When the journalist Michael Crowley accused him of becoming one of the experts he so despised in his books, Crichton retaliated by including in his dyspeptic 15th novel, Next (2006), a character called Mick Crowley, a political columnist and closet paedophile accused of raping his two-year-old nephew. The real Crowley, who had railed against Crichton's "breathless, pot-boiler prose", was not the only critic irritated by Crichton's two-dimensional page-turners. Another complained that to call his characters cardboard "would be to endow them with a misleading sense of profundity". Crichton himself would swat away such swipes with a flick of his cheque-book, for his polemical tales earned him a fortune in book sales – reckoned in 2006 to exceed 150 million – and a further fortune, many times over, in film rights and screenplays, all written by himself.