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Reuters reports that an "author" is suing filmmaker Tyler Perry. She says he stole the plot of his 2012 movie, "Good Deeds," from her book. Terri Donald, who also writes under the pseudonym TLO Red'ness, says Perry based the film on her 2007 book, "Bad Apples Can Be Good Fruit." She says she sent a copy of her book to Perry's company before production on the movie began. In the movie, Perry stars as a wealthy businessman who meets a struggling single mother.

This kind of thing is the reason no one wants to get anything in the mail anymore. If the description of her self-published book (with 0 reviews on Amazon after five years) is as badly written as the book, then heaven help us all. Here is part of it:

"This mysterious secret must unfold in order for the woman to allow a committed vow. In this story her past unravels tragedy, murder and her secret. What the man isn t being honest about is that he also has a secret that materializes in the midst of the storm and the raging fury it holds. The two come to grips with the truths and decide for the future and what it has to offer them."

It reads like someone took a paragraph, translated it via Google Translate into Polish, and then translated the Polish back into English.

Or how about this self-description:

"Terri Vanessa Donald is a 36-year-old female writer who first began writing as a hobby. After meeting Steve Martin through casting agent Mindy Morin in Los Angeles during the shooting of LA Story, Steve showed her manuscript format. Two years later, she began writing for Artist Darrin O Brien, a.k.a. Snow, and had three-time platinum success. Terri plans to take the book industry by storm with her Maya Angelou-style of writing technique. She is a proud mother with family values and a native-born New Yorker who is now serving proudly in the US Army during this very exciting venture."

Words fail me. If anyone has a lawsuit here, it might be Maya Angelou.

Isn't this a great cover?



But what the publisher neglected to mention is that it's an "affectionate homage" to a ground-breaking 50-year-old cover:



As the London Observer reports:
This book's publishers and author, Barry Fantoni of Private Eye fame, call it an "affectionate homage" to Hawkey, although they admit it is used without acknowledgement or authorisation.

Hawkey's widow, Mary Hawkey, Deighton's biographer, Edward Milward-Oliver, and a number of Hawkey's contemporaries have branded the jacket a rip-off and asked for its withdrawal, condemning it as "shameful" and "outrageous".

Mary Hawkey calls the jacket "plagiarism". "I can't tell you how distressed I am on seeing such an obvious copy of Ray's work. He was extraordinarily generous with, and encouraging towards, young graphic designers, but I believe he would have been appalled and angered by such a naked, barefaced copying."


Read more here.

Remember that spy novel that turned out basically to be a bunch of other spy novels stitched together, with a few names changed? Well it sure looks like another novel drew heavily from a much older novel on the same subject: Edgar Allen Poe's cousin/wife.

Here's just one of many examples:

O'Neal (old book): "She would smile and, if the ladies were not looking, reach for his hand and give it a reassuring squeeze. The trip, something over 20 miles, took about an hour."

Hart (new book): "During the rare moments the ladies weren't looking our way, I'd slide a hand along the seat behind the swell of my skirts, capture Eddy's fingers, and give a quick squeeze. Petersburg lay 20 miles distant. 'The trip should take little over an hour,' he informed me."

The author claims that these accusations are being made by someone who attacks anyone who writes about Poe, and that any similar phrases are because they relied on the same primary sources.

Uh huh.

Read more here.

A book that came out this month - a spy tale that got starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly - seems to have largely been cobbled together from other books. Now it's being pulled from the shelves by the publisher.

A blogger got a copy Q.R. Markham’s Assassin of Secrets and started comparing it to other books. Here's just one example:

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Markham, Page 13: “His step had an unusual silence to it. It was late morning in October of the year 1968 and the warm, still air had turned heavy with moisture, causing others in the long hallway to walk with a slow shuffle, a sort of somber march.”

Taken from Page 1 of James Bamford’s Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency: “His step had an unusual urgency to it. Not fast, but anxious, like a child heading out to recess who had been warned not to run. It was late morning and the warm, still air had turned heavy with moisture, causing others on the long hallway to walk with a slow shuffle, a sort of somber march.”
* * *

To see many, many, many more examples, click here.

There are so many it seems like this almost falls into the category of typing. To call it plagiarism would be a compliment.