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Charles Drazin

The Third Man: Yet More Theft Part 2


This blog entry is now the fifth example of John Walsh’s heavy plagiarism of my book In Search of the Third Man that I have posted online. Although there are much more rewarding things that I would prefer to do with my time, I have been advised that it is important to set out the extent of the plagiarism in as much detail as possible.


This latest example shows how p.103 of Walsh’s book The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film steals from pp.59–60 of In Search of the Third Man.


Here is Walsh’s first paragraph:


This paragraph steals from page 59 of my book, reproducing a quotation from my original interview with Guy Hamilton without giving any credit to me as the source.


Walsh paraphrases in his own words and condenses an account that he has taken pretty much wholesale from me, and at one point his phrasing is similar enough to amount to near word-for-word copying: “They would appear as witnesses to the unfolding drama” is an obvious reworking of my sentence, “They would be onlookers to witness the drama unfolding in their midst”.


Walsh goes on, in his next two paragraphs, to describe the appearance of an elderly balloon-seller in a night-time square:


The two paragraphs are a theft from pp.59–60 of my book:


All the points that Walsh makes in his account – that the balloon-seller’s appearance is a moment of comic relief, that the sequence is unscripted, that Reed had spotted the old man a few days earlier, even the comparison to Alfred Hitchcock – are drawn from my account. So too is the long quotation from Guy Hamilton, although, once again, Walsh does not credit me as the source (nor does he even reproduce the quotation accurately).

1 commentaire


Shinta Fukuda
Shinta Fukuda
18 oct.

I've been following your articles about the plagiarism.


What comes across now, very strongly, is how very dull John Walsh's "writing" is! If one can call it writing. My eyes glaze over before I've read even half of a Walsh sentence!


Rather than end this comment in a flourish of well deserved expletives, I simply recall Cicero's lament on his own times, "𝘖 𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢, 𝘰 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴!"


— Alex Anderson

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