Created by Dimitri Gat
Pseudonyms includeC.K. Cambray
(1936–)
So, back in 1982, Avon published a paperback original called Nevsky’s Return, by some guy called Dimitri Gat. It was all about Russian-American “information specialist” YURI NEVSKY (he doesn’t like there term “private eye”), with offices at 138 Moorland Street in Pittsburgh.
Gat was an intriguing character: an unexpectedly philosophical investigator, bookish and brooding, a quiet type with a taste for classical music and deep ties to Pittsburgh’s Russian community. But he could more than take care of himself if he had to, which came in handy when he’s hired to find a missing young man who may–or may not–have committed murder, and ends up tangled in a case involving drugs, an ancient Russian cult and plenty of P.I. action.
It was an impressive debut, The New York Times citing it as “one of the “most notable crime novels of 1982,” with Newgate Calendar looking forward to Nevsky’s further adventures, and the book was a finalist for the 1983 Shamus Award for Best Paperback, bestowed by the Private Eye Writers of America. Hell, even I liked it.
The sequel, Nevsky’s Demon, published the next year, soon put the boots to that dream. Instead, it became one of the biggest publishing scandals to hit the Shamus Game since James Hadley Chase. Granted, in these days of ghost writers, AI and word-shitting “writers” who allegedly pump out twelve or fifteen books a year, it seems almost quaint. But it was big news at the time.
Nevsky’s Demon was released to generally favorable reviews; another solid P.I. tale, this time involving cocaine smuggling (across Lake Erie) and all sorts of hard-boiled stuff.
And then, months after its release, along came Bob Sherman, a Washington-based reporter and researcher for columnist Jack Anderson. Bob was a mystery buff, regularly reading them while commuting by train daily from suburban Maryland. As he told the Washington Post in 1983, “I buy ’em as I go through Union Station.”
In June 1983, he was sitting on the train, reading John D. MacDonald’s 1975 Travis McGee novel The Dreadful Lemon Sky, when he read a passage that seemed awfully familiar. He’d read it before, but he wasn’t sure where. ”Then I realized I hadn’t read the book, I’d read the story.”
Confused, he went home and looked through his bookcase until he found Nevsky’s Demon, which he’d finished only a few weeks previously, and found the troubling passage. “Except for names and settings, the books are basically the same.”
He bought more copies of each books, cut them up and compared them. He concluded that the major plot and characters were nearly identical, although settings and occasionally gender were switched. And there was a lot of paraphrasing.
Feeling cheated, Sherman contacted MacDonald, asking him if he was perhaps recycling old books under a pseudonym. MacDonald told him he wasn’t and, intrigued, read Gat’s book. He told Sherman that it certainly seemed similar to his. So Sherman brought the troubling similarities to the attention of Avon and Fawcett, which had published The Dreadful Lemon Sky, and soon enough, lawyers for Fawcett, MacDonald’s publisher, were crawling all over Avon and Gat, citing more than thirty instances of copyright infringement.
The verdict was that Nevsky’s Demon was found to have plagiarized The Dreadful Lemon Sky. Gat apologized (though he claimed it was intended as “homage”), and Avon recalled and destroyed all unsold copies.
And that was it. After that, no publisher would touch Gat, and a promising career crashed and burned.
Except that, more than two decades later, figuring the heat had finally died down, Gat took another whack at it. He self-published two more Nevsky novels, Anastasia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dimitri Gat’s first books included a science fiction novel and Some Are Called Clowns (1974), about a barnstorming black baseball team, co-written with Bill Heward, and he was on his way to a promising career before the Nevsky’s Demon scandal. Since then, he’s kept at it (including two more books in the Nevsky series), despite the the publishing world and the public’s indifference. His Linked in page lists him as a “Freelance Journalist, Writer & Editor.”
UNDER OATH
- “Mr. Gat is a real writer, and one eagerly awaits the further adventures of Yuri Nevsky, who finally discovers himself at the end of the book.”
— Newgate Calendar (The New York Times) - “It is not only one of the more famous cases of plagiarism, but one of the most blatant even compared to James Hadley Chase who got nailed twice (for knocking off William Faulkner and later Raymond Chandler). His book was not just a little like MacDonald’s, it lifted whole sections. There was no question of homage or influence, Gat tried to pass off large sections of JDM’s novel as his own.
Chase was a good deal more subtle about it and it never really hurt his reputation even here in the States, though both the book and film of No Orchids For Miss Blandish weren’t touched by American markets for years after. Gat was ruined by this.”
— David Vineyard on Mystery*File
NOVELS
- Nevsky’s Return (1982) | Buy this book
- Nevsky’s Demon (1983) | Buy this book
- | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- | Buy this book | Kindle it!
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand!
The Eyes of the Keystone State.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
