The Real Book Thief

How To Steal Another Author’s

Work & Nearly

Get Away With It

Ingrid Black

Copyright © Ingrid Black

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE REAL BOOK THIEF

ESCAPING IRISHNESS

INTRODUCTION

In 2015, I discovered that another author had been plagiarising my work and selling it through Amazon, making large sums of money along the way. This is the story of how her deception was uncovered and what happened afterwards. A shortened version of this book was published in Life magazine in Ireland’s Sunday Independent on March 27th 2016 and was followed the next week by a further article outlining the response which I received to my original piece from other authors and readers.

This book also includes a copy of Escaping Irishness, my essay on crime fiction previously published as part of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing In The 21st Century, an anthology edited by Declan Burke and released by Liberties Press in 2011.

THE REAL BOOK THIEF

One day in early October 2015, I logged onto Twitter and noticed that I was now being followed by a woman with the username @DonnaPatel.

Normally I wouldn’t pay that much attention to checking out new followers, but something that day made me click on the link to see who it was. Call it intuition. Donna Patel described herself wryly as an “aspie” and “Potterhead”, and her most recent interaction had been addressed to an Irish author calling herself Joanne Clancy, whose handle at the time was @JMClancyWriter. Donna had been reading Clancy’s latest book, Tear Drop, a serial killer thriller set in Cork City. At the time, Tear Drop was the 111th biggest selling e-book on amazon.co.uk, and was the number one bestseller in Irish crime fiction, and Donna Patel had a simple question for the author: “Are you Ingrid Black?”

Next day, having received no reply to her message, Donna sent another tweet to the same account, saying: “Your book Tear Drop is The Dead by Ingrid Black.” Shortly afterwards, a third: “So you must be one of the authors behind Ingrid Black, or you are plagiarising.”

I found this exchange particularly interesting, and for a very good reason. The main reason being that I am Ingrid Black.

**********

One half of Ingrid Black, to be precise. She was a pseudonym adopted more than ten years ago for a joint crime writing project between myself and another author. My name was, still is, Eilis O’Hanlon and I was, still am, a columnist for Dublin’s Sunday Independent, Ireland’s largest selling newspaper, and also in those days for the Northern Ireland edition of the now defunct News Of The World. Ingrid’s other half is Ian McConnell, a children’s author, and The Dead was our first book.

The novel featured a former FBI agent turned true crime author with the name Saxon (no other name is ever given) who has moved to Dublin. It concerned her search for a murderer of young women who has adopted the persona of another serial killer known as the Night Hunter. Ed Fagan is believed to be dead when the book begins, but a series of cryptic, sadistic, boastful letters are being sent to a newspaper in the city, promising further deaths. Because of her specialist knowledge of the case, and personal connection to the original killer, Saxon is drafted in by the Dublin Metropolitan Police to help investigate the unfolding crimes.

Writing the book was the culmination of a series of circumstances in the previous few years. Crime fiction had never been much of a passion of either of us. A fondness for Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler was as far as it went. We weren’t very familiar with modern popular fiction either. Then for some unknown reason, one of us – it’s hard now to remember which one – picked up a copy of Patricia Cornwell’s first book Postmortem, about Virginia forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, and we were both blown away.

By the Virginia setting. The snow. The voice. Neither of us had realised that modern crime fiction could be this good. For the next five years or so, we were on a journey, investigating the range of modern crime fiction, mainly American authors, who seemed to be the best around at the time.

At some point, the thought occurred to us: Why not write a series of crime thrillers set in Ireland? At the time we were living with a young family in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and the first thought was to set it there; but there were so many problems around politics and policing in that part of the world, and we didn’t particularly want to deal with those. The Troubles held no interest to either of us as a fictional device, but they seemed inescapable. Instead we decided to set the series in Dublin.

It seemed that no one had taken the city and used it, the way that Cornwell had done with Virginia; as John Sandford had with Minneapolis St Paul; the way Ian Rankin was doing for Edinburgh.

That was surprising, because Dublin was a great location, and it wasn’t as if Irish readers didn’t lap up crime fiction set in other places; but this was the year 2001 and Irish crime fiction wasn’t the phenomenon that it has since become. Serial killers were regarded as rather vulgar by the Irish literati. Such blood soaked shenanigans might be considered very entertaining for Americans, but the gatekeepers of Irish high culture liked to think of themselves as having more sophisticated tastes.

Thinking of a title was easy. It would be The Dead, named after James Joyce’s famous short story from the collection Dubliners.

The first step was to think of a character. Saxon came pretty easily. Her sardonic, detached voice likewise. Her name was chosen in tribute to the main character in Scottish author Hugh Scott’s Whitbread Award winning children’s book Why Weeps The Brogan? That concerns a girl, Saxon, and her brother, Gilbert, who are trapped inside a museum after a nuclear attack, fending off giant spiders, encroaching dust, and a nightmarish creature that they know only as the “Brogan”.

As a further nod to Scott’s character, we gave our Saxon the same habit of smoking cigars that he had given to the little girl.

(Later, when we contacted Hugh Scott to tell him about this, he sent a lovely letter in reply, thanking us for liking his book so much that we wanted to do this, including a copy of a column he’d written in his local newspaper in Scotland talking about The Dead).

We next decided that we needed Saxon to have someone in the police with whom she could work. The days of the enthusiastic amateur in the spirit of Miss Marple are long gone, sadly. Modern police work is a specialised and technical field. A police officer lover seemed the obvious solution, but a man might skew the plot, so we made Saxon gay, and gave her Detective Chief Inspector Grace Fitzgerald as a partner.

The next item on the checklist was a plot. This was harder, but we began with small steps, asking questions. Who would the victims be? Who was the killer? How could the culprit be uncovered? Ian came up with the perfect killer as he walked around the garden one day with our eldest daughter. No spoilers, but it seemed fitting in light of our journey towards crime fiction. After that it all came together. Slowly. We started sketching out a story. All we knew is that it was to be set over seven days. It would involve multiple victims, and be very dark and urban in tone, treating Dublin as a big city like any other, just one large canvas on which to have fun with the characters and their lives.

Then we started writing. We were actually working on Chapter One on September 11th, the day of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and didn’t see any of the live news coverage. Only later, coming downstairs to make dinner, did we learn what had happened.

After writing the first few chapters, we sent them to an agent in London, with a rough outline of the rest of the story – with the emphasis very much on rough, as we still weren’t sure of every twist and turn. We didn’t even know if anyone would be interested in the book, it was a fishing expedition. To our surprise, she responded quickly and enthusiastically. She wanted to see more. So we wrote more. She still liked it. We finished the book in a burst of creativity, late nights, little sleep, the occasional disagreement. It was all part of the process.

The agent took it on, and, after a few offers from different publishers, The Dead was picked up by Headline in London as part of a two book deal. It was subsequently sold to publishers in the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy. It came out in 2003, and an audio book was soon recorded by actress Tara Ward.

The Dead was well reviewed. There was an advertising campaign on The Tube in London. It sold well. Tesco bought a large consignment. The film rights were optioned by the BBC and a writer commissioned to finish a script. The book also won a Shamus award in the United States for Best First PI Novel in 2005, an award previously won by such famous names in crime fiction as Walter Moseley (for Devil In A Blue Dress, later filmed with Denzil Washington in the leading role); Dennis Lehane, for A Drink Before The War; and John Connolly, for his 1999 debut Every Dead Thing. Things were definitely looking up.

A year later, we published a sequel – The Dark Eye, again featuring Saxon and Grace Fitzgerald. This time they were investigating a killer known as The Marxman who was despatching victims apparently based on some sense of their deservedness to die. After a change of agent and publisher, two more novels in the series followed - The Judas Heart (2007) and Circle Of The Dead (2008), both published by Penguin Books, again with audio book versions being recorded by Tara Ward.

By this time, however, the editor at Penguin who had purchased the books had left and gone to Australia, and there was no one in the publishing house to champion Ingrid Black. Our new agent also sadly died. Feeling as if we were back at square one, and not knowing how to start over, Ingrid Black slipped from our minds. Ian had returned to his main interest, which was writing for children, and I was working on different projects too. In time, the books slipped out of print, though they were still available to buy on Amazon from second hand booksellers.

The film rights were re-optioned by the BBC when they ran out, now with a different producer on board, but in the end The Dead was never filmed. Now out print, copyright reverted to the authors.

At various points over the next few years, we toyed with the idea of releasing the Saxon stories as e-books through Amazon for people to read on Kindle. It seemed silly not doing so. They represented many years of work by us, and whilst the series had not generated the promise which was there in the first book, they had garnered a few fans along the way. Putting them out on Kindle represented a way of giving them a second lease of life. It certainly wasn’t about the money. There was no reason to suppose that they would find much of an audience; it was more about acknowledging that they existed. Once a book falls out of print, it as if it’s Monty Python’s famous parrot – it has ceased to be. Now there was a chance to keep them alive for anyone who wanted to read them.

We shillied, we shallied; dillied; dallied. Never got around to it. In the end, May 2014, we decided that the time had come. We set up a Twitter account in the name of Ingrid Black to prepare for publication. Our first tweet: “Now all I have to do is figure out how you put a book on Kindle and I'll be a millionaire by Christmas. That's how it works, right?”

