MacSimon Brown has announced that it is scrapping plans to print 250,000 copies of Anthony Puckett’s second novel, Simon’s Rock, after it was discovered that passages in the book were lifted directly from a little-known novel published in 1951 by the Irish writer Kieran O’Dwyer.
Anthony Puckett, whose debut novel, A Room Within, spent thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list nearly five years ago, was set to release his much-anticipated second novel in June. He is also the author of a book of short stories, The Temptation of Adam.
Mr. Puckett is the son of mega-bestselling thriller writer Leonard Puckett, whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold at least 200 million copies worldwide.
Charles Graydon, head of MacSimon Brown, said in a statement that the company “takes this matter very seriously. We were very much looking forward to the opportunity to promote Mr. Puckett’s second novel under our auspices and we are greatly saddened to learn that we will no longer have the opportunity to do so.”
Some industry watchers have speculated that the pressure to produce a second book that would sell as well as Mr. Puckett’s debut—perhaps propelling Mr. Puckett into the stratosphere currently occupied by his father—placed undue strain on Mr. Puckett and may have factored into his decision to plagiarize. Bestselling debut novels are notoriously difficult to follow up. The author of the 2009 bestseller The Help, Kathryn Stockett, was said to be working on her second novel as long ago as 2012, and has yet to publish it.
Others in the publishing industry took a more sanguine approach to the accusations. “I bet if you checked twenty books you’d find that at least six of them contained some sort of plagiarism,” said Shelly Salazar, a freelance book publicist based in Manhattan who claims to have worked with several top-selling authors. “Maybe seven. I mean, seriously? Simon’s Rock is an amazing book. Amazing. And Anthony Puckett wrote almost every word of it himself.”
“Some degree of plagiarism ought to be considered part of the publishing process,” said Richard Posner, a former judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and author of The Little Book of Plagiarism. Posner acknowledged that the practice is more rampant in the academic world than in the world of fiction. “Academics are particularly concerned with and prone to plagiarism,” said Posner. “It can be difficult to publish in academia without drawing on previously published work.” For novelists, the practice of plagiarism is both more unusual and more difficult to refute when discovered, if, as in the case of Mr. Puckett, exact sentences and paragraphs are copied word for word.
In the end, the copied passages add up to a little less than 1,200 words of a 120,000-word book, but that number will prove little help to Mr. Puckett, who, despite numerous attempts, did not return calls seeking comments. The publishing house declined to disclose how much of Mr. Puckett’s well-publicized advance, said to be in the two-million-dollar range, the author was asked to return. Thomas P. Campbell, a Manhattan-based attorney who specializes in cases of plagiarism, speculates that MacSimon Brown will want to recoup most, if not all, of the advance.
To some in the industry, Puckett’s situation recalls that of Kaavya Viswanathan, who, in 2004, as a seventeen-year-old, received an advance reported to be $500,000 for a two-book deal for two young adult novels. When excessive similarities were later found between her work and that of an already published book by Megan McCafferty, her publisher pulled the first book and canceled the contract for the second. Viswanathan claimed that although she had read McCafferty’s books, any similarities between the two were subconscious.
The elder Mr. Puckett, whose fifty-ninth novel, The Thrill of the Chase, is due out in June, could not be reached for comment. The estate of Mr. O’Dwyer, who died in 1998 in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland, also had no comment on the charges. The book in question, There Comes a Time, O’Dwyer’s fifth and final novel, sold fewer than 5,000 copies worldwide. It is not known how Mr. Puckett might have become familiar with the work of Mr. O’Dwyer, whose popularity, though considerable at its height, was mainly confined to his native country.
It is also not known publicly how the plagiarism was discovered. Calls to Leonard Puckett’s publishing house went unanswered.
Along with the article, they’d published Anthony’s author photo, in which he was leaning against a distressed piece of wood, perhaps meant to resemble the wall of an old barn. He was wearing a collared shirt, one button casually open, and he looked smug. In fact, he looked sort of like an asshole. He was smiling. Which was fine, of course, for a book jacket photo, but definitely not for a photo to go alongside an article detailing his shame and humiliation. Anthony hadn’t even wanted to use that photo on the book jacket. He’d preferred the photo that had appeared on the jacket of A Room Within, in which he looked more somber, more literary and pensive. But Cassie had insisted on a new photo; she’d insisted on the smile. “You’re a different person now than you were then,” she’d said. “You’re a star, Anthony! You need to play the part.” She’d called his look “approachable.”
Looking at the photo now made him feel nauseated. It didn’t even help him to write his feelings down in novelistic form, though he tried it anyway. Anthony Puckett could see right through his stupid fucking Cheshire grin, all the way to the black heart that lay beneath.