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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Sex, ferrets, plagiarism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I know, I know. You saw that headline and thought, “Oh no, not another blog about sex and ferrets and plagiarism! When will he get off this kick?”
But listen up, cause this is a hoot. A romance novelist, Cassie Edwards, has been caught plagiarizing chunks of material from another source into her paperback novel “Shadow Bear,” a story of forbidden love between a Lakota chief and a white woman, Shiona Bramlett, in South Dakota in the 1850s.
After Bear and Bramlett have made the beast with two backs in his tepee, a family of ferrets starts making noise, and they discuss the critters.
“They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail,” says Shiona. She continues that she once read a book about ferrets. “I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polcecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.”
Let’s just pause here a moment. Shadow Bear, old buddy, if you have just done your manliest best with a woman, and you and she are entwined on a pile of pelts or whatever, and she starts nattering on about a book she read about ferrets, then you need to raise your game a notch. Trust me on this.
OK, back to the literary controversy. It turns out Edwards lifted her ferret research — word for word in parts — from an article by Paul Tolme in “Defenders of Wildlife” magazine. The plagiarism was discovered by bloggers at a romance novel blog called Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Once they uncovered that, they started plugging more and more of Edwards’ prose into Google and have found at least 14 more such instances in seven of her novels.
At first, Edwards pleaded ignorance. “When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to” credit your sources, she told the Associated Press when the news first broke. She later changed to “no comment,” and her publisher, Signet, has said it is reviewing her books.
Back in 2002 there was a flurry of plagiarism charges, with noted historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose both called out for sins of (depending on one’s viewpoint) outright plagiarism or just not crediting source material properly.
There’s outright theft, and there’s carelessness, and from what I recall of the Kearns and Goodwin cases, there was ammunition on both sides. I’m not going to pass judgment.
But I do take away one sure thing from all this: When I write my novel, and the hero and heroine are floating in post-coital bliss, and the subject turns to ferrets, as it usually does, I am by Golly going to be sure and footnote my research.
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