Of course, it wasn’t done by Christmas. Procrastination was Ingrid Black’s middle name. By the time New Year came around, it was forgotten. Same by the following Easter. Same with summer. We occasionally checked in to the Ingrid Black account to see what was happening. The short answer being – not much. We’d only sent six tweets and had less than a hundred followers when we switched on in October 2015 to see the notification of a follow from Donna Patel, who had contacted Joanne Clancy to accuse her of having stolen The Dead.

**********

The logical place to start was to find out if there was any truth to this allegation. First stop, Amazon. The summary of the book in question, which had been released as an e-book in August 2015, certainly sounded familiar: “The serial killer known as Tear Drop vanished almost a decade ago, and nothing has been heard from him...until now. As death stalks the dark streets of Cork City, it soon becomes clear to the police and the media that a serial killer is on the loose. Detective Elizabeth Ireland was the lead investigator on the original case when Campbell vanished. Now, she must embark upon a frightening psychological journey to uncover the killer's identity, where she's pulled into a lethal game in which the killer sets the rules and waits for her next move. With the crimes of the past echoing in the present, can she find the killer before he comes for her?”

A blurb wasn’t conclusive proof, however; there are only a limited number of plots. So we downloaded a sample and started reading Chapter One…. at which point the truth was revealed. Donna Patel was right. This wasn’t simply similar to The Dead. It was The Dead.

Chapter One of our book opened with Saxon sitting in a café, the rain falling outside. She glances up to see a reporter who she knows stepping through the door. He has an assignment for her. His newspaper has received a letter from someone claiming to be a certain serial killer. As someone with intimate knowledge of the case, they want her to authenticate it, though she knows that he can’t be the killer.

Everything about Joanne Clancy’s chapter was the same, from the main character’s caustic, sardonic voice to the jokes to the order and structure of sentences and paragraphs. Saxon was now called Elizabeth Ireland, and our reporter, Nick Elliott, was introduced as Brendan Mahon, and the story had been recast in the third person rather than told by Saxon herself in the first person; but these were mere details, window dressing to conceal what was little more than a straight up literary theft.

Here is the original: “I glanced up as the door chimed and saw him coming in, looking round, shaking off the rain violently like a dog, as if offended by the very business of being wet. I quickly turned my gaze back to the coffee, a moment before his eyes would have found mine. I knew he was looking for me, because Nick Elliott wasn’t the sort of person who could feign an accidental meeting even if he wanted to – he didn’t have the subtlety or intelligence to carry it off – but I ignored him in the hope that he’d take a hint and leave me alone.”

Here is Tear Drop: “She glanced up as the door chimed and watched the man violently shake off the rain. A moment before their eyes met, she averted her gaze, knowing he was looking for her; Brendan Mahon didn’t have the intelligence or subtlety to feign an accidental meeting. She ignored him, hoping that he’d take the hint and leave her in peace.” It’s hard to describe how surreal it was, to read sentences that we had written suddenly echoed back to us, ever so slightly altered; to see characters that we created inhabiting these new names.

If I’d been asked, I would have said that I remembered little of The Dead – at this point, it was over ten years since the book was written, and I’d never reread it - and yet, as I went through that first chapter of Tear Drop, I realised that I remembered so much of it, all those details we’d worked on and honed to get them right. First chapters matter very much.

The template was followed exactly down to the smallest details of dialogue. From The Dead: “‘Can I get you something?’ he asked… ‘I’ve been coming here five years for breakfast, Elliott, I can order for myself. I speak English too, you know.” From Tear Drop: “Would you like anything’ he asked – ‘I’ve been coming here most mornings for the past nine years, Brendan, I think I can order for myself.’”

Again, this wasn’t one or two examples. Every paragraph followed the same template. Tear Drop had been written by someone with The Dead open at the side of the keyboard as they typed.

I continued on to Chapter Two. The Dead: “I jumped when the phone rang and checked the number before picking it up. ‘Fitzgerald,’ I said. ‘You read it?’” Tear Drop: “The shrill ringing of her mobile phone made Elizabeth jump. Reluctantly, she pulled it from her pocket, checking the number before answering. ‘Frank,’ she said. ‘Did you read it?’ Once more, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, The Dead was being raided and filleted in front of my eyes.

I knew I had to see the whole thing. Gritting my teeth, I paid £1.99 to download Tear Drop onto my Kindle, and started reading the whole book. At this point I didn’t have much doubt about what I was about to find, but it was still a shock to see all my worst suspicions confirmed.

Joanne Clancy had changed the names of the characters, clumsily in some cases, which was galling in itself. Names were very important to us. We picked them very carefully. The city pathologist in our book, Ambrose Lynch, now shared a name with the former UK Liberal Democrats leader Charles Kennedy; our FBI profiler Mort Tillman had become the rather dully-named Harold Preston; whilst the London-based celebrity criminal psychologist Lawrence Fisher now shared his name, bizarrely, with Carry On regular Kenneth Williams (“ooh, stop messing about,” we were tempted to say). Most gallingly of all, Grace Fitzgerald was now a man with the name Frank Murphy. Saxon’s lover had been removed unceremoniously from her own story.

Clancy had cut some of our descriptions and there were now thirty two chapters plus an epilogue rather than forty five chapters and an epilogue. Likewise, many details had been tweaked for the sake of appearance. A Russian prostitute found murdered in our book was now a Serbian prostitute. Instead of an FBI agent turned true crime author, Clancy’s protagonist was a Metropolitan Police officer from London who had made her money from a libel action after being falsely accused of planting DNA evidence on a suspect. Dublin locations had been transposed with equivalent ones in Cork.

The point remained: The Dead had been stolen in its entirety by an author and then passed off on Amazon as her own work.

Not only that, but it was doing well enough to be among the most downloaded books on Kindle and to be a number one bestseller in Ireland. It was also being widely, and enthusiastically, reviewed by crime fiction fans, both on Amazon and elsewhere on the internet.

“Personally I really do not know how she came up with the superb storyline,” wrote one. (We certainly did!) “I didn't even go to sleep until the early hours because I wanted to finish it. I wanted to carry on until the conclusion because this is how this author makes you feel. You can't rest until you have read the entire book, I kid you not.”

There were scores more in the same vein.

“This is the first book that I have read by Joanne Clancy and as it is the first in the series I was very open minded. I was drawn in from the very start and literally could not wait to turn each page”

“I am an avid reader of this type of book and usually realise the killer quite quickly but Joanne had me guessing right up to the end and I was hooked into the story very quickly. My type of book and look forward to reading the rest of her back log of books.”

“A strong heroine and a nail bitingly tense plot kept me reading long into the night. There are red herrings galore, with so many twists and turns along the way, I felt drained once I reached the end.”

“A well-plotted, perfectly paced book. I was hooked from the start. Joanne Clancy has a knack of drawing the reader in so that you feel, hear, sense and see as clearly as if you were there. Her descriptive writing has made her quickly become one of my favourite authors, and has given me a renewed passion for murder mysteries”

Fellow writers were equally enthusiastic.

“A super suspenseful, fast-paced killer thriller read,” was the verdict of Maureen Reil, author of a number of humour romances also for sale as e-books. “Knowing it was about a serial killer, I could not wait to start reading this crime novel for it is a subject that truly fascinates and scares the hell out of me. I recommend this writer if you enjoy getting to know criminal minds and those that aim to stop them.”

“A sign of a gifted author is the ability to transport her readers, place them right in the middle of the storyline and allow them to feel the range of emotions that the characters in the book are going through. Joanne Clancy is that type of author.”

So said Erin Brady, another writer of romantic comedies.

This woman who called herself Joanne Clancy was getting even better reviews than we did! Clearly she might not be much of an original crime writer, but she might make a cracking editor.

To see Joanne Clancy receiving such glowing reviews for a book which was not ever her own work was almost as galling as reading Tear Drop in the first place. I felt violated, remembering the effort involved in writing our book. The nights when we didn’t get to bed until three or four o’clock in the morning as we struggled to complete the 120,000 novel. The hours spent banging our heads against a brick wall as we tried to resolve some thorny plot problem. There was one day, with a deadline looming, when we planted the two eldest children in front of the TV with a mountain of crisps and sweets whilst Ian went upstairs to complete one section on the home computer and I stood in the kitchen, with a new born baby in a sling around my neck, finishing another on my laptop on the work top.

That’s what writing a novel is like – long hours of graft and determination - not lifting it wholesale from another book.

Ian was more sanguine about it all, almost amused at the audacity of what Joanne Clancy had done, but he wasn’t happy to leave it there either. Together, we began considering how best to respond.

If Amazon discovers that there has been copyright infringement on any title, there is no system of compensation available. Whatever money has already been paid to the author from selling stolen work stays with the thief, and it’s up to the original author to seek restitution. But if notified, the company will take down that particular book and, crucially, an author’s entire back catalogue before shutting them out from selling their work on Amazon ever again - at least not under the same name. There’s nothing to stop an author who plagiarises the work of others from signing up under a new name and continuing to make money from further fraud.

But we didn’t want to move too fast. We wanted to gather facts. Another plan was also festering away and we wanted to put it into action.

Most of all, I wanted to know whether she would do it again.

