Unmasking the internet's favourite novelist

Updated

Todd Noy was said to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a towering figure in the online fan-fiction community. His books were delivered around the world. But he may have never existed.

At midnight on a wintery Saturday, Alexei Toliopoulos finally looked up from his keyboard, adjusted to his surroundings and tried to ignore a sense of deep foreboding. He had never fallen so deep down an internet rabbit hole. Perhaps no one ever had — at least, no one who escaped out the other side.

Outside, a blood moon cast a pall over the Sydney skyline, but inside, seated at his mum's computer, Alexei scanned the perpetual midnight of cyberspace, that purely psychological realm where no one can hear you scream.

Alexei knew this beat well. He was not a detective, but rather a podcaster, film school graduate, cinephile and, by his own admission, a tremendous nerd.

For months, he had followed a trail of digital clues on the whereabouts of the mysterious Australian author Todd Noy.

Whatever shreds of Noy's biography he found read like a movie script: a Pulitzer Prize-winning sports journalist and author of multiple highly-acclaimed novels, Noy was said to have disappeared from his Perth home in January, 1992, after a long battle with drug and alcohol addiction.

Every detective knows the first few hours of a missing person's case are the most crucial, and so, on this night, Alexei felt encouraged that he was only outside this timeframe by a mere two decades or so.

So far he had courted legal action by wearing a wire to the State Library of New South Wales, taken a deep dive into the National Bibliographic Database of Australia and searched the World Catalogue without finding a trace of Noy.

He wondered how a writer of such prestige, with by-lines in The Guardian and VFL Weekly and an honorary degree from the University of New Delhi, could elude the spotlight in the small mining outpost of Perth, Western Australia?

Throughout his investigation Alexei was accompanied by his long-time podcasting partner, Cameron James, who had become a reluctant sounding board.

Their first indie podcast tackled cinema, the next explored the career of their hero Mike Myers, and the next was focussed solely on film remakes. Now they had been given taxpayer funding by the ABC to play amateur detectives, with the proviso they would crack the case for their new podcast. The stakes, like the budget and quality control, seemed much higher.

"I feel like I want to disappear much like Noy did," Cam complained after being briefed on the Noy case for what felt like the fiftieth time. "Just, like, grab a bottle of bourbon and walk into the horizon."

Alexei grinned at his best friend: "Or did he?"

"Yeah man," Cam goaded, "You think maybe Noy is just back in Perth, hanging out, checking out the open mic comedy scene? That what he's up to?"

These questions, and Alexei's obsession, started in a way that would be familiar to everyone living through the internet age: Alexei had fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Most of the time these rabbit holes open innocently enough: victims might begin with a straightforward question and a few hours later find themselves in a shadowy online woods, lost via hundreds of stray links and detours, reading about the consensus decision of the United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins.

Alexei's first fatal click, the portal into this particular rabbit hole, was on the Wikipedia page of Ivan Drago, the Russian villain from one of his favourite movies, Rocky IV.

The first Rocky is a modern classic, a Best Picture Oscar-winner, and a character study of a working-class Philadelphia kid rising to challenge the greatest boxer in the world. Rocky IV, on the other hand, is a Reaganite fever dream and maybe one of the most ridiculous 1980s cultural artefacts to exist.

The movie opens with a garish credit sequence where two boxing gloves — a USSR and USA flag — collide and then explode. Rocky Balboa comes back from retirement — where he lives peacefully with his family and his robot butler — to face the USSR's top fighter, Ivan Drago, who has just killed Rocky's best friend in the ring.

In a Christmas Day revenge match behind the Iron Curtain, Rocky single-handedly ends the Cold War with a victory so inspiring that the once-hostile Soviet crowd chants his name.

Fully a third of the 90-minute running time is dedicated to montages, including a five-minute performance by a late-career and bloated James Brown. The supposedly family film takes a bizarre turn at one point when it is heavily implied that Rocky's brother, Paulie, has had… intimate relations… with his slightly terrifying and clunky robot butler.

