Two Envelopes And A Phone’s Reviews > The Paper Dragon > Status Update

I said hello and goodbye to a lot of pages today…but I’ll have to finish this biggie tomorrow. It has been much better than I thought it would be; I guess we should always have faith in our favourite writers. That said, I don’t want a legal thriller or a courtroom story for a long time, thank you.

I thought this might be the Evan Hunter novel it would be best to ignore - irrelevant, dated, even offensive, skip it or save it for last - but I think it's still an interesting book. A few Mystery books I have read recently have suddenly switched the courtroom in the last stages, and I have not enjoyed that as an unexpected finale...but a plagiarism trial unfolding before me has got me hooked. The proving is tough.

Whoops. I had to follow my update with a revised update…I have not read 210% of the book! Typo King Award again goes to…

This is fiction, but…it must be difficult to prove plagiarism, when the plagiarist is clever. Don’t tell anyone what you stole from, make enough changes that similarities cannot be traced from one work to another. The case in this novel seems to be boiling down to one specific similarity that is against the odds of happening by sheer coincidence. When the plagiarist doesn’t not just copy text, it’s tricky. Good book.

I wasn’t sure at first - but now I’m quite into it, and anxious to get back to it. I’m more interested in the plagiarism case than I am in breaking away for the life-stories of all the players, but I guess an unending trial in progress would become monotonous. Years ago, I did read the nonfiction look at well-known plagiarism cases, Stolen Words. And I read Assassin of Secrets prior to it being outed.

Ordered this on a whim, due to loyalty to Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain. It's fascinating to think of Hunter working on 87th Precinct novels as McBain, but also giving us these huge reads as Evan Hunter. 1966...so this big book is from around when Eighty Million Eyes got published, Doll...plus, Hunter was writing a bit for Hollywood. I think of the 87th Precinct as his main focus, but maybe they were his relaxation!