This is cannon fodder for Lee Goldberg

American-British author (or at least someone who calls himself an author) has been caught plagiarizing Mika Waltari's large historical novel Ihmiskunnan viholliset/The Roman. Colin Slater's novel Lindum Colonia is comprised of, only with some word changes, the English translation of Waltari's novel.

Why Lee Goldberg? Because Slater's novel was published by a POD press, Virtualbookworm, and Goldberg has been criticizing POD (or vanity) presses' mode of action for years in his blog, Writer's Life. And it seems it's easy enough to publish something not your own through these channels.

Slater hasn't answered the e-mails or calls of the Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. He seems to have a LinkedIn page, in which he claims he was a road manager of The Bay City Rollers in the seventies. How famous can you be? (It seems, though, that being a Bay City Rollers road manager means that you took the guys' money and ran.)

Slater also says he's worked in Hollywood, producing commercials and animated TV series. Here's a comment on one of his productions. His LinkedIn page says that he in 1990-2001 he "instructed course on film music royalties and copyright issues" at UCLA.