Insincere, the second in her series about Elizabeth Ireland, was scheduled for publication on October 21st, only a few weeks away. Looking it up online, it was clear that this too had been lifted from our second novel, The Dark Eye, as the blurb revealed: “‘Someone is trying to kill me,’ said the distressed woman. ‘You're the only one who can help me.’ The mysterious death of her brother years ago compelled Detective Elizabeth Ireland to leave her family home. Now, she finds herself chasing the dark heart of a serial killer whose seemingly motiveless murders force her to confront her own unresolved tragedy. When dangerous secrets begin to emerge, the past and the present collide with explosive consequences.” It was Saxon’s sister who died in The Dark Eye, but it was clear that Tear Drop was not a one off. Joanne Clancy planned to plagiarise the entire series, and she had another book, Soon, listed for publication the following January 2016, which once more bore the same plot as our third novel, The Judas Heart. Was she really planning to continue this deception after being outed online?

**********

We contacted Donna Patel, who had spotted the plagiarism in the first place and confronted Joanne Clancy on Twitter, though at this stage, because Clancy had deleted her account, only Donna’s own followers or those who searched for the Irish author’s name on Twitter would be able to see the tweet in question. Clancy might also have hoped that Donna wouldn’t take it any further. In an effort to keep our interactions with her under the radar, Ian used his own account, which was not at that stage linked to the Ingrid Black account, to make contact with Donna Patel, mainly to thank her for having spotted what Clancy had done.

Donna replied, explaining that she loved crime fiction and had a Kindle Unlimited subscription, allowing her to borrow books for free, because she reads so much. That was how she had come across Tear Drop. “As soon as I started to read it, it felt familiar,” she said, but it was only when she came to a particular section of the book, where the killer misremembers an event in Saxon’s life, allowing her to narrow down and identify the only person that could be, that “I knew I had read this before. The Dead is a book I love, and my copy is well used, and I got it off the shelf and compared it. At first, I wondered if it was one of the Ingrid Black writers who had reworked it”. The fact that Joanne Clancy had deleted her Twitter account after being contacted by Donna made her realise that she had in fact stumbled on her secret.

She had tried to get in touch with Ingrid Black to alert us of what had happened and was that day intending to contact our old publisher to see what could be done about it. “It really bothered me that this woman had ripped off your book! I would love to know how it all turns out.”

**********

The question we were asking ourselves was: Who is Joanne Clancy?

All we knew about her is that she was from Cork and had published 26 works since 2010 in various genres from erotica to romance to crime fiction, of which this series was the latest. Up until now, Detective George Ellis seemed to have been her most popular character.

Traceless… Killing Time… If You Tell Anyone… Shattered… The Offering… Open Your Eyes… Before I’m Gone. The production and release of her books was prodigious, almost industrial.

She was also a former Kindle All Star, which is an accolade given to authors whose books are among the hundred most downloaded in any month, and was also a quarter finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, which was set up to find unpublished authors and give them a contract with an established publishing house. She had a website too, joanneclancy.com, through which she sold copies of her books and kept readers up to date with developments in her writing career, and which, at the time, was strongly pushing the new Elizabeth Ireland series.

Her biography, however, was brief enough to give no further clues that might help trace her: “Joanne Clancy is an Irish mystery writer, from Cork, Ireland. She is an avid reader, a self-confessed Kindle addict, and a tea fiend!” A quick Google search discovered some more facts about her.

The fact, for instance, that she claimed to have attended a certain school in Cork and to have studied maths and physics at university, where her interests included debating. There were a number of photographs which could be found online. She was listed on the professional networking site LinkedIn, where she was described as an “Amazon bestselling author and creative entrepreneur” as well as a “blogger, specialising in writing, publishing & marketing.”

Apparently this included “social media analysis”, and her interests under the heading Arts and Culture included “children, civil rights and social action, education, and human rights”.

Beyond claiming that she had a facility for French, there were no further details. She did have a Facebook page, and she was a member of book review site Goodreads, where she had recommended a number of other books. One page said she was born in London, but whether that was true or not, we couldn’t say. I bookmarked the Facebook page for later reference, but within 24 hours that too had been deleted. I kicked myself, as I could have used the Friends list in order to narrow down the search further. The LinkedIn page soon followed into oblivion, but not before I’d taken a record of all the information it contained.

Her Pinterest page proved more forthcoming. She had an interest in clothes and shoes, and a taste for soppy inspirational quotes, and there was a page devoted to her other novels involving Detective George Ellis where she had pinned pictures of actors that she felt represented people in the books, starting with Matthew McConaughy as Ellis. Perhaps she wanted him for any forthcoming movie. Colin Farrell, Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson were among her other choices, so, if the movie ever does get made, the budget for salaries is going to be huge.

I found a blog that she’d written in which she recalled the moment she decided to become a writer, after losing her job. This forced her to “reevaluate my life”, and, sitting in her campervan looking out on a cold Atlantic ocean on the west coast of Ireland, she “went back to my roots and started reading and writing again”. She entered a novel writing competition, but didn’t win, but was inspired by the story of Amanda Hocking, who started selling her self-published stories and as a result became a millionaire in under two years. She said she sent her work to agents in Britain and Ireland but without success, before discovering Kindle Direct Publishing. From that moment, she didn’t look back.

She said 2013 was the first year that she made a living from self-publishing, and in 2014 she launched her website. She said that she intended to concentrate in 2015 on writing rather than marketing.

**********

I still wasn’t sure at this stage what I wanted to do. Confront her? Ask for an explanation? I genuinely wanted to know why she had done it. Had she started out writing her own books and then become addicted to the attention and glamour and had to fake the production of new books in order to continue? Was she simply doing it for the money? Some self-published authors have made millions through Amazon. Plenty more earn thousands every month. It has been particularly fruitful for female authors, who do best of all on Kindle, and who have been able to use self-publishing as a way of smashing through the glass ceiling in publishing.

Alternatively, was she even aware of what she had done?

I couldn’t figure it out. Some of the details led us to believe that Joanne Clancy was secretly laughing at us through the books, and taking a delight in her deception. One of the secondary characters in The Dead is a policeman called Niall Boland. In Tear Drop, that is changed to Greg Holland. Boland and Holland are close enough for the resemblance to seem tauntingly deliberate. The central character’s name was even more striking. In our books, she was Saxon. In Tear Drop, it’s Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the anglicised form of my own name, Eilis.

Was that a coded reference, a knowing nod? Saxon is also a word that conjures up Britishness. Ireland even more explicitly plays on Irishness. Was that deliberate too? Elizabeth Ireland’s initials were EI – E for Eilis, I for Ian, perhaps?

Tear Drop also had the same initials (TD) as The Dead.

On the Amazon page for Tear Drop, there was another teaser: “A novel that will tease readers of The Lie, Girl On The Train and Silent Scream”. The Lie? What a Freudian slip. The Lie is about a woman living a lie. She seems to be one person, but in fact she is someone else.

Was that another clue?

Then there was The Detective’s Wife, which, with a fine sense of irony, came with the blurb: “What if your life was one big lie? What if someone was about to discover your darkest secret?”

What indeed?

Turning to Insincere, Clancy’s second book in the series, planned for publication that October, the cover was also noteworthy. It showed a woman’s face in close up, half in shadow, with her right eye standing out darkly with black lines running from it. A number of Clancy’s covers feature eyes; it’s fairly common crime fiction symbolism. Eyes as windows of the soul. This one, though, looked as if it might be a particularly blatant hint back at the title of the book from which her own novel had been taken, namely The Dark Eye.

Indeed, entering the phrase “dark eye” into Google Images brings back numerous similar pictures. Was this how she had found the cover?

The third book in the series, Soon, was based on The Judas Heart. Her planned cover was predominantly red, like blood. At this stage, we were perhaps seeing signs everywhere, reading significance into things which were actually coincidental or meaningless, but they were intriguing clues all the same as we tried to get our heads round Joanne Clancy’s MO.

None of this seemed like the work of a woman who was sorry or ashamed of what she’d done, but one who was revelling in the deception. This was confirmed when I saw that she had given a number of interviews about the new series, including one to a website called enthrallingdimple.wordpress.com, whose self-avowedly “bookaholic” creator admitted that she had recently been “fangirling” over Tear Drop, adding: “I was so impressed by this book that I decided to let my feelings known. I contacted the person who created this impressive piece and she turned out to be so sweet that I couldn’t help ask her for an interview.”

She proceeded to ask Clancy a number of questions about the book, such as how she came up with the name Elizabeth Ireland. “I’ve always loved the name Elizabeth. I think the name suits my female protagonist’s character; it’s a no-nonsense name for a no-nonsense character, but has a certain element of mystery because of its regal association.”

Were there, she went on to ask, any other endings considered for the novel? “I had a few other killers in mind, but I’m happy with my final decision.” Which character was easiest to write about? Elizabeth, said Clancy, “I like her cheeky sense of humour and her directness. She’s far from perfect, but makes no apologies for who she is. With Elizabeth I just let her voice take over in my head as I write.”

Finally, what got left out in the final draft?

“Apart from a few minor adjustments, I didn’t leave out anything major.” She could say that again!

In some interviews, Clancy even described Elizabeth Ireland as her favourite character and spoke of the similarities between them.

Ian and I had both put elements of ourselves into Saxon in an effort to bring her alive on the page, and now a stranger was claiming those same characteristics as her own. Before going public about this experience, I only told one person what had happened, and his response was to say that “it sounds like having a stalker”. Of course, it was nowhere near as traumatic, but reading the interviews was the closest I came to regarding the experience in that light. It was like having a shadow tracking our every move. Watching us. Copying us. Being us.

