FFB: Danger Next Door - Q. Patrick

THE STORY: Clark Rodman is fascinated with the apartment across the alley. He watches with curious intensity the occupants and in particular the young woman who lives there. He captivates her. She lives there with two other men, both of whom he knows are photographers employed by a news agency. One of them is her brute of a husband. They seem to know a little too much about Clark, too and let him know when in a chance encounter they attempt to make him the subject of a photo essay. When Clark refuses the attention Gene Folwell, the husband, lets on he is aware of Clark's Peeping Tom act and threatens him if it doesn't stop. Of course this only intensifies Clark's morbid curiosity, firing his imagination that there is Danger Next Door (1951) for Laura Folwell.

THE CHARACTERS: Clark, Laura, Gene and the rest of the cast are stock in trade characters you might encounter in any number of "foolish voyeur" thrillers so familiar to crime fiction fans. Clark is a rich kid who wants a taste of the simple life. He turned down his father's offer to join the family business and instead took off for the big city of Manhattan with dreams of becoming a writer. He uses Laura, the girl next door, as his muse and churns out a sordid tale of an abused young woman suffering in silence as a prisoner of her domineering ape of a husband. This turns out in part to be true, for Gene is a sadistic thug who exploits his wife in a blackmail scheme that relies on using Laura as an inserted model in altered photographs of people caught in nearly pornographic, compromising positions. As the story unfolds the reader knows that Clark will be determined to save Laura at any cost. Murder is not ruled out. Soon his outrage gets the better of him and Gene is killed. The final third of the story tells how Clark, Laura and Gene's brother Harry plan to cover up the crime.

But Ted Steele, Clark's intrusive neighbor, is complicating matters. Ted presents himself as a police officer on the vice squad with his eye on Gene and Harry's blackmail operation. He also seems to know a little too much about Clark. Everyone seems to be watching Clark with the same intensity that he is watching Laura. When Clark tries to verify Ted's identity he finds out that there is no one in the phone book listed as either Ted or Edward Steele. Through his connections with a policeman friend Clark learns there is no one named Edward Steele in the NYC vice squad. Who then is Ted Steele? And why is he so interested in Clark's welfare and the activities of the three people across the alley?

Then there is the mystery of furniture that seems to move by itself in the Folwell apartment. The odd glances Gene makes towards the floor. Was he kicking at an unseen dog? But how can a dog make a sofa glide across the floor? The wallpaper is ripped off and shredded from one of the walls in a room Clark can see from his place.  What might explain that?  Angry fits of temper? A wild animal going crazy? What of the messenger boy Clark enlists to deliver a note to Laura? Why did he return from the Folwell apartment in a terrified state talking of a freakish creature with the face of monster that was hiding behind Laura, clinging to her legs? Is that some kind of apelike pet the Folwell's are keeping in their home?

I liked the irascible forensic pathologist Dr. Talbot Trask who turns out to be one of Clark's few allies and a sort of detective in the final pages. He suffers no fools gladly and can't abide the naivete of the police he must deal with daily. Dr. Trask is interested in a cold case, the unsolved disappearance of Professor Barraclough who apparently was lost at sea. Trask is convinced that Barraclough has been murdered, but without a body he can prove nothing. The professor is an inventor of a photographic method that makes image manipulation very easy, something like a 1950s idea of Photoshop but without the digital aspect. An invention involving photography? Oh yes, you better believe this cold case will figure into the sideline of Gene and Harry Folwell. Trask provides the only bit of humor, albeit a nasty, cynical humor, in a novel that is filled with tension, suspense and few chilling surprises.

INNOVATIONS: More than any other Q. Patrick work Danger Next Door (1951) is a genuine noir novel not much of a detective novel though there are detective story elements. It's also as sordid as the magazine piece that Clark wrote. There is a perverse quality to the plot that recalls the brutality and cruelty of Q. Patrick's The Grindle Nightmare written nearly two decades earlier. I was reminded of the darkest novels of Gil Brewer and the revenge thrillers Lawrence Block wrote in his very early career. Sex and sadism mix together in a tale of twisted blackmailers obsessed with the darkest desires and blackest bedroom fantasies. Elements of the weird menace stories of pulp magazine writers like Anthony Rud, Wyatt Blassingame, and G. T. Fleming Roberts also turn up in one of the more bizarre revelations at the book's midpoint and in the ultimate twist in the final pages.

