Plot It Yourself
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| Author | Rex Stout |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Bill English |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Nero Wolfe |
| Genre | Detective fiction |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
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Publication date
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October 30, 1959 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 183 pp. (first edition) |
| OCLC | 1389319 |
| Preceded by | Champagne for One |
| Followed by | Three at Wolfe's Door |
Plot It Yourself (British title Murder in Style) is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1959, and also collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces (Viking 1969).
A group of authors and publishers hires Nero Wolfe to investigate a series of plagiarism claims. Wolfe, by his own admission, bungles the investigation so badly that three murders result.
In Plot It Yourself, Stout draws on his lengthy experience with book publishers, with authors (via, for example, his presidency of the Authors Guild), and with the writing process itself. Apart from the series' continuing characters, all the players in the book are directly associated with the publishing industry. Stout adds as subtext his take on the peculiar relationship between book authors and book publishers — part symbiosis, part animosity. Stout himself experienced at least one instance of contentious relations with his publishers.
Someone has been getting away with a different spin on plagiarism. It's the old scam – an unsuccessful author stealing ideas from an established source – but it's being worked differently. Now, the plagiarists are claiming that the well-known authors are stealing from them (as Wolfe puts it, "plagiarism upside down."). And they are making their claims stick: three successful claims in four years, one awaiting trial, and one that's just been made.
These claims have damaged both the publishers and the authors. The Book Publishers of America (BPA) and the National Association of Authors and Dramatists (NAAD) form a joint committee to explore ways to stop the fraud, and the committee comes to Wolfe for help. The first four claims have shared certain characteristics: in the first, for example, the best selling author Ellen Sturdevant is accused by the virtually unknown Alice Porter of stealing a recent book's plot from a story that Porter sent her, asking her suggestions for improvement. Sturdevant ignores the accusation until Porter's manuscript is found in Sturdevant's house. The writing and publishing industry is convinced that the manuscript was planted, but the case was settled out of court.
That scenario, with minor variations, is repeated four times, with other authors and by other plagiarists. The latest complaint has been made only recently, and the target of the complaint wonders when a manuscript will show up somewhere that it wasn't the day before.
Wolfe's first step is to acquire and read the manuscripts that form the basis for the complaints. Wolfe's love of literature turns out to be useful in his investigation: from the internal evidence in the manuscripts, Wolfe concludes that they were all written by the same person. Aspects such as diction, punctuation and syntax – and, most convincingly, paragraphing – point Wolfe directly to the conclusion that one person wrote all the manuscripts.
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