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tell them what happened. I'm going to say, ‘Imagine this little man fooling all of us. Isn't it hilarious? We're going to announce that this book isn't non-fiction, it's fiction, and we're going to change the name of it immediately from The Man Who Wouldn't Talk to The Man Who Talked Too Much.'” Wally said, “Let's see what happens.”

It worked like a charm. The press was delighted with the whole story and played it up, as I had hoped, as a harmless deception.

We haven't heard much more about Quentin Reynolds since then, though.

Oh, nobody really was hurt. The interesting thing is that the book sold about five times as well after the exposure as it did before. Suddenly everybody was talking about Dupre and chuckling over him. It's another example of how you can laugh off things. If we had gone into a frenzy, we'd have made fools of ourselves. This way, everybody laughed with us.

How did Quentin Reynolds take it?

Oh, he laughed right along with us. He continued saying, “He's a great guy, despite everything!”

Is Reynolds still at Random House?

He's dead.