The first time it happened was this summer, when I happened to catch a showing of the (great) 1940 British spy thriller Night Train to Munich on TMC. Night Train to Munich is set in the days leading up to the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany in September 1939. The Nazis kidnap a Czechoslovak scientist and his daughter, and to rescue them, a British secret agent (played by a strikingly young Rex Harrison) travels to Berlin, dons a Gestapo uniform and bluffs his way into Gestapo headquarters.
Of course, there's no way I could watch that scene and not instantly draw the connection to a similar episode in A Traitor's Loyalty, in which the protagonist, a British spy, travels to Berlin to hunt a British defector and, in order to get information, disguises himself as a Gestapo officer and enters Gestapo headquarters.
Then over the holidays, I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, as is my wont, got home from the film and immediately looked it up on Wikipedia. And therein I discovered that, in the book on which the movie's based, the codename that MI-6 gives to their star Soviet mole is Merlin. In A Traitor's Loyalty, by the by, the hero used to be MI-6's star Nazi mole, and his codename back when he worked for MI-6 was Merlin. (In A Traitor's Loyalty, which takes place in a world where the Nazis defeated the Soviets, the cold war is fought between NATO and Nazi Germany rather than NATO and Soviet Russia.)
(SPOILERS FOR HAYWIRE AND A TRAITOR'S LOYALTY AHEAD)
And then yesterday I saw Haywire. At one point, in one small moment, after the heroine has had her employers turn against her, she searches her trusty rucksack and discovers, sewn into its lining, a small black device with an antenna on one end and a blinking red light on the other. In A Traitor's Loyalty, when the hero realises his masters have been manipulating behind his back, he searches the car they gave him and discovers, sewn into the upholstery of the boot, a "small radio transistor with a red light blinking slowly at one end".
(END SPOILERS)
Your first reaction when you come across stuff like this--or my first reaction, at any rate--is to wince, to think that you're a horribly derivative writer incapable of thinking up an idea someone else hasn't thought of, and that you're about to be exposed as such before the world.
After a little while, though, you start getting a little bit of perspective. You realise, first of all, that it isn't about having every element of your story be something no one's ever thought of before--it's about what you do with your story elements, combining them and presenting them in a way that people still find fresh and interesting. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code are both famously made up of a multiplicity of sources from elsewhere, but even those readers who could spot and tease out the inspirations for the stories' different elements still often found reading them very enjoyable.
Downtown Abbey could be summed up without much inaccuracy as a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Upstairs Downstairs. That was obvious to me within its first five minutes, but not only did it not do anything to dampen my appreciation of the show, it actually added another dimension to it for me. I got to see how Downton took the premise of a country landowner who has fathered only daughters but whose estate is entailed upon the male line and how it treated that premise--doing some things that were similar to what Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice and some things that were very different.
And then the second thing you have to realise is that a lot you see, you only see because you're you--you're the author of the work in question. The example from Haywire is a perfect incidence of that--I'd be stunned if anyone who were to see Haywire and read A Traitor's Loyalty noticed such a tiny coincidence. It gets about five seconds of screen time in both works, and "secret homing device" and "a spy discovers his (or her) masters have been spying on him" are hardly such unique, distinctive tropes that your first thought when you encounter them is, "That's just like ...!"
Ditto the codename "Merlin"--it's such a minor point in both books (so minor in Tinker Tailor that it didn't even make it into the movie) and the contexts surrounding it are so very different that I think anyone who picked up on it would simply give me the undeserved credit of thinking I'd done it deliberately, as a respectful homage to the work of John le Carré.
(That's if they had the chance--I confess, I did email my editor and ask him to change the codename to Lancelot. But A Traitor's Loyalty does still have a genuine homage to le Carré--there's a very minor character who's named after two characters in my favourite le Carré book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)
Your book is, of course, your baby, and as such, you've got a natural inclination to be highly sensitised to anything concerning it. As authors we're taught early on about having to let go of one part of that--about detaching ourselves when we receive feedback and critique. This is another part, I think. It's a very human thing to draw connections and see patterns, and we're so close to our own books that it's inevitable for those to be what we draw the connections to.
I have a hypothesis that the reason I've started seeing elements of my story everywhere now is because the book is, essentially, now out of my hands--I no longer have the ability to make any significant changes to it. In that sense, I've already let it go--I've had to. And now I also have to let it go emotionally.
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