An American policeman who dabbles in theatre has been caught plagiarizing plays the works of Canadian playwrights and staging them in the US.

Belke wrote The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes in 1992 and it was produced as recently as last year in Edmonton.

But after hearing that a similar play had been staged in Los Angeles, Belke and his agent went on sleuthing expedition of their own.

They discovered a version of the play had been staged in both Los Angeles and northern Ohio.

Herman may also have plagiarized scripts written by at least two other high-profile Canadian playwrights, Peter Colley’s I’ll Be Back Before Midnight and Kim Selody’s Suddenly Shakespeare, according to the Edmonton Journal.

In 1999, Herman produced a play called The Unexpected Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was character for character, word for word the same as Belke’s.

It played twice in Ohio with his Tree City Players, an amateur troupe in Kent, a university town near Cleveland.

Then Herman’s friend, Bill Wolski, asked for the rights to produce the play for a Los Angeles theatre company.

But come on, this is just words…. it’s not like it’s really stealing, per se, is it?