Matt Gourley

From page 197 of High-Hanging Fruit: 

‘He unlaced his cowslamb stepping-shoes with an intensity seldom reserved for slip-ons. She knew instinctively what this meant. Together, in this abandoned Bavarian sex chapel, they would lie as one in a long, wet nap. He began tasting her un-webbed fingers, leaving only the left thumb un-sampled. It was precisely this un-finished business that left her orphaned in the foster care of his spangled turgidity…’

            And so closes another volume of Dahlia Brand’s best-selling series, The Convincing Laplander. For 11 long years, she had been serializing the molten affairs of her taut Scandinavian hero, Paavo Hjerpe. Fifteen novels, eight Fleshy awards, and one minor motion picture option later, she finally felt her hero’s romantic escapades had run their course. More to the point, she had been basing the book’s more salient passages on her personal, and very real, love life. But somewhere in the long stretch from starving authoress to literary powerhouse, she had forgotten to ‘replenish the coffers of her sex-banks.’* The well had run dry, and frankly, so had she. Her books were world famous, autobiographical, and entirely true. True except for one thing. Miss Dahlia Brand was really Mister Louis Fessenden.

 * From Brand’s novel Wingéd Yeast.