Among several pages of heavily plagiarized text to be found in The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film is the above sample, which is being used to sell the book on Amazon. It is stolen from In Search of the Third Man, a book I wrote twenty-five years ago.
When last Thursday I heard from Titan, the book’s publishers, I agreed that I would give them another week to sort out what had gone wrong before submitting a copyright infringment report to Amazon.
They shared with me some statements the author John Walsh made defending his book, which included a specific defence of the Amazon sample page. What follows relates only to that page, and it is important to point out that there are several other pages in Walsh’s book that plagiarize me just as heavily.
Defending the Amazon sample page, Walsh stated: “This is not plagiarism; I used reference material from many other sources for my research.” But he singled out only one other source by name, a book called The Shepperton Story by Gareth Owen: its value as a genuinely independent source can be judged from Walsh’s comment – I suppose as some sort of justification for his own theft – that Owen’s book contained “verbatim information” from In Search of the Third Man without any citations in the main text.
Walsh also made this comment: “Suppose there are numerous examples of plagiarism, such as facts from history and stories in the public domain or repeated in different books.”
I think what Walsh is trying to say is that simply describing what happened is not in itself plagiarism. But he doesn’t simply describe what happened. He adopts my research and analysis in choosing what are the significant events to describe, and he follows my paragraph structure, without any citations that enable a reader to see that my work is the source of what he has written. Pointing out that he used another book that also plagiarized me doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for his own plagiarism if he doesn’t cite that book as the specific source of the information (which he doesn’t).
But let’s take a closer look at the Amazon sample, paragraph by paragraph, comparing each paragraph with the paragraph or paragraphs that it plagiarizes in my book. I am sorry about the rather remorseless tone of what follows, but the need to make my case requires me to be forensic:
The sample page on Amazon (p.115 in Walsh’s book) begins with this opening paragraph:
The above is the only paragraph in the Amazon sample page that does not copy me, but it offers some clue as to why all the other paragraphs do. It is irrelevant background information that has nothing to do with the making of The Third Man. Not having done any serious research of his own, Walsh turns to me for more cogent, relevant information, but he does so without providing the required credit.
The actual copying begins with Walsh’s second paragraph. He writes:
This is a condensed version of the two opening paragraphs of a chapter from In Search of the Third Man called “In the Studio” (p.82):
Walsh’s version adds no pertinent information that is not already included in my paragraphs. And its choice of what specific information to include is dictated by what he has found in my book – the mention, for example of, Hoerbiger learning his lines phonetically. While I provide a footnote to cite the source of my information, John Walsh provides no citations at all.
Let’s go on to Walsh’s next paragraph and again compare it to the paragraph he’s taken it from in my book (whether directly or via another uncredited source):
There is no information in John Walsh’s paragraph that he hasn’t simply lifted from my paragraph. But although the number of 75 sets was only a rough estimate that Hawkesworth gave in an interview with me, John Walsh presents it as an exact figure – he copies but corrupts. He does not use exactly the same words, or in exactly the same order, but, in its lack of any ideas of its own, his paragraph is little more than a slavish copying. While the two footnotes in my account provide readers with the sources for my information, John Walsh once again gives no citations at all.
John Walsh’s next paragraph is a long one that corresponds to, and plagiarizes, four of my paragraphs (pp.82–4). Here again are, first, the plagiarizing text, and, then, the plagiarized text:
John Walsh’s one paragraph condenses my four paragraphs, which provide the road map for his content. The whole shape of his paragraph and its choice of information to include – filming the Casanova Club and the scenes outside Harry’s flat, the building of the sewer set, the use of a second unit to film Harry in the doorway, the troubles filming Harry’s cat – is dependent on my account. And although John Walsh doesn’t cite me, his quotes from Guy Hamilton about Harry’s cat are taken from my interview with Guy.
Where there are any differences in his account, they are never an improvement. So for example, when I describe that Vincent Korda supervised the building of the sewer set on Stage B, in copying me John Walsh adds the curiously useless and incomplete detail that “the vast set was housed within a 120-foot, 35-foot high space supervised by Alexander Korda”. A 120-foot-what? Wide? Long? In trying to figure out where he got this bit of seemingly new, if incomplete, information, which for once he hadn’t taken from my book, it occurred to me that he must have been referring to the sound stage itself, and, sure enough, when I Googled "B Stage Shepperton Size", this is what I found:
What would have been far more relevant information would have been to give the size of not the sound stage but the sewer set itself. This brief departure from simply copying me is made even worse by the fact that he then names the wrong Korda as the supervisor of the sewer set. The right Korda was, as I stated in my original account, Vincent, not Alexander.
Another small departure is Walsh’s comment that Harry’s cat was mentioned in a memo between Selznick and his lawyer Milton Kramer. It’s a rather pointless mention because he doesn’t say what the memo said, but, far worse, the date he gives for the memo, 4 October 1948, must be wrong, because it’s several months before the sequence with Harry’s cat was even shot.
Getting facts wrong is routine for Walsh. Even when he’s simply copying, he fails to do so accurately. For example, quoted in my book, Guy Hamilton says, “Carol, I think that at about 800 feet there’s a bit that you’ll like . . .” Copied in Walsh’s book, this becomes: “Carol, I think that at about 80 feet, there’s a bit that you’ll like.” From 800 feet to 80! That is quite a difference.
It is a week today since the publication of The Third Man: The Official Story of The Film. The sample page I’ve analysed in this blog is still up on Amazon. And now the Amazon reviews have started to come in. Six so far. And so far, all five stars!
“A fantastic and well researched study into this classic film,” comments another review. “I can’t imagine anyone topping it,” says yet another. As the person whom Walsh has plagiarized each review makes me feel a little bit more angry and determined to seek redress.
