Thursday, February 23, 2006

Mary Higgins Clark a plagiarist?

Galleycat reports that Mary Higgins Clark is being sued for allegedly pinching the plot and characters of someone else's screenplay, for one of her books.

Well, leave aside that Mary Higgins Clark has demonstrated for -- what, thirty years? -- that she is perfectly capable of thinking up her own plots, what we have here is proof of the old show-business dictum: where there's a hit there's a writ.

Now you know why Hollywood will not read unsolicited scripts. Won't even open the package, in fact. It's because they got weary, back in about 1920, of being sued for similar allegations of plagiarism.

1 comment:

Maxine Clarke said...

Thank you for your post. I am very fond of MHC's books, I have read them all and while they are a tad formulaic I think they are pretty good and hold up well in the crime-fiction genre as a whole.
I, too, am sure she is not a plagiarist.