Careful readers exposed two literary swindlers last week, one American and one Brit. Both were liars, but the similarities broke down there, and not to Britain's advantage.
Intellectual frauds expose a society's tolerance of mendacity. British impostors show that they are from a culture where rules are for fools. They are more devious and much darker and stranger than their foreign counterparts. Our frauds do not just want to make money, but to humiliate their rivals as they play out their revenge fantasies on the web.
Americans are one-dimensional in comparison. They tend to be journalists of average ability who want the status of a great writer and the money that comes with it. Jonah Lehrer, subject of the latest scandal, was typical. He won a staff job on the New Yorker and a contract for a pop-science book in the Malcolm Gladwell mould. He may have overplayed the importance of the neuroscience he parroted with such confidence, but he appealed to readers who liked pat answers to hard questions.
American critics accused him of recycling old articles and passing them off as new, but he shrugged off the allegations and appeared to have a lucrative career ahead of him. When a journalist called Michael Moynihan showed that Lehrer had also invented Bob Dylan quotes to support his arguments, however, he was finished. His fabrications were minor, but the New Yorker fired him and his publisher withdrew his book. American authors can survive critics dismissing their work as ridiculous or worse, and Lehrer had both charges levelled against him, but if they are caught cheating they struggle to find another job in journalism.
The editor of the New York Times fired Jayson Blair in 2003 for inventing stories and stealing the work of others. No other publisher would touch him and he is now something called a "life coach" in Virginia. The New Republic fired Stephen Glass in 1998 for making up stories for its venerable pages. He left journalism to study the law. Alas, the New York State Bar deemed him "morally unfit" to practise even as a lawyer – a barb that must have stung – and he ended up performing with a Los Angeles comedy troupe.
Few British frauds worry that exposure will damage them because punishment rarely follows the crime. So brazen have they become that Stephen Leather, who churns outs ebook and paperback thrillers, boasted at last month's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival: "As soon as my book is out I'm on Facebook and Twitter several times a day talking about it. I'll go on to several forums, the well-known forums, and post there under my name and under various other names and various other characters. You build up this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself."
Leather was not ashamed. He crowed like a prize cock and expected his fellow crime writers to applaud his cunning. On the face of it, he looks like Glass, Blair and Lehrer: another hustler trying to make a quick buck.
Jeremy Duns, a British thriller writer who exposes plagiarists in his spare time, found that Leather was nastier than that. When he wanted to fake an identity, Leather picked on Steve Roach, a minor writer who had made disobliging remarks about one of his books. Leather created Twitter "sockpuppet" accounts in the names of @Writerroach and @TheSteveRoach. Roach described on an Amazon forum how one account had "16,000 followers all reading 'my' tweets about how much 'I' loved SL's books". He was nervous. He told Duns in a taped conversation that Leather was "very powerful" and not a man to be crossed. Roach emailed Leather and begged to be left alone. Pleased that his cyber bullying campaign had worked, Leather graciously gave Roach control of the @Writerroach account he had created, to Roach's "great relief".
Leather and his publishers did not respond to my request for an interview. But you can see that he is something more than a common conman. His method of undermining rivals or enemies from behind the coward's cloak of anonymity is a distinctively British contribution to literary fraud.
Johann Hari, our most notable shyster, was not content with plagiarising and fabricating too. He behaved like the type of creepy loser who pushes shit through letterboxes or writes poison-pen posts on the web, while not himself being a loser.
Hari appears to be the exception because pressure from readers forced him to resign. Yet it was symptomatic of the state of British letters that the Independent fought to keep him, despite the fraudulence of his journalism and the anonymous lies he placed on Wikipedia about his enemies – among whose number I was one, I am proud to say. Andreas Whittam Smith, an editor I once admired, conducted an investigation but did not call witnesses or demand Hari's resignation.
Chris Blackhurst, the current editor, passed the organiser of the Orwell prize to his lawyers after she inquired why the Independent had allowed Hari to submit plagiarised work to her jury. After the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times impressed its detractors when it took down Blair's work and published the results of its internal inquiry. The Independent, by contrast, still carries Hari's efforts on its site and refuses to publish Whittam Smith's findings.
Suggestively, Whittam Smith and Blackhurst worked as City journalists before they became editors. In publishing as in finance, professionals have the same aversion to punishing fellow members of the middle class. British gentlemen should be regulated with a light touch, they believe, and not bound by regulation. They forget that gentlemanly amateurishness allows the professional charlatan to flourish, and in Britain in particular, the sadist to bully without fear of reprisal.