Unless you hang around a Barnes & Noble on Saturday morning drinking foo-foo coffee, you might not know who mystery author Mary Higgins Clark is. Now you do. And aren't you the better for it?
WWW- Did rich and famous author Mary Higgins Clark [pictured] steal the story line for her 29th novel from a little-known Israeli writer's screenplay on the same subject?
Dalia Gal claims in a lawsuit that Clark's book, "The Second Time Around," recycled the plot, key scenes and characters, and even character names from Gal's screenplay about intrigue in the drug industry.
Gal's 2000 screenplay, "Immortalin," was widely circulated in Hollywood, the suit says. Clark's 2003 novel was a hardcover and paperback best seller for Simon & Schuster.
"The substantial similarities between the infringing work and Gal's screenplay are remarkable and can only be explained as a deliberate copying," the lawsuit charges, adding that both works spotlight "a single female journalist's investigation of an elaborate conspiracy plot between two rival pharmaceutical companies to create a miracle drug, [and] a scientist working on the miracle drug [who] disappears," while the scientist's "wife is having a secret relationship with the head of the rival pharmaceutical corporation, and plays a role in the conspiracy against her husband." Recently a federal judge refused to dismiss the suit.
"Before this lawsuit was filed, I had never heard of Ms. Gal and certainly never saw her screenplay," Clark told Lowdown. "Her allegations are blatant nonsense and patently untrue." Simon & Schuster's Adam Rothberg said: "We fully support our author."
But Gal - whose new novel, "Adonis & Alizade," is a post-9/11 love story set in Manhattan - is primed for battle. "You shouldn't mess with me or any Israeli," she told me from Tel Aviv. "We have to be tough, because life is tough here."
