and it took
me a couple of minutes to realize the premise of the book was very
similar to the setup of A.A. Milne's The
Red House Mystery (1922).
However, this similarity
could have just been a coincidence or Arleaux had read The Red House
Mystery and thought he could wring a better detective story from
Milne's premise. I didn't immediately assume the worst, but the
feeling of deju-vu didn't subside when I started reading an
excerpt of the first chapter. So I opened a second tab and went to
Project Gutenberg to compare
the two chapters, which showed that this was not merely a coincidence
or an homage to Milne – because the chapters were nearly identical! Only some
of the names were changed!
Here's a brief sample from
the first chapter of The Locked Study Murder:
Now compare that excerpt with the opening lines from The Red House Mystery:"In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Townsend House was taking its siesta. There was a lazy murmur of bees in the flowerborders, a gentle cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms. From distant lawns came the whir of a mowingmachine, that most restful of all country sounds; making ease the sweeter in that it is taken while others are working."
"In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Red House was taking its siesta. There was a lazy murmur of bees in the flower-borders, a gentle cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms. From distant lawns came the whir of a mowing-machine, that most restful of all country sounds; making ease the sweeter in that it is taken while others are working."
The Red House Mystery
is in the public domain and this is not, strictly speaking, illegal,
but it isn't fair nor is it very honest and just a cheap way to make a buck under false
pretenses. Even more
annoyingly, Arleaux wrote on the copy-right page that the story is "As
Suggested by A.A. Milne," which really rubbed me the wrong way.
This is nothing more than copy-paste job with a name change. A story
suggested by Milne would have been an originally written detective novel
based on the unrecorded case he had hinted at at the end of The Red
House Mystery.
This is not the only time
Arleaux has passed off a book in the public domain as his own work.
The
Locked Room Murders (2017) is a word for word copy of
Wadsworth Camp's The
Abandoned Room (1917) and he didn't even change the names of
the characters in that one! Obviously, he does this to make a quick,
easy buck, because Arleaux's copies are only available as paperback
editions that are sold for close to sixteen bucks a copy when you can read the originals for free. So let the
reader be warned!
I hastily slapped together this unplanned blog-post on the spot, because I simply had to share this with all of you, but normal programming will resume tomorrow with a regular review of a short story collection by Edward D. Hoch. So stay tuned!