This might well have been titled Fifty Shades of Ebony. Yet none of the power plays and domination scenes we are shown (thankfully only two) can possibly titillate. It's just violence. Laura's victimization curdles the blood and chills the bone; there isn't a tinge of intended arousal. The reader is longing for Gene to get his comeuppance.

The novel can also be seen as an inverse of the Horatio Alger stories of poor young men who seek success and wealth in city life. Throughout the story everyone who meets Clark tells him that he's in over his head. That his rich kid background is something he can never escape and that he should never have left the comfort of his father's house and the guarantee of an easy life in an inherited position at the family business. Here is a sampling of the many warnings and advice our hero receives:

Gene Folwell: This isn't a healthy neighborhood for millionaires' sons.

Dr. Trask: Don't go poking your nose too far into other people's affairs. [...] Rich men's sons are good targets, too. We don't want to have you on a slab in the next room, you know."

EASY TO FIND? Already discussed in my exuberant post when I first discovered the book offered for sale and my immediate purchase of that rare copy. Read about it here. So the answer (as usual) is no. In this case the book is so uncommon that I'd amend that to a blunt "Absolutely not."

1975 BOOKS: Sex, Race & Crime

I know, I know. I'm a day late (and a dollar short as my mother would say. These days I'm several dollars short). But I have to get these written up and knocked off, so to speak. I enjoyed them more than the other 1975 book, each for different reasons. And they were much more exemplary of the year 1975 than that book I refuse to name by that American woman. So very quickly here are the highlights of the two other books I read for the Crimes of the Century meme last month when 1975 was the year of books being saluted and celebrated.

The Topless Tulip Caper by Lawrence Block

This is the last book about Chip Harrison, ostensibly also written by him as they were originally published under his name. But he's just another of Block's alter egos working double time on the wiseguy humor and the sex and crime books he wrote for Gold Medal back in the days of paperback originals. It's also the second detective novel featuring the sleuthing team of Leo Haig and Chip who, as all mystery lovers in the know should know, are knock-offs of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Oops. Should I say this is a homage? No way. Block would call that pompous.

As the title implies there's a strip club involved and a stripper is the first victim. Well, really the 124th victim. "124 murder victims?" I hear you cry. "That's some serial killer at work!" Oh calm down. See, this is also about tropical fish collecting and the lost art of breeding fish in an aquarium. (Does anyone still have home aquariums?) As Wolfe has his obsession with caring for and hybridizing various orchid species so Leo Haig has his tropical fish. And the client in this case has hired Haig to find out who slaughtered her prize collection of Scatophagus tetracanthus (You better believe I looked that one up!) They account for the first one hundred and twenty-three victims of the book. Thankfully, we are spared this aquatic carnage as they are mass murdered by poisoned fish food well before the book even begins. Chip knows that Leo is the man for the job as does Thelma Wolinski, aka Tulip Willing, as she is known when she dances in her undies for the salivating male audience at the Treasure Chest strip club. Thelma, you see, is the leading authority on the "Scatty" and has written a couple of articles on how to successfully breed the species for a few ichthyological trade journals. Remarkably, the bizarre death of her stripper colleague Cherry (curare poisoning delivered mysteriously to her ...uh... left breast) is tied to the liquidation of Thelma's fish.

Leo Haig delivers a rousing final chapter lecture just as all great detectives of the Golden Age should do with all the suspects present in his office. Chip has several sexual escapades with the attractive women in the cast all done tongue in cheek and with some meta-fiction jokes at the expense of the people who were Block's editors at Gold Medal. This is a fun and frothy example of a well done off-the-wall detective novel that hits all the marks for me -- bizarre murders, unusual subject mater, raunchy humor and true wit, as well and some randy sex scenes that, as gratuitous as they are, still managed to make me smile because they were never taken seriously.