**********

Doubting that Joanne Clancy would speak directly to either of the people behind Ingrid Black, and not wanting her to know as yet that we were on to her, we set up a fake email account using the name Iseult O’Malley.

This had actually been one of a shortlist of names which we had drawn up before the publication of The Dead as a pseudonym for our joint venture. We had rejected it for Ingrid Black which seemed much stronger. Using it for the name of a contact was a little in-joke.

We sent a message to Joanne Clancy through her website, pretending to be an Irish student by the aforementioned name, who was currently studying for a Masters degree at Bath Spa University. We said we were writing a paper on digital publishing and its usefulness to women and had contacted a list of other self-published female authors to that end. We asked for an interview, said we would be happy to do it either by email or in person, but that, if she did agree to meet for coffee, Iseult would be in Ireland in a few week’s time and would love to meet.

We then went back into Google Images and, as a further joke, searched the name “Grace Fitzgerald”, one of the two main characters from our own series, the lesbian police officer who had been deemed surplus to requirements in her reshaping of our book. Hundreds of different pictures of women came back. We picked one that looked as if it would suit a young Irishwoman studying in England, attached it to the account, and pressed send. Then we waited. No reply.

This hardly surprised us, as she must have been cautious at this stage that she might in fact now be exposed. I had also started to wonder if any such person as Joanne Clancy existed. Perhaps it was only one of a multiplicity of identities which were used to commit this elaborate deception? I decided that I would have to get along without her.

In the meantime, we started trawling through her back catalogue, intending to uncover whether we were Joanne Clancy’s first or only victims. Twenty six books in a few short years is quite some output. Terry Pratchett was regarded as something of a godlike genius in the industry for his ability to produce two or three books in a series each year. Enid Blyton wrote ten thousand words a day, but she was a phenomenon, and her books followed a definite formula, whereas Clancy’s were much more varied in tone. Could it be that some of the other books which she had published under her own name had been stolen from other authors’ books too? It was difficult to know how to go about answering that.

Plagiarism can be easily spotted by certain online programmes. Simply insert a chunk of text into the search facility and the software will determine if there is a match amongst hundreds of millions of examples of published material. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

Putting Tear Drop into the programme would not have determined a match to The Dead, because not only were our original books out of print, they’d also never been published as e-books, so they had no presence online. What’s more, plagiarists are not stupid and Clancy had been careful to shift around the words and phrases and names, cutting, tinkering. Plagiarism only detects identical, or near identical, matches. What she had done to us was more a case of intellectual property infringement, a much harder thing for a computer programme to pick up. In order to prove such a charge, the owner of said intellectual property cannot simply put an example of his or her own work into a search engine and then wait for the machines to find echoes of it in cyberspace.

He or she has to be aware to begin with that their copyright has been breached and then set about proving it in reverse, which is much more problematic and time-consuming. How are they even supposed to know that their work is being lifted without attribution or payment in an industry where hundreds of thousands of new e-books are issued each year, without any checks to determine that they are original works and not cut and pasted from any number of other sources?

In our case, it had been the merest chance that Joanne Clancy’s activities had been discovered. The Dead was out of print and the author Ingrid Black had, to all intents and purposes, given up writing crime fiction. There was no reason to suppose anyone would notice. Only because Donna Patel had previously read The Dead and was observant enough to spot the overlap had we been alerted to the problem.

To think of it as a Venn diagram, there was a circle of people who had read The Dead and a circle of people who had read Tear Drop, and the only possible connection could have been made by the small number of people who had read both. The odds are in the plagiarist’s favour.

Even within that small number, further sub divisions were needed, because it needed someone who had read both books, and then spotted the connection. Not everyone reads so carefully. They read for pleasure, diversion, and they get through large numbers of books. Many crime books are quite similar in tone, plot, circumstance. One murder is much like another. Detectives are two a penny. Donna Patel simply happened to have an eagle eye. The other point to remember is that there was a low risk of Joanne Clancy being caught. Had she lifted from the work of a more famous author, it would have been spotted immediately by more readers, but Ingrid Black wasn’t a famous enough name.

There was, of course, one further risk that Joanne Clancy was taking, and that was the shared Irish connection between her and us.

The location of the books was only slightly altered, from Dublin to Cork. Had she stolen the plot of Tear Drop from a little known American writer based in Philadelphia or Dallas or North Dakota, the chances of being discovered by readers on this side of the Atlantic would have been significantly reduced. Each step taken further from the original source makes discovery less likely, but Clancy had taken no such precautions, again suggesting that she might have been taking some obscure pleasure in playing with fire. Assuming that she really was Irish, as she claimed, then she was messing in her own backyard. She also had to know that, if I did discover what she had done, I might, as a working journalist, want to write about it, thereby further increasing the chance of exposure.

Either way, we knew that if she had done the same thing to other authors then they were probably going to be ones at the same rather modest level of fame as ourselves. We started trying to pair up her books with other lesser known Irish crime writers, but the truth is that we are not familiar enough with the genre to be able to identify specific books that might also have been plagiarised. I’d entertained visions of alerting another author to the theft of their work, but we soon hit a brick wall.

Google offered a quicker route, but there is something generic about plots that makes it hard to know how to narrow down any search. I Should Have Told You, for example, concerns a brutal killer who is picking up prostitutes and dumping their bodies near the river. There’s nothing very specific about that. It matches hundreds of books.

Three plots stood out as being particularly memorable. The first concerned a lawyer driving home late one night when she strikes a man who runs into her path. Instead of stopping, she goes home, with him still on the bonnet, and proceeds to hold him hostage. The second began with a baby being smothered to death in a drawer. The third was about a detective investigating crimes committed by his own serial killer father.

All three seemed like promising avenues to explore, but still no combination of words and phrases threw up a match on Google.

Were these books then entirely her own? If so, it made what she eventually started to do all the more regrettable, because these three ideas were intriguing premises for a story. If we’d thought of them, we might even have used them ourselves for a fifth Ingrid Black book!

If, on the other hand, they’re not original, then it suggests that our experience has merely scratched the surface of this deception. Other authors would have to undertake their own research in order to reassure themselves that they too have not fallen victim to further plagiarism.

**********

Reading the reviews on Amazon did open up one other possibility. One of Joanne Clancy’s books, Traceless, is based on the real life murder in the Australian outback of Peter Falconio, a British tourist who went missing in July 2001 whilst travelling with his girlfriend Joanne Lees. His body has never been found, though a man was subsequently convicted of his killing and will not be eligible to be considered for parole for another seventeen years. Joanne Lees later wrote a book about the experience.

Clancy transfers the action from Australia’s Northern Territory to Ireland’s County Wicklow, making something of a mockery of the story in the process, because the striking thing about the Falconio murder and Lees’ subsequent ordeal is the remoteness of the location, which Traceless struggles to replicate. Wicklow can feel like the middle of nowhere sometimes, but it isn’t actually. Some of the reviews noted a certain strangeness about the way this book was written, a stiffness or distance reminiscent more of non-fiction than crime fiction.

I began reading some non-fiction accounts of Peter Falconio’s murder and noticed a number of passages and details which had also made their way into Clancy’s story. That’s common enough when novels are based on real life events, and the similarities were nowhere near as sustained as in Tear Drop, but I began to see Clancy almost as a magpie, taking what she needed from various sources, cutting and pasting, changing the material just enough so that it could be called her own, before succumbing finally to full scale authorial thievery.

She certainly wouldn’t be unique in that. Another notorious plagiarist was even more flagrant in his breach of copyright, publishing numerous science fiction novels lifted directly from famous writers in the genre such as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, with only slightly altered titles. He was unmasked in 2012.

An American romance writer with many pseudonyms was similarly found to be slightly altering, then publishing, other people’s work. She initially denied it, before eagle-eyed readers turned collective detective and uncovered her trail of deceit.

There are numerous other cases. Erotic literature appears to be particularly susceptible to plagiarism. Perhaps the devotees of sexy books have better things to be doing with their time than writing original stories.

There are even companies which offer, for a fee, to produce and market books on behalf of clients, earning them hundreds, sometimes thousands, a month in sales. The books are invariably in breach of unsuspecting authors’ copyright, and Amazon has admitted to having removed thousands of such titles from its site. Some of the books being sold are copies of stories which are available for free from the real author.

Some self-published authors on Amazon, we discovered during our investigation, have released hundreds of titles. It’s impossible to say for certain that they are all plagiarists. It could be that they simply have no internal quality controls and are content to publish a book a week, no matter how terrible it might be. But shouldn’t an output that prodigious set alarm bells ringing? Amazon has software which can detect straight steals of existing material, but make sufficient changes and your book easily bypasses such safeguards, and Amazon cannot be expected to have armies of readers checking every title for possible plagiarism.

Even if they did, the busy book soldiers wouldn’t be guaranteed to spot it. Without reading and remembering every novel, it’s impossible to know for certain what connections might exist between them. The self-publishing model has to operate on a certain degree of trust, or it wouldn’t work at all. Still, do readers never wonder where all these books are coming from? How many traditionally-published authors struggle to keep up a one-book-a-year deadline whilst others seem to churn out books with the ease of a hen laying eggs? Cluck, there’s another.

**********

A few days after emailing Joanne Clancy, I checked Iseult O’Malley’s email account and found that she had replied to our fictional Bath student.

