Who remembers The Truth? lolz
Looking back on it now, this was a warning to me. Someone was telling me, "Don't go to work for the Truth". Remember Truth? Ezra Norton's amazing weekly - ANOTHER NUN OVER THE WALL AT TEMPE CONVENT. BEASTLY BROTHER IN BED WITH BOY. NORMAN VON NIDA CAUGHT IN LOVE BUNKER.
I did go to work for the Truth, and I was ambitious and foolhardy, so the editor said one morning that the paper was stuck for a sex maniac story, and since it was too late to find one I'd have to make one up. To my everlasting shame, I did. I invented a sex fiend who travelled on crowded suburban trains. He had a hook fashioned from a wire coat-hanger up his sleeve, and he would surreptitiously lower the hook and gently raise the skirts of girls standing next to him to glimpse the tops of their stockings.
The editor loved it. "If it's not true", he said, "it should be." The only change that he made was to christen the sex fiend THE HOOK, and have him operating that very Saturday night among crowds coming into town. The following Tuesday it was clear that we had got away with it. No other paper had denied it. How could they? The railway authorities had not complained, and there was no word from the police. Then my telephone rang, and an official sounding voice said, "Detective Sergeant Plowman, Bankstown police here. You the reporter who wrote that story about the sex maniac, the Hook?" "Yes", I said. "Righto," he said, "just wanted to tell you that we got the bastard this morning."
- Phillip Knightley.
I did go to work for the Truth, and I was ambitious and foolhardy, so the editor said one morning that the paper was stuck for a sex maniac story, and since it was too late to find one I'd have to make one up. To my everlasting shame, I did. I invented a sex fiend who travelled on crowded suburban trains. He had a hook fashioned from a wire coat-hanger up his sleeve, and he would surreptitiously lower the hook and gently raise the skirts of girls standing next to him to glimpse the tops of their stockings.
The editor loved it. "If it's not true", he said, "it should be." The only change that he made was to christen the sex fiend THE HOOK, and have him operating that very Saturday night among crowds coming into town. The following Tuesday it was clear that we had got away with it. No other paper had denied it. How could they? The railway authorities had not complained, and there was no word from the police. Then my telephone rang, and an official sounding voice said, "Detective Sergeant Plowman, Bankstown police here. You the reporter who wrote that story about the sex maniac, the Hook?" "Yes", I said. "Righto," he said, "just wanted to tell you that we got the bastard this morning."
- Phillip Knightley.