Snake by James McClure

At the opposite end of the 1975 detective novel spectrum is this police procedural from South African writer James McClure. As somber as Block's book was lighthearted this crime novel depicts the era of apartheid in all its ugliness and bigotry. The book dares to show policemen working together, black and white, Afrikaners and Bantu, without one trace of the political correctness we are suffering from these days. McClure' s main policemen characters are Lt. Tromp Kramer, a white Afrikaner, and Mickey Zondi, a Zulu. Kramer calls the locals coons, wogs and coolies. Zondi doesn't even blink at the use of these terms. There is also Sgt. Marais, one of the most ultra conservative and nationalist Afrikaners in the police force. He often resorts to the term "kaffir" -- a word that was banned from usage in South Africa as it is the equivalent of nigger in the US. Oddly, the word is borrowed from Islam and literally means a non-believer in Allah. But just as "gook", the Korean pejorative in their own language for white men, was turned into an insult for Korean soldiers during that war I can see how a relatively harmless word from another culture was appropriated by South African white men to insult an entire race.

The white policemen and the black policemen seem to tolerate one another amid all this obvious dislike. Kramer despite his uncensored language is more than tolerant and has a friendship with Zondi that transcends their work relationship. Occasionally the reader is reminded of the reality of apartheid as in the scene when one of the police officers watches an argument between an African teacher hosting his class on a field trip and a nature museum official. The teacher is not allowed to enter a movie theater in the museum because there is a prominent sign marked "Whites Only".

And why a nature museum in this novel? Because, of course, as the title tells us there's a snake in the pages. The murder being investigated is of an exotic dancer who was apparently strangled by the python she used in her act. The death is described in detail and we know that she was visited by a man who she attempted to seduce in a very unorthodox manner -- well, creepy is the right word, I guess -- by letting the snake slither over her naked body as her visitor slowly undressed himself. Then we see that he kills her when the kinky sex gets out of hand. The mystery is not so much about who or how she was killed, but exactly which of the many male suspects is guilty of the murder.

Told parallel with this murder case is the investigation of a series of robbery/shootings in a poor neighborhood known as Peacedale. This had some powerful resonance for me with the rash of urban crime and bank robberies that have beset Chicago for the past ten years. The depiction of the gangster lifestyle of 70s era South Africa doesn't seem very different at all to what continues to plague 21st century cities in the US. The resolution of this portion of the novel has an interesting twist that further comments on the divisiveness of South African culture during the 1970s.

This is the first of McClure's I've ever read though I've known about them for decades. I found his manner of unrestrained violence and straightforwardness in presenting difficult topics refreshingly honest and real. Kramer, Zondi, Marais and all the rest of the policeman and law officers come alive on the page and are uniquely individual. McClure was a crime reporter for many years so he knows the ins and outs of both writing and the police in his native land. But he also manages to reveal a human side to all of his characters in the brief glimpses we get of his characters' personal lives. Even Marais who for the most part seemed to be a huge asshole had a couple of scenes where he was less hateful and more human. There was one touching scene where Kramer's girlfriend after moving to a new home donates her unwanted furniture and clothes to Zondi and his family. It's done without a patronizing manner and reveals character without one word of dialogue being spoken.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this short series of crime novels. I own copies of almost all of them and they've been set aside for this month and the coming new year.

All in all, here are two books from 1975 well worth your time. Whether you lean towards wild and crazy or somber and humane each of these books give you aspects of 1970s life that are genuine and not artificial.

Make Out with Murder - Chip Harrison

The dedication page to Make Out With Murder (1974) says: "This is for REX STOUT, whoever he might be." If you're one of those ardent readers who scrutinizes every page of a book this dedication will not only bring a smile to your face but will provide you with a tantalizing hint as to what lies within its pages. For this is not just another book starring and written by Chip Harrison exaggeratedly dubbed "a one man anti-chastity movement" on the cover it is a love letter to the traditional mystery novel.

Why the Stout dedication? And why that crack implying no one knows him? Well it's all due to Leo Haig, an aspiring private detective who has modeled himself on the practice of Nero Wolfe. And he actually believes -- as many people believe of Sherlock Holmes -- that Wolfe is a real person living a reclusive life somewhere in Manhattan where Haig has also set up business. He also believes that Rex Stout is the clever pseudonym chosen another real person, Archie Goodwin who according to Haig is not only Wolfe's right hand man but his most respected biographer. You'll have to read the book to find out Haig's theory about the origin of the Stout pen name. It's insanely funny and almost believable.

But it isn't just Wolfe that Haig admires. He knows and honors all the great detectives of fiction. In fact everything he knows about being a detective he has learned from his extensive collection of murder mysteries that crowd the shelves of his home. Look carefully and you'll also find several fish tanks artfully inserted in the many bookcases in Haig's house. Just like Wolfe has his obsession with orchids Leo Haig is overly devoted to the care of his large collection of rare tropical fish.

