For those who don’t read the comments carefully (and indeed for those who do), a reader has posted asking whether she is “the only person who has read Chris Ayres’ work of non fiction, War Reporting for Cowards?” She wonders, therefore, “Kulish, are you familiar with the word, ‘plagiarism’?”
Thousands of journalists descended on Kuwait in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. Many memoirs were published in the aftermath. Ayres is a correspondent for the Times of London who wrote a memoir about his embedding experience after working as Los Angeles correspondent for his paper, shades of my protagonist Jimmy.
But when his book was published, Last One In had already been out with publishers, though unsold, for a year and a half. Dozens of people had read the novel in early 2004. In fact, the film option for Last One In had been purchased six months before War Reporting for Cowards hit shelves.
I haven’t read the book in its entirety. I skimmed it at the store when it came out, wondering what effect its publication would have on my own manuscript. It struck me that it was as much about Ayres’s life before the invasion, with lots of flashbacks, as his time there. Last One In dives into the invasion and pretty much stays there.
But it’s a matter of record that Last One In was done long before “Cowards” came out (probably around the same time he was done). A new book by Mr. Ayres, “Death by Leisure,” is coming out soon. According to Amazon it is a first-person romp through the leisure class that ends up taking him to the “Katrina-ravaged South,” where, coincidentally, I was writing for the New York Times. Perhaps this is like Fight Club, Ayres/Kulish, Kulish/Ayres…