“Hi Izzy,” she wrote, using the name that we had told her we used amongst friends. “Thanks a million for contacting me. I'd be delighted to be included in the list. May I ask who else will be on it? Email works best for me. My apologies for not replying sooner, but my website's been having a few glitches, which have just been fixed. I look forward to hearing from you. Best wishes, Joanne.”

Who else were we talking to? That was a tricky one, because the answer was no one. Once again we hit Google and came up with a few names that we had supposedly contacted for research and interviews. This seemed to do the trick. Again, she replied, suggesting some other writers to contact, adding: “Let me know if you have questions.” By now we were almost beginning to feel bad for deceiving her.

This was one of the strangest aspects of the whole thing. What Joanne Clancy had done was devious, and yet, without knowing why she had done it, it was hard to know how we felt about it. We kept changing our minds. Maybe she was simply unhappy and this charade was giving her life purpose? Maybe she started out doing it on a small scale and got drawn in too deep? Maybe she genuinely had no idea that she had done anything wrong and was as bewildered by this turn of events as we were. The books were out of print, so what was the harm? That might have been how she justified it to herself. The internet is a free for all. Copyright often seems to mean little online. She might have convinced herself she was only doing what everyone else was doing anyway.

On the other hand, we were too far in to turn back, and we still wanted answers. We had every right to protect our intellectual property. We started working on a series of questions, which we could ask her, wondering how we could draw out the maximum amount of information from her without making it obvious what we were about.

One question we sent went as follows: “What would you say are the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing? A common theme that comes back from my own investigations is a feeling of being in control and answerable to no one.” Another like this: “How do you find a balance between writing and publicising/selling the work? Does the work involved in being your own publisher get in the way of writing? I imagine handling all this must be a full time occupation.”

We asked what had been her most successful book in terms of sales, and who was her favourite character and why. We asked about the locations of her work, wondering how much research she had put it to get the details right or whether it was all based on memories, impressions, imagination? We’d written The Dead long before the days of Street View on Google Earth. When we wanted to check some geographical detail, we had to go there. Since we didn’t live in Dublin, that meant getting the train down from Belfast and putting in the leg work.

Dangling further bait in front of Clancy, we asked too about the amount of novels which she had published. How did she manage to maintain the quality when she wrote so fast?

Furthermore, how much research did she have to do to get the details on policing, forensics and criminal psychology right for Tear Drop? Because that takes time too. I remembered the amount of background reading we had to do, including one large book on autopsies so gruesome that we had to hide it on a high shelf where the children wouldn’t accidentally find it and see all the pictures of horribly murdered victims. I’d found it hard enough to get those images out of my own head as it was.

Clancy didn’t reply for a few days and then said she would get back as soon as she could, but that she had just found out that a family member was sick and she would be busy looking after her in the coming months. That floored us rather – again a natural human sympathy kicked in – but was she even telling the truth? Had she rumbled Iseult O’Malley’s real identity? Either way, we couldn’t continue the exchange on these terms. Iseult replied and told her not to worry about answering any of our questions. Though none of that, needless to say, stopped her from publishing, a few days later, the sequel to Tear Drop.

**********

Insincere came out on October 21st and we were among the first to download it. Once again we started reading and once again we discovered that it was indeed The Dark Eye. There hadn’t been much doubt in our minds that it would be, but still it was something of a shock.

Again there were some cosmetic changes. Instead of Saxon having a sister called Sydney who committed suicide, Elizabeth had a brother called Shane. The first victim is a photographer in our book, and a painter in hers. But sentence by sentence; paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, it was another facsimile of our own second novel.

We’d sweated over The Dark Eye for the longest time. There had been redrafts, rethinks, rewrites. We’d killed a particular character in the first draft, only for our editor to suggest that we keep him alive, so we rewrote it so that he didn’t die. Then the same editor said she’d changed her mind and we should kill him after all. We were exhausted by then, and decided against going back a second time. Suffice to say that The Dark Eye had been a difficult book to write. The Dead was hard work too, but it had an organic quality that seemed to make it flow naturally and we’d thrown everything into it. Even working out a basic plot for our second book was much more problematic, as we sought to build on the particular qualities in its predecessor that make it work and which could turn it from a standalone title into one that could work as a series.

Joanne Clancy had none of those worries. We’d done all the work for her already. To see another author exploiting it without any of the same effort was disturbing. Even Ian was beginning to see red. He suggested that I should write about it. I still wasn’t sure. Joanne Clancy had made me feel strangely guilty. I needed more time to think.

Insincere was as well reviewed as the first Elizabeth Ireland story.

“I was guessing and getting it wrong right up to the end. It had me at page one and did not let go until the final line. I could not recommend it higher for those who enjoy a gripping read. This is another engaging crime novel from the talented mind of Joanne Clancy. She never lets me down when it comes to entertaining my socks off. Bring on the next one”

“Ms Clancy is fast becoming a favorite author of mine. She has the ability to pull you right into the story with the opening lines, and keep you riveted til the end.”

“It's FANTASTIC, I couldn't put it down, what I loved was the complexity of the story, it's that well written that you don't lose the plot but you’re so surprised at the twists it keeps you HOOKED..... I'm so so pleased we have a 3rd on its way I really can't wait....”

There were now only three months until the next book in the series, Soon, was scheduled for release. It was time to act.

**********

Within hours of the publication of Insincere, we finally submitted a complaint to Amazon on the grounds of copyright infringement. We got an immediate reply saying that they were looking into the matter and would get back to us. Then we waited. And waited.

That was the hardest part. Every author will understand that need to constantly check where a book is on Amazon’s sales charts. We had done the same ourselves when The Dead was published. It becomes a ritual, undertaken regularly during the day, like checking your email. Now we found ourselves doing it with Joanne Clancy.

At one point, Clancy’s Elizabeth Ireland books were sitting at numbers 3, 5 and 7 in the list of most purchased Irish crime e-books , outselling works by such well known names as Tana French, husband and wife team Casey Hill, Stuart Neville, Paul Carson and John Connolly.

Doubts began to set in. What if Amazon didn’t take our complaint seriously? What if our claim got lost in the blizzard of other copyright claims and took months or years to process? Then there was the nightmare scenario. What if they sided with Joanne Clancy and decided that she hadn’t plagiarised our work? That couldn’t happen, we kept telling ourselves, the copying was too blatant to pretend otherwise. But that didn’t stop us from considering every possibility, however mad.

After frustratedly waiting a week, I sent Amazon another message, asking for an update. Then another. After a couple of weeks I managed to get through to someone who said that I had actually sent my complaint to the wrong department. I wasn’t surprised, because it’s not that easy to find the right place on Amazon’s website to make a complaint. The important thing was that they now had our appeal and were looking into it.

They requested pdf copies of our original published novels, which Headline had provided to us after being informed of the issue, and said that they would be back in touch. This was a relief. At least we knew that someone was dealing with this issue. (For anyone facing a similar problem, be aware that the correct address for an email is copyright at amazon.com). This time, they replied promptly, informing us that Joanne Clancy’s work was being removed in its entirety from their marketplace in accordance with company policy on plagiarism.

The feeling of validation was immense. To know that you have been the victim of a fraudster is one thing, but to have it officially confirmed is a huge relief.

Over the next hours and days, her work started to disappear from sale. Clicking on any link brought up the message: “We're sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” It didn’t say why, but at least she wasn’t benefitting any longer from the deception. On the day her books were removed, the two published Elizabeth Ireland books were both in the Top Ten sellers in the International Crime and Mystery category, outselling Ian Rankin amongst others.

Some anomalies did remain. It was no longer possible to download her titles onto Kindle, but some of her books were still available to order as print copies through a special service. At the time of writing, this facility remains active. There were, furthermore, still pages dedicated to the books which Amazon had agreed were plagiarised and consequently removed from sale. It wasn’t possible to buy them, but readers who had purchased copies before the titles were removed from sale continued to post reviews, and still can if so minded.

Incredibly, the first chapters of her books, including Tear Drop, can also still be read by clicking the “Look Inside” arrow on selected titles on Amazon, which is irritating for us but does make it possible for other crime writers to check whether she has plagiarised their work too.

Whilst waiting for answers from Amazon as to how many copies of her plagiarised books Joanne Clancy had sold, and how much money she had made from them, we also got in touch directly with Joanne Clancy. There was no longer any reason to pretend that we didn’t know exactly what she’d done or that we weren’t seriously ticked off about it.

**********

“Hello, Joanne,” I wrote. “I don't think I need to introduce myself. As you must be fully aware, I am one half of Ingrid Black, author of The Dead and The Dark Eye. Following this evening's decision by Amazon, in response to a complaint of plagiarism by me, we both know very well why I am writing to you. We need to talk as a matter of urgency. How you respond to this request will very much determine the course of action that I and my co-author take in the coming days. We have already sought legal advice on this matter, but primarily my intention is to try and understand as best I can why you plagiarised our work so shamelessly. I am prepared to listen if you are prepared to talk. In the circumstances, I think I am being more than fair about this. I expect a swift reply.”

I got one.