But enough about Haig. The book is really about Chip Harrison, who Haig has handpicked to be his own Archie Goodwin.  This third book is more of a first book in that it introduces Leo Haig and refashions Chip as his legman and biographer. It's a legitimate murder mystery serving as Chip's crash course in dealing with the temptations of femmes fatale of all ages and hair color. As if he hadn't already had his fill of women. In the previous two books Chip is a randy young man itching to lose his virginity. Those books are all about sex and bawdy humor not crime and dark motives.

Chip is head over heels in love with doomed Melanie Trelawney who has a morbid fear of dying. Two of Melanie's sisters died violently and suspiciously and she is certain she will succumb to a similar fate. Within days her death wish comes true and Chip is convinced that her death by heroin overdose is a vicious murder. Too many things are fishy. Like how Melanie was found dead on her air mattress bed but was overly cautious with sharp objects being anywhere near the bed let alone on it. Leo and Chip team up and show up the loutish cops who seem more interested in closing the case as another junkie suicide than in finding Melanie's killer.

The real fun reading this book is in revelling in Block's combination of ribald humor and Chip's slang-filled narration expressing a youthful worldview that comes across as utterly authentic. Detective fiction fans will enjoy the seemingly endless references to crime writers and their books. Haig promises his young employee that by drinking deep of murder mysteries he'll gain the knowledge he needs. Chip is impressed when Haig tells that all he knows of philately he picked up from The Scarlet Ruse, a Travis McGee book. Similarly, Sayers' The Nine Tailors taught him about the art of bell ringing. When Chip learns that one of the murder suspects is a numismatist he follows his employer/tutor's advice and reads Chandler's The High Window plus a book by Michael Innes to learn all he can about coin collecting.

Chip does all the legwork, gets beat up, and has a few bedroom interludes but it is Haig who comes up with the dazzling solution. This case of multiple murder will turn out to be more reminiscent of Ross Macdonald than Rex Stout -- a bit of detective fiction trivia Haig cannot help pointing out to Chip. While the killer may be a bit easy to spot as the body count climbs that doesn't mean this isn't worthy of your attention. I had a lot of fun meeting Chip and Leo. And I'm eager to read about them again in their second (sadly last) adventure set partially in a strip club and called The Topless Tulip Caper. Stay tuned for more...

Like Ice She Was - William Ard

WARNING: This review is littered with spoilers.

I will confess that I purchased this book primarily for the very cool cover art.  Then I learned that William Ard was a favorite writer of Mike Nevin's who is one of the people who turned me onto Harry Stephen Keeler and taught me how to better appreciate the work of the brilliant Cornell Woolrich.  I trusted Mike's taste in great books and neglected writers and decided to read Like Ice She Was (1960).  I think I picked the wrong one to start with.

Lou Largo is hired to find Madeleine Mann, a former prostitute from Montreal who stole a million dollars from her casino owner husband Nick Mann. Seems that money was routinely packed up in suitcases and flown from Canada to Miami where it was supposed to be stowed away in Mann's Florida home. One of these Canadian cash shipments never made it to its final destination. The pilot Fred Cooper and Madeleine helped themselves to the money, Madeleiene decided she no longer wanted Nick and took off with Cooper and the millions for California. Now Nick Mann wants Madeleine and his money. Lou heads to Saratoga, New York to find her.

Along the way he manages to pick up Joan Martin, college student in criminology, as a sidekick. She approaches Largo with an idea that she follow him along on one of his cases for a research paper she is writing on the life of a private investigator. At first Lou nixes the idea but when Joan shows up unexpectedly having successfully tailed the private eye and rescued him from some thugs who intended to beat him to death she proves herself a worthy partner. They become an interesting team in more ways than one.

Lou's idea is that they pass themselves off as a philandering couple at the motel where Madeleine, now calling herself Marion Bouchard, has holed up. He cleverly books the room immediately next door to her. Luckily for him the walls are paper thin and the bed is extra squeaky. His plan? He will create the illusion that he and Joan are sex fiends with a lot of hysterical sound effects and exaggerated sex talk. These scenes are hilarious and one of the few parts of the book I really enjoyed. All this sex is meant to arouse the attention of Marion/Madeleine who we soon learn "has the coldest skin of any dame [Lou] ever came across." (And you thought the title was a clever attempt at metaphor.) Most people would be disgusted or annoyed by loud screwing accompanied by ridiculous running commentary and ask to move to a different room. Not Marion. She is completely turned on. She's seen Lou swimming in the pool showing off his trim muscled body and now imagines him to be a Titan of a sex partner. "Quel homme! Formidable!" (She actually says that.) She desperately wants Lou which is just what he wanted to achieve.

