You Could at Least Read Me

If you are going to steal a writer’s name, I think you ought to have to read the writer.

Not a reasonable demand to make of a criminal. I understand that. A man willing to steal my name may be reluctant to accept additional conditions. But I have spent time on those sentences. There were paragraphs I could have finished earlier if I had been willing to let them remain as they were. I would hate to discover that the whole disagreeable business could be bypassed by knowing which links to paste.

Linda Geddes describes a version of that business in the Guardian on October 17. Someone had been pitching editors under her name, from an email address that wasn’t hers, referring to articles she really had written. Then she found her name above a New York Post article she hadn’t written at all.

The subject was chronoworking, arranging work around biological rhythms. Geddes has written a book about circadian rhythms. A plausible assignment for the right writer. They had got that part right too.

The New York Post says it has removed the article, carried out an internal review and referred the matter to the authorities.

This bothers me more than a completely invented career. A fake degree can at least be found not to exist. These were real pieces, with a real writer behind them. Go looking and you could find her. There she was, having done the work. The difficulty was that she wasn’t the person sending the email.

I have a picture of impersonation in which the thief studies the victim. Not a claim about what happened to Geddes; my private, self-important version of being robbed. He would read the work, learn the rhythm, discover which words I keep using because I cannot think of better ones. He would have to notice something. I could resent the crime while privately approving the preparation.

Perhaps he would even come to appreciate the difficult paragraph. This is how far a writer’s vanity can accompany him into a police report.

But the reporting doesn’t establish a machine that has learned to write like Geddes. She says many of the pitches bear the hallmarks of AI assistance. The person behind the accounts and the motive remain unknown. We don’t get to turn that into a laboratory demonstration of a perfect synthetic Linda. We do get an older, less flattering possibility: the name and the previous work can be useful without anybody mastering the prose.

Here is an imaginary pitch line, not one quoted from the fraudulent emails:

You can find a couple of my recent articles below.

Perfectly ordinary. I could send it. There would be the links. An editor could open them and make a sensible judgment about whether I knew the subject. The articles could withstand that judgment. Every name, date and quotation in them could be right. None of that would tell him whether the person offering the next piece was me.

I keep wanting to defend the quality of the work. It is the defense I have available. Read the thing. Look how carefully the awkward part was handled. Look where the paragraph stops instead of giving the reader another explanation. I can become quite tiresome about the virtues of a page nobody has attacked.

The page isn’t on trial. It is being used as a reference.

Someone posing as science writer Caroline Williams got an article commissioned and published by Science and received about $1,000, Geddes reports. I cannot tell you how that payment was collected. Geddes asks the same question. But I notice the amount. Of course I notice the amount. I was prepared to be offended on behalf of literature without enquiring about the rate, and then there it was.

Now comes the question I would once have welcomed: how do we stop commissioning the wrong person?

At Nature Health, editor Ben Johnson tells Geddes the experience makes him less likely to commission freelancers he hasn’t worked with before.

I can see why. He has pages to fill and things to check.

But someone I’ve worked with before is a lovely phrase when it includes me. It means I have survived a period during which I had to explain myself. An editor remembers. A name does a little of the work before the next sentence arrives. I have wanted that for years. The thief wants it for the length of an email.

Geddes describes being asked to supply further proof of her identity when she contacted the New York Post about the impersonation. There is the real writer, trying to get her own name back out of the day’s work. No substitute can do that chore for her.

I withdraw my demand that the thief read me. It would not improve the arrangement. He could read every word, admire the best part, understand exactly what it cost, and still send the email.

Besides, I know which part he’d skip.

The blank page after the last published piece.

Source: Fake Linda and me: the Agatha Christie-worthy mystery of the fraudster who stole my byline