Plot It Yourself

Wolfe’s head turned. “As I told you on the phone, Mr Harvey, I know nothing about plagiarism, but I would have supposed that it concerned an infringement of copyright. All five of these claims were based on material that had not been published and so were not protected by copyright. Why were the claims not merely ignored?”

“They couldn’t be,” Harvey said. “It’s not that simple. I’m not a lawyer, and if you want it in legal terms you can get it from the NAAD counsel, but there’s a property right, I believe they call it, in these things even if they haven’t been copyrighted. It was in a court trial before a judge that a jury awarded Jane Ogilvy a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. Do you want me to get our counsel on the phone?”

“That can wait. First I need to know what you want to hire me to do. The first three cases are history, and apparently the fourth, Mr Oshin’s, soon will be. Do you want me to investigate on behalf of Miss Wynn?”

“No. I should say, yes and no. This committee was set up six weeks ago, before the claim on Miss Wynn was made. It had been authorized at a meeting of the NAAD council in March. It seemed fairly obvious to us what had happened. Alice Porter’s putting the squeeze on Ellen Sturdevant, and getting away with it, had started a ball rolling. Her method was copied exactly by Simon Jacobs with Richard Echols, except for one detail, the way he established the priority of his manuscript and the assumption of Echols’s access to it; and he changed that one detail because he actually had sent a novelette to that literary agency, Norris and Baum, and had it returned. He merely took advantage of something that had happened two years back. Of course the manuscript which was the basis of his claim-the one he allowed Title House and Echols to inspect-was not the one he had sent to Norris and Baum in 1954. He had written it after Echols’s novel had been published and gave it the same title as the one he had sent to Norris and Baum-‘What’s Mine Is Yours.’ ”

Wolfe grunted. “You may omit the obvious. You are assuming, I take it, that that was the procedure in all five cases: plagiarism upside down. The manuscript supporting the claim was written after the book was published or the play produced and had achieved success,”