The story is pretty thin. Like the instructions on a shampoo bottle we get a formula like this – chase, sex, beating, repeat. Lou stumbles upon everything too quickly by asking only a few questions of people who are all too willing to spill the beans - including Madeleine's own mother. The bad guys, headed by a corrupt ex-cop from Montreal, are always a few steps behind him ready to beat him to a pulp demanding to know what exactly he's up to. By the midpoint you think he ought to be hospitalized but he carries on valiantly like a cartoon superhero sustaining a large collection of bruises and cuts. Yet somehow with all his injuries he still manages to be amazing in the sack. Vive la résilience!

Interspersed with the beatings and the sex play between Marion/Madeleine and Lou we get a lot of pining and longing from Joan. She wants Lou just as much as Marion, but he keeps calling her "kid" and "sis" and she thinks she hasn't a chance. Until that is she starts dressing like a woman, putting on makeup and changing her hairstyle. Then Lou takes notice and they play out a genuine torrid sex scene complete with squeaking bed. Immediately after Lou calls her "girl" and Joan is delighted. She's graduated from kid to sis to girl. Ah, womanhood!

When Madeleine discovers that Lou has forsaken her sexy charms for those of the younger more beautiful and less trashy Joan she vows revenge. So she goes next door to her motel room where Fred Cooper has been getting drunk with every passing hour and stabs him repeatedly. Then she frames Lou for the murder and takes off. This is the level of nonsense that the book descends to. Just when you think you've hit the absolute nadir the story lathers on more cartoonish behavior. The thugs show up, kidnap both women and plan to kill them and dump the bodies in a lake. The bad guys even tie concrete blocks around their feet. But Lou is there to save the day aided by a deputy sheriff and a posse of police.

I will give Ard credit for one scene that you rarely get in these kind of books. Nick Mann keeps insulting one of his thugs and finally calls him a fairy which seals his fate: "Tony triggered the gun once, and blew the gambler's brains out with a slug between his eyes." I always wonder why the bad guys endure insult after insult from the one in charge. Tony, unlike most of these bad guys, takes no crap from anyone even his boss.

Some of my other favorite lines:

"Lou guessed that she had squeezed that forty-inch bust into a size twelve gown to maybe take your eye off the little spinning ball. Not Largo's though" (The woman works the roulette wheel in a gambling joint.)

"Quel homme!" she thought admiringly as the creaking springs went on. "C'est magnifique! What a bull she has for company!"  (Did you ever hear anyone from Quebec province talk like they were in a Cole Porter musical? Marion was also "listening raptly" in the previous paragraph.)

"He flashed her his boyish grin, looked as guileless as Li'l Abner with the Dragon Lady." (Lou is anything BUT boyish.)

After doing a little online research I stumbled across an excellent website devoted to Ard with information supplied by the writer's widow. He died in 1960 at the early age of 37 from cancer that he foolishly believed he did not have despite multiple warnings from doctors. This book was one of the last he wrote himself. Other Lou Largo books were ghosted by Lawrence Block and John Jakes. So it looks like if I want to discover more about Ard's writing I'll have to go back to his first books in the early 1950s. I ought to give him another shot. The Timothy Dane books are supposed to be completely different and much better. Stay tuned for a possible reassessment.

To educate yourself about William Ard visit his tribute website here.

NEW STUFF: Getting Off - Lawrence Block as "Jill Emerson"

Getting Off by Lawrence Block
(writing as Jill Emerson)
335 pages
Hard Case Crime $25.99

Kit Tolliver may remind some readers of an oversexed female version of Dexter. I couldn't help but draw analogies between the two characters. There were some scenes in this outrageously over-the-top sex and blood thriller that seemed to have been lifted right from that popular TV show. But Block has something else in mind than the usual study of the psychopathology of a fictional serial killer. It's not so much the killing and the violence that is the focus. It's the sex that dominates this book. Raw, hedonistic, power play sex. And it is sex that defines Kit's personality and how she navigates her way through her world. It's a book where orgasm, the little death as the Elizabethans liked to call it, is in search of a much bigger death -- death as the ultimate high as the title so bluntly suggests.

