That scenario, with minor variations, is repeated four times, with other authors and by other plagiarists. The writing and publishing industry is convinced that the manuscript was planted, but the case was settled out of court. Sturdevant ignores the accusation until Porter's manuscript is found in Sturdevant's house. The first four claims have shared certain characteristics: in the first, for example, the best selling author Ellen Sturdevant is accused by the virtually unknown Alice Porter of stealing a recent book's plot from a story that Porter sent her, asking her suggestions for improvement. The Book Publishers of America (BPA) and the National Association of Authors and Dramatists (NAAD) form a joint committee to explore ways to stop the fraud, and the committee comes to Wolfe for help.
These claims have damaged both the publishers and the authors. And they are making their claims stick: three successful claims in four years, one awaiting trial, and one that's just been made. Now, the plagiarists are claiming that the well-known authors are stealing from them (as Wolfe puts it, "plagiarism upside down." ). It's the old scam – an unsuccessful author stealing ideas from an established source – but it's being worked differently. Someone has been getting away with a different spin on plagiarism. Stout himself experienced at least one instance of contentious relations with his publishers. Stout adds as subtext his take on the peculiar relationship between book authors and book publishers - part symbiosis, part animosity. Apart from the series' continuing characters, all the players in the book are directly associated with the publishing industry. In Plot It Yourself, Stout draws on his lengthy experience with book publishers, with authors (via, for example, his presidency of the Authors Guild), and with the writing process itself. Wolfe, by his own admission, bungles the investigation so badly that three murders result. Nero Wolfe on learning of yet another murder, in Plot It Yourself, chapter 13.Ī group of authors and publishers hires Nero Wolfe to investigate a series of plagiarism claims. I shall drink no beer until I get my fingers around that creature's throat." Wolfe quit bellowing as abruptly as he had started, glared at Fritz, and said coldly, "Take that back. He was roaring something in a language that was probably the one he had used as a boy in Montenegro, the one that he and Marko Vukcic had sometimes talked.įritz, entering with beer, stopped and looked at me reproachfully. He had closed his right hand to make a fist and was hitting the desk with it, and he was bellowing.
Plot It Yourself (British title Murder in Style) is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1959, and also collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces (Viking 1969).
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