Joanne Clancy replied within hours to tell me that she was “ashamed” of what she had done and thanking me for giving her the chance to explain. She repeated the story that she had told the fictional Iseult O’Malley about family health problems, saying: “I haven't been able to think straight for months. I read your book and thought it was brilliant. I felt inspired after reading it and felt like writing again for the first time in months, but my own story and words wouldn't come. I don't know what came over me. I shouldn't have copied your work. There's no excuse good enough to explain. I just want to let you know what was going on in my life. I've never done anything like this before. Amazon has removed all my books for sale. They have also shut down my account and banned me for life. I won't receive any more money from them effective immediately. They pay 60 days in arrears. I published Tear Drop on August 25th so I've only earned a few hundred Euro from that, which I was paid last week and will send to you. I'm a self published author and was exclusive to Amazon so that was my only source of income. I don't own a house or drive a car. Now I don't have a job or income. I don't know what I'm going to do. I have no one to talk to.”

Naturally we both felt terrible, but we still didn’t know what to believe. Joanne Clancy had clearly been spooked by the mention of possible legal action, and had been keen to stress that she had nothing that we could demand from her in compensation, nothing that would make it worth our while pursuing her. That didn’t matter. I’d spoken to a lawyer to see where we stood, but we never really had any intention of suing her. Legal action is expensive and uncertain, and, even if guaranteed of winning, the prospect of financially ruining this woman held no appeal. We didn’t want her money. She was already being punished by having her main source of income, however ill-gotten, closed off. We just wanted to use the threat of lawyers to persuade her to talk to us.

But was she telling the truth? “I felt like writing again for the first time in months,” she had said, “but my own story and words wouldn't come.” There is no evidence in her back catalogue, however, of any such gap in production. She has steadily produced a book every few months for years now. Her pattern of behaviour seemed closer to that of other serial plagiarists found to be selling other people’s work through Amazon. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles round the internet scamming readers like a duck, isn’t it more likely that it’s just a duck?

Not least when being temporarily unable to write is no excuse for stealing another author’s work. If the words won’t come, they won’t come. We’ve all been there. So you don’t write for a while until they do. If they never come back, that’s awful, but taking the words from another author isn’t the answer. You wouldn’t steal a car and then justify it by saying the cars wouldn’t come naturally as a result of your own efforts.

Then there was the question of how much she had benefitted from plagiarising our work. She claimed to have only earned a few hundred euros from publishing Tear Drop, but when Amazon eventually came through with the information which we had sought, it transpired that the book had in fact earned $15,791.60, not bad for a book which was only on sale for a few months, of which just under two thousand dollars had been paid before her account was suspended. As for Insincere, that had earned $3,844.40 in the even briefer time that it was on sale, though none of that second sum had been transferred to her, as the deception was discovered within Amazon’s sixty day window before payment.

Joanne Clancy’s website also remained operational, and still sends out automated emails, though its content doesn’t appear to have been updated since October. The Elizabeth Ireland books are now gone, but the other books remain on display. In the months since she was banned by Amazon, she has also signed up to new e-book services and writing communities, presumably in order to sell her work in future through fresh outlets. She has every right to do so if these are original works, but it was hard to watch her interact with other users as if nothing was wrong when our brief exchange of emails had been followed by a long deliberate silence.

I had replied to Clancy’s email, reassuring her that I was not inclined to take the matter any further legally, even if she did have the means to pay a legal settlement, that had never been our principal concern, but that I still had some questions that were puzzling me. I mentioned her prodigious rate of output, asking if she was being entirely honest that this was the first time she had plagiarised another author’s work.

I asked why she had given the characters certain names that seemed to hint at their origin in our books, and why, despite being rumbled early on by Donna Patel, she still went ahead and published Insincere, with apparently every intention of publishing the next one too. I wondered what she had told people to explain the disappearance of her books from Amazon, and whether anyone within the blogging or self publishing community had asked her what had happened.

(In November, I later discovered, a page had been opened on Amazon’s online forum by a reader in the US, asking “what happened to your Kindle edition books??? Will they be back soon????” Another reader responded: “I was wondering the same thing”).

I also asked if Joanne Clancy was her only identity, because I had begun to wonder about that too. There were some reviews I found posted online that just made me downright suspicious. Even some traditionally published authors have admitted to posting fake glowing reviews of their work in an attempt to generate a buzz around a particular book. Indie authors are no different. If anything, they have even more incentive to do the same, as the work of publicising books is left entirely to them.

I began to look at other authors offering work for sale through Amazon and wondering: Are you Joanne Clancy too? Plagiarists rarely have a single identity. If one identity is making money, why stop there?

I assured her that I held no hostility or anger towards her, but pointed out that, if she was a real person - a single writer rather than some mysterious collective identity churning out books online – then she had, in a way, a remarkable story of her own to tell. What happened to me was only one side of the experience and it would always be incomplete without knowing her version too. “I may be barking up a wrong tree,” I concluded, “but I feel as if this is a story still half told and I'd love to hear the end of it.” I don’t know what I expected – that she would reply and we’d end up having coffee, even becoming friends as far as that was possible, possibly even telling this story together; all sorts of mad ideas went through my head – but in the event she never replied.

Nor did she reply when, in the New Year, I made one last effort to contact her, offering her the opportunity to put her side of the story. I was forced to conclude that, once the threat of legal action had been removed from the scene, and she was confident that we were no threat, she no longer had any interest in staying in touch.

The most recent trace of her online presence that I can find is on Facebook. An account in her name and bearing her picture was back up briefly, but with no links to any of the friends who were there before and with all posts dating back to 2009 removed. On November 19th, six days after the Paris attacks by Islamic State, the account in question updated her cover photo to include the French flag, as many others were doing at the time. The day before Christmas Eve, a user in Phoenix, Arizona replied, saying: “I can't see anything on your page anymore?”

The mysterious Joanne Clancy didn’t reply to her either.

**********

On Easter Sunday 2016, I published the story of my dealings with Joanne Clancy under the title Encounters With A Real Book Thief in the Sunday Independent. Over the next few days, the story was shared online almost 90,000 times, including by successful authors such as Joanne Harris, Val McDermid and US thriller writer Tess Gerritsen, as well as by many people both in the book community and around Ireland and the UK.

Many wanted to know: What happened to the money?

The two Elizabeth Ireland books had generated thousands of dollars in sales. It wouldn’t go to Joanne Clancy, obviously, as she had been exposed as a fraud; but it didn’t seem likely that it would go to us either. Then we discovered, during the course of a conversation with a representative from Amazon, that the company would pay out to the original author of a book if it could be proven that it had been plagiarised.

Wasn’t it enough that Amazon had removed Joanne Clancy’s books for having breached the company’s policy on plagiarism? Apparently not. It was still up to us, as the authors, to pursue the matter to get justice. Luckily, that one email from Joanne Clancy in November was enough for Amazon to agree to pay us the royalties which she was due.

We were fortunate. We caught Joanne Clancy at a vulnerable time. She’d only just discovered that her books were being removed from Amazon and that she was banned for life, at least under her own name. She was also worried about the prospect of legal action, and seemed keen to mollify us. Had she taken a day or two to think it over, she might well have decided that silence was the best strategy.

What happens to the money made by plagiarising authors when the real authors cannot prove plagiarism in the same way that we did? That’s still unclear. It seems unsatisfactory that authors themselves should have to prove that they have been the victims of copyright infringement before getting justice. Some readers got in touch to describe the various computer programmes used by universities to ensure that students don’t copy their essays from online sources, and wondering why Amazon didn’t employ a similar system. As it happened, Amazon told me that they did have plagiarism-checking software, though they wouldn’t give more details as that might help other book thieves beat the system.

Other readers just got in touch to complain that we had been too “soft” on Joanne Clancy, that we should have demanded more details from Amazon, tracked her down, and doorstepped her. One comment underneath the piece on independent.ie went so far as to say that we were “chicken” for not pursuing legal action. Others said we had what amounted to a moral duty to find her and make sure that she was punished, either by the police in a criminal, or by solicitors in a civil, case.

I’m still not convinced by that argument. Legal action is time consuming, expensive, and mentally draining, with no guarantee of success, especially against a shadowy opponent who seemed to exist mainly online. That was another problem. The internet is a big place. Many people got into contact to explain how to track down people through their online fingerprints. Joanne Clancy had a website, which yielded some further clues, some very intriguing, as they tied in to other details we had about her, but there was nothing decisive.

Other authors were able to provide IP addresses from comments left by this Joanne Clancy on their pages and blogs. One showed her location at various points over the course of a few days ranging from Dublin to Florida to San Antonio in Texas. Had she actually been on the move in that period, or hiding her location?

If the latter, it would suggest that she wasn’t an innocent who had strayed off the straight and narrow path into plagiarism, but a career faker who’d been preparing the ground for a quick getaway from the start.

Just one thing kept bothering me. After the story was shared 90,000 times online, I was contacted by hundreds of authors, bloggers, readers, reviewers, publishers, many understandably upset that they too had been deceived by a writer whose work they’d supported since she came on the scene in 2012. One blogger who had championed Joanne Clancy, and even interviewed her by email, said that she couldn’t sleep on the night she read the piece as she was so upset; this betrayal of trust was a common theme. Readers put in a lot of work to support and encourage self-published authors. This felt to them like a slap in the face.

But out of all these thousands of readers, not a single person has contacted me to say that they know this woman or ever came across her in real life. Some were closely involved in the literary community in Cork, which Joanne Clancy claimed as her home town. They could find no trace of her existence either. She seemed to exist only online.

I was convinced all along that Joanne Clancy was a real woman. Others were of the opinion that she didn’t exist, except as a name to hide a professional gang of cheats, copying books to make money. The more time that passes, the less sure I am which of us is right.

