Plot It Yourself

At eleven-twenty the next morning, Tuesday, Wolfe, seated at his desk, sent his eyes from left to right and back again, rested them on Philip Harvey, and inquired, “You’re the spokesman, Mr Harvey?”

Since Harvey had made the appointment and was chairman of the committee, I had put him in the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk. He was a middle-aged shorty with a round face, round shoulders, and a round belly. The other five were in an arc on yellow chairs that I had had ready for them. Their names, supplied by Harvey, were in my notebook. The one nearest me, the big blond guy in a brown suit with tan stripes, was Gerald Knapp, president of Knapp and Bowen. The one next to him, the wiry-looking bantam with big ears and slick black hair, was Reuben Imhof of the Victory Press. The female about my age who might have been easy to look at if her nose would stop twitching was Amy Wynn. I had seen a couple of reviews of her novel. Knock at My Door, but it wasn’t on Wolfe’s shelves. The tall gray-haired one with a long bony face was Thomas Dexter of Title House. The one at the far end of the arc, with thick lips and deep-set dark eyes, slouching in his chair with his left ankle on his right knee, was Mortimer Oshin. He had written the play, A Barrel of Love, which I had seen last evening. He had lit three cigarettes in eight minutes, and with two of the matches he had missed the ashtray on a stand at his elbow and they had landed on the rug.

Philip Harvey cleared his throat. “You’ll need all the details,” he said, “but first I’ll outline it. You said you know nothing about plagiarism, but I assume you know what it is. Of course a charge of plagiarism against a book or a play is dealt with by the author and publisher, or the playwright and producer, but a situation has developed that needs something more than defending individual cases. That’s why the NAAD and the BPA have set up this joint committee. I may say that we, the NAAD, appreciate the co-operation of the BPA. In a plagiarism suit it’s the author that gets stuck, not the publisher. In all book contracts the author agrees to indemnify the publisher for any liabilities, losses, damages, expenses-”

Reuben Imhof cut in. “Now wait a minute. What is agreed and what actually happens are two different things. Actually, in a majority of cases, the publisher suffers-”