It remains one of the highest-grossing sports films of all time.

As a self-confessed film nerd with a possibly unhealthy fascination with Sylvester Stallone, Alexei thought he knew everything he could about the franchise, and especially its fourth film. But on Ivan Drago's Wikipedia page, one line in particular grabbed his attention:

"Todd Noy's 1989 book Drago: On Mountains We Stand details the story of Ivan Drago after the end of Rocky IV. It is affectionately referred to as Noy's final masterpiece."

The quote alluded to a mysterious world of Rocky fan-fiction and literature. It was full of puzzling contextual history and assumed knowledge.

Immediately, Alexei had some questions: who would labour to write an entire novel about the bad guy from Rocky IV? Where could he find a copy of this unheralded masterpiece? And who the hell was Todd Noy?

Every match for the author's name on Google returned only links to On Mountains We Stand.

The top result was a Goodreads review which told an incredible tale of a "battered first edition" being passed between generations of travelling strangers on the secluded beaches of Chala, a small town on the Pacific Coast of Peru.

Alexei felt as though he had uncovered a myth, a Greek epic or folk story passed down by word of mouth through generations.

So far, though, every clue led to a dead end. But a world away, Alexei's efforts had not gone unnoticed.

So, at the stroke of midnight on this fateful moonlit night, Alexei's Facebook pinged with a message request from a complete stranger in England. They shared no mutual friends, and the profile was scrubbed of all detail. Six words escaped this void and appeared on Alexei's screen like an ill omen:

"We need to talk about Noy."

Chapter II: Back in the USSR

From her hiding spot, Eleni Toliopoulos saw the dark leather boots of the Greek fascists stomping across the square, and sensed the fear in the crowd as they descended on her older brother. As they seized his arms, he shouted to his five-year-old sister: "Run home, go get Mum." Eleni was the last person to see her brother alive.

Her family later found out the charismatic 16-year-old — a young up-and-comer in the local Communist Party — was tortured and killed, taken from them as he came into the prime of his life.

The killing stayed with Eleni through her adolescence, when her family was involved in socialist politics in Greece. It remained when she and her husband fled an assassination attempt in the 1960s, and escaped to Sydney to avoid the violently anti-Communist military junta that had seized power in a bloody civil war.

It continued to haunt her as new generations of Toliopouloses came into the world.

Alexei was one of their grandkids to grow up among the Italian and Greek migrants in Dulwich Hill and Leichhardt, suburbs where marble lions and imitation Parthenon columns flank the driveways, and rows of grapes and tomatoes burst from shady gardens.

Eleni was responsible for "the most Greek moment" in his young life, when he witnessed her being chastised by a passing motorist for cleaning her concrete footpath with the garden hose during summer water restrictions.

As the only other person in the family with curly brown hair, Alexei forever reminded his Greek grandmother of her murdered brother.

She told Alexei stories about him, and about the old country. Eleni taught her grandson that socialism was a political ideal informed by community and love, one concerned with people being able to care for each other. She taught him they were part of a collective unit full of individuals working together for the benefit of the neighbourhood and to support the greater community.

As a kid, Alexei did not recognise any of these ideals in the Aryan features of Ivan Drago, played by the bronzed Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren.

The movie seemed to set out to paint socialist Russia as the worst place on earth. Instead of the supportive and collectivist ideals he learnt about as a kid, the Russians were depicted as unfeeling agents of a juggernaut, a machine that represses individuality in order to win at all costs.

And the most robotic character of all is Ivan Drago, a blue-eyed titan with a baby-blonde military flattop who has a total of maybe 10 lines in the movie.

To Alexei, he looked like a fascist.

Rocky Balboa, on the other hand, had always been Alexei's hero.

An underdog character from a migrant community, the Italian Stallion was a role model for a Greek boy growing up in a Mediterranean suburb on the outskirts of Sydney. Seeing him square off against Ivan Drago was like getting a front-row seat to watch two members of the family pummel each other in the ring.