***********

If this was a work of fiction, there would be an ending. Some satisfactory conclusion that tied up all the loose ends, answered all the remaining questions. Real life is less neat and tidy. There is no ending, happy or otherwise. I doubt I’ll ever know who Joanne Clancy really was or what was going on in her head. Our lives intersected for a while in the strangest way, but now she’s vanished from it as unobtrusively as she came. Our ultimate thoughts about her are not as might be expected.

In a way we feel sorry for her. She must have had her reasons for doing what she did, whether they are the ones on which she claimed to be acting or baser ones such as greed or a love of the praise and attention which being a published author brings. Just because she plagiarised our work didn’t mean that she was a bad person. Maybe she just fell into Plagiarism after realising that she didn’t have enough ideas to write a book of her own or because she’d started out with the best intentions and then started taking short cuts when she realised how hard it was

Either way, everyone deserves a second chance.

If she really did start out as an original writer, and simply allowed herself to be tempted down a wrong path, then it’s doubly sad, because it meant she hijacked her whole career for a risk that had immediately backfired, without even being able to cash in on it fully first.

What she did doesn’t necessarily mean that she is a bad writer either. She had put in more work than lazier plagiarists who simply take another author’s name off a particular work and substitute her own. The transformation of the Saxon books into the Elizabeth Ireland series had involved making creative changes and decisions which were still recognisably writerly. She had misused her talents, but they did exist. She also clearly had a degree of creative ingenuity working in her favour.

The third book in our Saxon series was The Judas Heart. In it, Saxon encounters a troubled former FBI agent with whom she had worked in the United States and who disappeared after the brutal murder of his wife, and who is now seemingly on the run in Dublin, a possible suspect in the sexually-motivated murder of a young actress. Saxon thinks he’s innocent but how can she set about proving it to the police?

Joanne Clancy took this story and recast it as Soon. In it, from what one can gather from the blurb, Elizabeth Ireland is similarly trying to find her old friend, who has also gone missing since the death of his ex-wife, and of whose innocence she is entirely convinced, but in her version the man is Detective George Ellis, hero of her other crime series.

That was such an intriguing premise that we were almost tempted to hold fire until the planned publication date to see what she did with it. Meshing two series together in this way has been done before, but it’s not that common a device. It would have been interesting to see how she did it. In the end, we decided to put an end to the saga. Having read Soon, we’d only have been equally curious to find out what she did with our fourth book, Circle Of The Dead, and even to see if she intended continuing the series into new stories, perhaps even of Elizabeth Ireland and George Ellis teaming up for future investigations.

Somewhere a line had to be drawn so that we could move on.

At the same time, we thought of the affair as a warning. Use what you have or someone else will. There’s no reason why a book has to die just because its original publisher isn’t interested anymore. Going out of print is no indictment of a book’s quality. It’s just one of those things that happen. Joanne Clancy had done what we should have done long since. Gave new life to a book that looked as if it had reached the end of its natural life. She’d done it the wrong way, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t do it the right way. Maybe this was a sign that we should finally stop prevaricating and put our books up on Kindle in their original, rather than plagiarised, form. If anyone was going to derive the benefits from all the hard work which went into these stories, it ought to be the people who wrote them. So that’s what we did. To coincide with publication of the article in Life magazine, we worked round the clock to upload new editions of our original books onto Amazon, discovering in the process that releasing your own books means being author, editor, designer, publisher, publicist and general dogsbody all rolled into one.

Slowly we began to sell a few copies of our books. During the course of the week, The Dead made it on to Amazon’s “hot new releases” chart and even rose to number four on the Irish crime fiction bestseller lists. Joanne Clancy had hit number one, so we still had some way to go to catch her up, but then she had a five year head start on us in terms of building up an audience. We just had to put the same amount of work into doing it honestly as she had to doing it dishonestly.

Joanne Clancy had inadvertently raised our crime writing alter ego from the dead – pun definitely intended – and it soon turned out that Ingrid Black was determined not to get herself buried again. Not only did we decide to re-release our four previously published books, we also set about working on a fifth instalment in the Saxon and Fitzgerald series.

If Joanne Clancy really is an author, she’ll no doubt wish us well. All I know for sure is that she’d make a great character in a novel.

Now there’s a tempting thought.

Visit our website at ingridblack.net or follow us on Twitter @_ingridblack_ or Facebook

ESCAPING IRISHNESS

Burning books has been frowned upon since that unfortunate business in 1930s Germany, which is a pity because there are many published volumes for which consignment to the flames would be richly deserved.

(I should know, I’ve written a few of them).

Personally, I’d reserve a special place right at the top of the pyre for a book entitled Being Irish, which came out - escaped might be nearer the mark - around the time of the Millennium. Basically it was a collection of less-than-groundbreaking reflections by a hundred people, famous and otherwise, on what it meant to them to be one of God’s chosen people.

They didn’t put it quite like that, of course, but there was no mistaking the assumption underlying a depressingly large proportion of the contributions, namely that being Irish was an awe-inspiring achievement altogether, and that those born under a green star were sensitive, poetic souls with a superhuman capacity for empathetic engagement with the world, intimately connected to history and their native land, thirsting for justice and peace like no race before, which was why everybody else on the planet secretly wanted nothing more than to be Irish and spent every day in deep mourning because they were not. It made How The Irish Saved Civilisation look modest by comparison.

It would be gratifying to report that this nauseating exercise in collective navel-gazing had more contributors than it did readers, but honesty forbids. Soul searching tomes about the search for identity will always draw a crowd, rather like car crashes, especially in Ireland where national traits are cultivated the way some countries grow rhubarb.

As one of the book’s few sensible essayists put it: “The only unique thing about the Irish, perhaps, is their utter conviction that there is something unique about being Irish.” Hear, hear. Indeed, one might almost say that more nonsense has been written about Ireland than about any other country, were that not to risk falling into the trap again of treating the Irish as if they were unprecedentedly unique.

It could be that such books have a higher purpose, which is to foster a sense of community and togetherness in a scary, fragmented world. The problem is that, by creating a checklist of qualities which go into making up Irish identity, a feeling of inadequacy can easily be engendered in those who fail, in their own eyes, to measure up to the national ideal. Inclusion becomes exclusion. Solidarity becomes segregation. And if that’s true of being Irish, then how much more true it is of being an Irish writer?

The term “Irish writer” itself can be problematic. What is an Irish writer – a writer who happens by birth or accident or choice to be Irish? If that’s all it is, then it’s as meaningless a phrase as “tall writer” or “blue-eyed writer”. If something else is meant, then we’re back in the realm of expectations and demands. The humble scribbler who only wants to be left alone to work is being asked to tick those damned boxes again.

Writers have always had a central place in Irish affairs. It was dreamers such as Yeats and Lady Gregory who helped invent the idea of Ireland as a nation in the first place. “If you would know Ireland body and soul you must read its poems and stories,” Yeats said. “They are Ireland talking to herself.” The creative project in those early days was explicitly nationalistic. It might almost be said that they were making up Irishness as they went along, and it probably seemed churlish, not to mention unpatriotic, at the time to demur.

Thus Irish writers who followed were expected, to varying degrees, to partake in the same mission. The Matter of Ireland predominated. The English had misrepresented and abused the native Irish for centuries. The writer’s job was to reclaim and remake that identity, taking it out of the hands of the oppressors and giving it back to those from whom it had been stolen, and it was too important a task to be taken trivially, which is why so many humourists were despised and marginalised when they dared turned the satirical tables on Irish life.

For many authors, the business of being an Irish writer was so onerous a responsibility that the words themselves became almost secondary. They were ambassadors for a burgeoning nation’s desires and dreams. In a way, it was an inevitable part of belonging to a small country, where everybody seems at times to be looking over everybody else’s shoulder, but it’s a burden which must have put off countless hopefuls from ever taking up the pen. Dennis Kennedy, former journalist turned history academic, touched on that in his own contribution to the Being Irish collection. He recalls what happens in Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth when the hero, Bonaparte O’Coonassa, is chased across the Paradise of Ireland by a great hairy beast called the Sea Cat that threatens to eat him alive.

On being asked to describe it, Bonaparte draws an outline which, surprise, surprise, “bore a close resemblance to the pleasant little land which is our own.”

Anyone foolish or brave enough to have left the cosy fireside of Irishness and wandered away from the tribal camp into the uncharted dark, only to be pelted with proverbial rocks for his pains, can be forgiven a little shudder of recognition there.

Sometimes the idea of Ireland just won’t leave you alone.

Complicating this still further was the English language question. The poverty-stricken, rain-sodden residents of Corkadorkey in The Poor Mouth are visited by Gaelic speakers from Dublin who tell them that not only should every word they utter be in the native language, but that the language itself should be the only subject of conversation. It’s a clever satire of fanaticism, all the more effective for not being very far from the truth.

Even today, there’s a residual feeling among many Irish people, whether they speak Gaelic or not, that those who do are somehow more real and authentic than the rest, and that something is missing or diminished when an Irish person speaks English.

Stephen Dedalus, meeting an Englishman in Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, torments himself with the suspicion that he is unable to use the identical words with the same confidence. “My soul,” he says, “frets in the shadow of his language”. Irish writers were expected to labour under the same sense of dislocation and loss. Even if they gloriously overcame it, they were still meant to be aware of the struggle.