The tame subtitle on the front cover labels this as “a novel of sex and violence." That 's enough to send many people looking elsewhere for a new read, I'm sure. But if you are the kind of reader who might be tempted to pick it up as a experiment in a guilty pleasure read you will get more than you ever dreamed of.  Open the cover and it's like opening a Pandora's box hidden away in the darkest corner of an adult pleasure shop in some backwater Podunk.  You will never expect what Block has in store for you.

That generic subtitle doesn’t even begin to explain what’s found on the pages within. The sex takes all forms from the usual mild descriptions of vanilla sex that fade out to the blowing curtains to graphically detailed power play games complete with ropes, blindfolds, gags, and sex toys. While most of the sex is between Kit and her male victims there’s also plenty of girl on girl action that extends to phone sex and "jilling off" stories. This is, after all, a "Jill Emerson" opus. Lesbian scenes will take center stage frequently. Kit is so depraved in her exploration of the darker side of hedonism that she even indulges in a little necrophilia.

Block presents us with a female sexual predator who experiences her ultimate high in murder. The orgasm is great, the kill is even better.

She reached a point where the sex act itself wasn't complete as long as her partner had a pulse. That was the true orgasm; when she struck like a cobra and the man died.

I was repulsed and fascinated by this book. I couldn't stop reading. How could I care about this cold-hearted, antisocial woman whose life was nothing but the pursuit of pleasure, the killing of sex partners, and the theft of their money? Surely there had to be something in her that I would find likeable or admirable. And there was. It was her cunning, her manipulation of everyone she encountered. Her father used to call her "his little soldier" and Kit in many ways has much in common with men trained in warfare. Targeting the enemy, sizing them up, out thinking them and then - bam! - taking them out.

If you stick with this deeply disturbed woman you may be surprised to find that she has a smidgen of a heart left in her steely soul. Late in the book there is a scene where she is shocked to discover that one of her former bedmates has been transformed by his life in the Iraq war. Seeing his battle scarred, abused and broken body deeply affects Kit. Her usual modus operandi in her bizarre revenge scheme is altered in an eyebrow raising scene that may elicit a few gasps of shock.

More sensitive readers might be gasping and crying out "Oh My God!" on nearly every page, frankly. The sex scenes only escalate in twisted surprising fashion as the book progresses. The basic premise is abused girl gets even with her abuser and the silent parent who did nothing to stop the abuse then sets out to find her true self in non-stop sexual encounters that usually end in murder. Problem is circumstances do not always allow for Kit to get her desired final orgiastic thrill. Five men managed to escape execution at her hands. Now she’s tracking them down intent that no one can live to tell that they ever had been with her. Kit is not fond of being the subject of conquest stories. She's the final conqueror when she meets a man. And we all know dead men tell no tales.

But Kit's search for those five men will take her into uncharted territory - the geography of her own heart. Decades ago she thought she left her heart and her emotions and what little love she ever felt buried and forgotten. Her emotional life is desperately fighting its way back to the surface, gasping for breath in a stifling existence of brutal hedonism and callous violence. Could she really be feeling love for another person? You may be praying for her soul, you may be praying she gets her comeuppance. Either way I guarantee you'll feel something for this sharply drawn, powerful and deadly woman.

For a little insight into the Block/Emerson identity crisis read this great interview where "they" talk to each other about "their" writing.

Coming Home & Getting Off

Gotcha!

I was delighted to find a box waiting for me in the lobby of my building when I returned from St. Louis. The return address read Random House.  My address label read J F Norris - REVIEW COPY. Inside was:

Hard Case Crime's first ever hardcover publication of a never before published Block thriller written under the Jill Emerson pseudonym. Don Longmuir of Scene of the Crime Books in St Catherines, Ontario told me at Bouchercon that he hadn't even seen a copy, couldn't order one, and that review copies promised to several people never showed up. Here is evidence to prove him wrong.

Thanks to Tom Green at Titan Publishing Group for following through with his promise of the book. Now I've got to read this and get a review up as soon as possible. The book is on sale in major bookstores on Tuesday, September 20.