These contradictions churned within young Alexei when he first watched Rocky IV, and resurfaced when he learned about the book Drago: On Mountains We Stand.

Whether Noy existed, or was a fictional creation, Alexei had to know the truth: could whoever wrote the book be as much of a Rocky fan as he was?

There are no warm corpses in the disembodied world of the internet, especially the barren and unforgiving internet of 2016. Alexei was looking for traces, digital breadcrumbs coded into the meandering path of algorithmic cyberspace: a username here, a photograph there.

A private eye doesn't waste years on the interminable hellscape of social media without picking up some kind of sleuthing chops, which is how Alexei eventually found himself tracking back through the history of the Facebook page dedicated to On Mountains We Stand. There, hundreds of Noy fans gathered, sharing anecdotes and tip-offs dating back to at least 2012.

Primarily, it seemed set up to announce the discovery of new copies of the Drago book "uncovered from the Noy vault". Among the most active followers was David Allatt, who styled himself as "a mere vessel of knowledge", a humble Noy fan and scholar, but clearly had the keys to some secret trove at the heart of the story. Alexei asked him to send a copy of Drago.

"Speed beats power, my friend — it'll be in the post today," David replied.

The group also featured the author's full biography, and a few days later, inside the Toliopoulos family home, Cam read aloud the details as Alexei searched for corroborating evidence.

The results were not good: they discovered there is no Pulitzer Prize for sports reporting, and the first Australian to win the prize was awarded decades after Noy's alleged disappearance.

Once-promising leads turned to dust. They found a deli at the University of New York, but not a University of New Delhi. Cam reached the section about Noy's disappearance in 1992.



"Wow. This is interesting: 'Presumed dead, a memorial service was held in his honour in Perth in December, 1995,' Cam said, stumbling on the next sentence. 'He is survived by his two sons, Marlon and Quince.'

Alexei looked up from the computer. "Marlon and who, sorry?"

"Marlon and Quince."

"So... Marlon Noy and who, sorry?" Alexei repeated, giggling this time.

"Quince Noy."

Hidden among his spam messages folder Alexei found correspondence from a man he assumed didn't exist: Robert Swift, the first piece of the puzzle, the author of the very first Goodreads review for Drago. This was the man who claimed to have wandered the humid streets of Chala and brought back the precious first edition of Noy's masterpiece.

"I never even thought you'd be a real person," Alexei wrote, ignoring the fight or flight response bubbling from deep within.

A transport logistics worker in Sheffield, Robert Swift was, it seemed, very real. His initial message, several months old by this time, announced the discovery of another long-lost Noy book, and included an invitation for Alexei to fly to England to attend the book launch in a Piccadilly Circus pub named the Queen's Head.

Alexei apologised that he hadn't seen the message sooner.

"No need to apologise for the delay," Robert wrote. "I just assumed David Allatt had forbidden you from talking to me."

Robert unravelled some of the mystery, and revealed details about the Noy Estate, a secretive organisation based in England that worked to painstakingly restore Drago alongside Noy's other long-lost literary masterpieces: The Alabaster Wars, Old Ochre Dyke and House of Fuego, among others.

Although he never communicated with the Estate directly, but rather through a London law firm, Robert offered to try to put Alexei in touch with someone in its upper echelons.

Robert's story quickly fell apart. It turned out the law firm didn't exist — in fact none of the other details that Robert mentioned checked out.

"Dude, I think you're being catfished," Cam warned, and Alexei swooned with a vertigo that reminded him he had never been so deep on a project. Was David trying to hide Robert from Alexei because he was more senior in the Noy chain of command, or was it out of jealousy at the work of a rival Noy scholar?

About 16 to 20 business days later, a fresh copy of Drago: On Mountains We Stand arrived in the mail. The first thing Alexei noted was that it had 67 chapters crammed into a brisk 80 pages.