But where did that leave writers who had no interest in Irishness as such, not even their own? Who were Irish by definition, but never gave it a moment’s thought beyond the biographical facts? Who weren’t tormented? Who felt no national burden? Who simply didn’t fit into those neat Protestant/Catholic, urban/rural, North/South classifications? Who didn’t feel a part of that club? Who saw the English language the way Indians see cricket – as something which may have come originally from England, but what of it, let’s just play.

The charge against writers who won’t align themselves to the great Irish project is that they’ve forgotten where they came from, but isn’t that half the fun? It’s enormously liberating sometimes to ignore the past and reinvent oneself anew.

It would be easy to say that, for long periods, the only way to escape Irishness was to escape Ireland, and many writers did just that. (Not just writers either. Generations of Irish people have managed to forge new identities through emigration). But physical distance was never a prerequisite. Others stayed and just stubbornly ploughed their own furrow. Not fighting against the prevailing cultural climate necessarily, merely ignoring it, because it wasn’t relevant to them, it didn’t speak to what was happening inside their heads.

Crime fiction was one such escape route, because, the odd literary maverick aside, it had never been a particularly popular native form.

Why that should be is hard to say. Some have speculated that the reason there was so little Irish crime fiction in the past was because murders were a rare event, which, even if true, is an odd argument, because murder did still happen, even if proportionately less of it than in other territories, and violent death is by its very nature horrible and fascinating. There has always been more than enough of it around to imprint itself on the consciousness of alert writers.

Moreover, why assume a straight causal link between crime statistics and crime writing? English rural society in the mid-20th century was not noticeable for its high homicide rate either, but that didn’t stop Agatha Christie from littering St Mary Mead with corpses. The impulse to fictionalise extreme human behaviour is not dependent on newspaper headlines.

Whatever the reason, crime fiction was certainly not established in Ireland in the way of fantasy or the ghost story. Aspiring fabulists had Lord Dunsany, Sheridan le Fanu and Bram Stoker to show them the way. For the most part, Irish mystery readers up until quite recently had to look further afield, chiefly America, to satisfy their imaginative needs. Whatever disappointment they felt about that was more than compensated for in the sense of liberation provided by sidestepping the suffocating insularity of so much Irish fiction.

Importing these genre conventions into an Irish context was a way for writers who felt out of place with the prevailing culture to reclaim the ground under their feet, make it their own again, even recreate it from scratch. They were freed from the tyranny of authenticity. Dublin didn’t only have to be Joyce’s city. It could be Sam Spade’s and Hannibal Lecter’s as well. Why not? It’s public space. It’s up for grabs.

Mingled with that was also the pleasure of sticking out a cheeky tongue at one’s forefathers, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. Women found the same escape from the demands of femininity in crime fiction. Female characters could be whatever they wanted to be. They could behave disgracefully. They could break the rules.

Crime stories are the perfect medium for remodelling the world in this fashion, because they are at heart fairy tales. They share the same familiar quality as myth. The details change from country to country, retelling to retelling, but they give shape to the identical shadows and impulses. If the Brothers Grimm were alive today, they’d be collecting newspaper clippings about modern day Rumplestiltskins and wicked stepmothers and witches in the wood enticing children to step across the threshold and have some candy. (“My, my, grandmamma, what big teeth you have!”)

There’s also a powerful element of wish fulfillment within the hardest, most cynical crime fiction which suits the writer out of sorts with his surroundings. There has to be. Fiction is impossible without fantasy. Most crime, after all, is a fairly prosaic affair. Writing and reading about it would be dullness personified for everybody concerned.

So the writer sexes it up, in that ugly but undoubtedly useful phrase. Serial killers are, thankfully, rare beasts; when people do kill, they tend to do it rather unimaginatively and get caught easily as a result. The annals of the mystery novel would be a poorer place without the criminal genius who toys with the police, but how many exist outside the head of the nerdy, wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-goose author at his laptop? Likewise, the fictional conceit of tracking every criminal conspiracy to the very top of society is usually just that: fictional. Government ministers and property developers and bishops can be thoroughly unpleasant individuals, but outside of the pages of crime fiction they rarely organise gangland hits or run international drugs cartels. Making them do so in works of the imagination - and better still, getting their comeuppance - is generally a sign of a writer’s private political daydreams coming out.

Huge numbers of crimes also go unsolved, which would make for frustrating endings. Hercule Poirot gathering the suspects in the drawing room and admitting that his little grey cells have packed up on him and he hasn’t got a clue whodunnit would be amusing once or twice, but readers would soon grow weary of the joke.

And so would the author, if truth be told.

Modern crime writers might like smugly to imagine that they’ve grown out of the cosy conservative certainties of the Golden Age – that criminals will be caught and punished, and the natural social order restored, and then it’ll be high tea on the vicarage lawn at four as usual – but narrative resolutions make their own demands and have their own satisfactions. As John Connolly once said: “All crime writers are secretly moralists”. Since this isn’t a moral world, they’re going to try and put it right on the page as best they can, in weird and murky ways sometimes, and often unsatisfactorily for the protagonists because the wicked do escape justice; but there aren’t many amoral crime writers around who actively egg on their most villainous creations. Even lamenting the failure to apprehend the guilty is a conservative resolution in itself, and maybe it’s the best we can hope for as readers in a system where the real criminal justice system too often works to the advantage of perpetrators.

Where crime fiction has an advantage is in fixing these archetypal patterns onto a recognisably solid physical environment. One of the undoubted pleasures of the genre is to explore the particularities of place. As a reader, what first attracted me to John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport series was not so much some sketchy tease of a plot on the back of a shiny paperback, the details of which I can’t even remember now, but the prospect of getting an impression of Minneapolis-St Paul, about which I knew precisely zilch. Patricia Cornwell’s early Scarpetta novels might have been sold on their gruesome forensic accuracy, but seeing Richmond, Virginia up close was as much of draw for me.

Like its Irish cousin, Scandinavian crime fiction is enjoying a surge of popularity at the moment for the same reasons. It’s a chance to inhabit for a while alien territory, and see beyond the regional clichés of blond manic depressives killing themselves whilst wearing chunky knitwear (though if, along the way, a few blond manic depressives kill themselves whilst wearing chunky knitwear, who’s complaining? It’s all good clean fun).

In truth, it’s impossible to know how accurate to their settings these books are without heading to the locations with a stack of paperbacks, a map, and the obsessive determination of a trainspotter who hasn’t had a girlfriend since junior school. But the real thrill is that it doesn’t matter a jot. If the setting comes alive on the page, and the book stays the memory, it ought to be job done for writer and reader alike.

When it comes to home turf, however, doubt too often sets in. An Irish writer wanting to set a thriller in Dublin will feel constrained by the demands of verisimilitude, usually because he knows some parochial smart alec will delight in scanning the book for factual inaccuracies and, on sniffing them out, gleefully take the opportunity to dismiss the publication out of hand. A certain type of Irish person can be extremely possessive like that. They take slights against the country personally. They’re easily offended.

Others simply can’t understand why a writer might want to run away from Irishness rather than wrapping themselves in it like a flag on St Patrick’s Day.

I had the experience of a sub-editor correcting the references in one of my novels to the “Dublin Metropolitan Police” and trying to change it to “Garda Siochana”, as if I didn’t know that the DMP had disbanded in 1925. I wanted to escape from the associations which the words “Garda Siochana” conveyed. “Dublin Metropolitan Police” had a neutral ring about it which felt right. Dublin could be just another city. Its police force could be just another police force. So I put them back in their old headquarters at Dublin Castle, because that was an aesthetically satisfying location to me, regardless of the fact that it’s now home to the Revenue Commissioners, amongst others, and hosted regular sittings of the Mahon and Flood Tribunals into various grubby financial dealings by politicians.

Who wouldn’t prefer the fictional alternative?

Not that there’s anything wrong with a writer wanting to set down on the page a city he knows and loves exactly as it stands in real life. Joyce always said that if Dublin were to suddenly vanish, it could be recreated using Ulysses (though imagine if the city planners accidentally picked up Finnegans Wake instead. The resulting mess doesn’t bear thinking about!). The important thing is not to let a preoccupation with accuracy become a fetish, because that’s missing the whole purpose of fiction. The joy of it, too.

Crime novels aren’t journalism, thank God, and writers sell themselves short when they try too hard to make a case for their books as mirrors held up to the society in which they live. Crime writers in Ireland are particularly prone to this special pleading. To listen to some of them you’d swear they were writing socio-political critiques of contemporary Irish mores rather than novels. The suspicion must be that they’re still trying to court the approval of certain critics who were always sniffy about crime fiction anyway, and will only lower themselves to take notice of it if they can be persuaded first that it has “something to say”.

By which they generally mean something uninteresting. Such as chest-beating, tub-thumping analyses of what it means to be Irish. The best novels don’t have clunkily linear messages to convey. They don’t make excuses for existing. They simply are.

Just as freeing oneself of the burden of speaking for Ireland is, for an Irish writer, the start of being able to speak for oneself, so giving up the futile effort of trying to win over the sceptics could well be the making of many a crime writer. Why expend all that energy sucking up to reluctant readers who have to be convinced they’ll learn something sociologically beneficial before opening the cover of a book? Who cares what they think? They’re the modern equivalent of the island-shaped Sea Cat. The only safe course is to stay away from those claws.