Not being a heavy reader, Alexei wondered whether it was common for a so-called literary masterpiece to have as many as three chapters per page and occasional basic grammar and spelling mistakes.

Even so, he was surprised to find the novel was actually good; a story that humanised Ivan Drago and rescued the character and his socialist ideals from the bombastic Cold War cliches of the 1980s film.

But something even more unusual was hidden just beneath the front cover. It made the book a smoking gun, a skeleton in the closet, a very mixed metaphor chock-full of literary devices like the metaphor.

And the reason was this: the book had obviously been typeset and printed within the last year. So how was it that its clean white pages held Todd Noy's handwritten signature when he was supposed to have disappeared in 1992?

Chapter III: The Noy Estate

Ghosts began to circle Alexei as he slept. Around this time, visions of the shadowy Noy Estate appeared as if from a dream, or from the Hollywood films he had admired his whole life.

He spent hours imagining wealthy publishers dispatching self-published fan-fiction from inside Wayne Manor, or Lara Croft's Tomb Raider mansion, or even that weird murder hotel in The Shining.

Whenever he saw Sylvester Stallone's botoxed visage he wondered whether a secret key to unlocking the case was hidden behind those frozen features. Would Sly walk out of the screen and whisper him the answer?

Alexei felt as though he was very much the only person tugging on this unravelled thread — a thread that, if untouched, would leave the world going on exactly the same as ever.

Meantime, Alexei was seeing Noy everywhere he looked.

Searches of the phone book uncovered someone in Perth with a name that was an anagram of Todd Noy and an age, occupation and LinkedIn profile that, to Alexei, appeared suspiciously similar to the Drago author.

Similarly, a world-renowned fan-fiction expert, Rukmini Pande, told Alexei in an interview that On Mountains We Stand distinguished itself because, unlike the standard fanfic fare about Harry Potter being a sexy goth vampire and so forth, whoever wrote Drago had gone to the trouble of publishing it as an actual, physical book.

For a time, Alexei was convinced that the shared biographical details between Pande and Noy were no mere coincidence. She had completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia, Noy's home state, and had studied at Delhi University.

Alexei's mind reeled at the possibility: could Rukmini be writing as Noy?

Just as confounding was the fact that Noy was being quoted by reputable journalism outfits as some sort of Rocky franchise authority figure.

Sports Illustrated magazine cited the novel in an article about Ivan Drago's fate after the Rocky movies, and the work of the Australian master popped up on various film discussion pages.

In his quest for the elusive author, Alexei had transformed his mother's house into the nerve centre for some hardcore detective work, where a lukewarm pot of coffee waits on the stove and a cigarette burns down to a stub inside an old ashtray. Or at least they would if the baby-faced 29-year-old drank coffee or smoked, or maybe, if his mum let him.

Still, he had all the serious gear he needed. Notepad: jet black. Laptop: fully charged. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me cap: very much in need of a wash.

In between their reconnaissance missions, Alexei and Cam made a podcast where they discussed film and, in one episode, reported their findings on Todd Noy.

David Allatt had resurfaced, and when the podcasters coaxed him into an interview he recounted his first experience with the majesty of Todd Noy.

The book, he recalled, came to David in its purest form: as a revelation by a passing stranger on a gloomy, wind-swept night of the soul. As a teenager struggling with bullies at his school, he had gone out for a quiet walk one night in Sheffield and bumped into "a worthless street vagrant".

The passer-by seemed to recognise his sorrow and gave him a choice: "You can either end it all now, or you can take this gift out of my hand."

That gift was a rare copy of Drago: On Mountains We Stand that had been passed down through generations of travellers, much like those that circulated on the beaches of Chala, Peru.

"And so the message goes: 'And Noy will find you,'" David said, his face shadowed by what was either grim portent or webcam pixelation.

As repayment for his dedication, the Noy Estate had recently offered David glimpses of a fabled unfinished work undergoing restoration: Swarmer, an epic semi-autobiographical novel 8,000 pages long said to have been written on strips of old toilet paper while Noy was locked in a Mexican prison.

"That's, like, eight times the length of War and Peace," Alexei mused after the interview. "How many rolls of Quilton is that?"

Alexei felt bothered: David was not the only kooky fan out there who was in a constant dialogue with the Noy Estate. What motivation could he have to pretend to be a fake author? He had agreed to be interviewed for an indie podcast, and didn't seem concerned with maximum fame, or maximum money. Why hide behind a pseudonym? Why keep up such deception for months, even years?

When a copy of Swarmer finally arrived in Sydney inside an unaddressed envelope, these questions were answered. Although it was much shorter than its fabled length, the story of Mexican prize fighters was told with the kind of muscular prose favoured by damaged men who punch out books about war and idealised versions of their ex-girlfriends, and who work at standing desks with empty bottles of whiskey piling up beside them.

This was a new Noy. His biography had been super-charged, and read as though someone had re-drafted a lie: gone were the outrageous claims about Pulitzer prizes and honorary degrees from Indian universities.

Alexei read the page over and over.

This new information seemed to match exactly with his recent line of questioning on the podcast.

"It's like it's being written for you," Cam said after reading the book.

"Cameron, don't."

"Alexei, I can't figure out who this book is for. I would not be surprised if this is the only printed copy of Swarmer in existence. This was made for you."

Before they could confront David, they were hit with a penultimate revelation: all of the people on Todd Noy's Facebook page had connections with David. Even his Mum and Dad liked the page.

Eventually, a message appeared in Alexei's inbox:

"To unmask the masked magician is quite a feat."

Chapter IV: The Masked Magician

As he dwelled on the task before him, David Allatt felt like the underdog. The atmosphere inside the Barnsley Metrodome, his town's prized piece of infrastructure, was even more electric than usual.

A line of hundreds of local boxing fans snaked its way through the regional sport and leisure complex — past the Calypso Cove Waterpark, past the Fitness Flex Metrodome and certainly past the Metrodome Bowling, four-time host of the World Tenpin Masters — waiting for a meet and greet with former world champion Mike Tyson.

It was 2011, practically the pre-internet Stone Age, when people were without the kind of permanent access to celebrity we know and exploit today. The fact of Mike Tyson coming to the little old English village of Barnsley was, to put it mildly, kind of a big frickin' deal.

One of the few claims to fame for this tiny hamlet was pigeon fancying: the keeping and breeding of prized birds for competition and racing. It just so happened that Tyson — aka "Iron Mike", aka "The Baddest Man On The Planet" — had a soft spot for pigeons. Like, a really soft spot.

So soft that he kept a coop of 350 cooing birds in his US home, and competed in pigeon races in New Jersey. He even voiced himself in a Scooby Doo-type cartoon where he solved crimes and mysteries alongside a sarcastic pigeon sidekick voiced by Norm McDonald.

Word in the Barnsley community was that Tyson had befriended a local fan, who he regularly spoke to on the phone, and agreed to do his friend a solid by going to Yorkshire for a meet and greet event.

As he waited among the crowd, all David Allatt could think about was getting into Tyson's hands one of the two copies of Drago: On Mountains We Stand stashed on his person. Days earlier, with the help of several friends, he had hastily finished the book and had 30 copies printed. What this fake 90s artefact needed, David thought, was for somebody to actually become Todd Noy.

Ideally it would have been Dolph Lundgren, the one and only Drago, but "Iron Mike" would make a fine Noy all the same.

As he limped towards the front of the line, the weight of one copy on his hip and the other strapped to his ankle like a concealed six shooter, David rehearsed his proposition.

"Iron Mike, my name's David, I've written this book for you," he repeated, picturing himself handing it over. "I believe that people will believe that you wrote it, and I think that you shouldn't deny it."

Instead of the smooth handoff he planned, David was pounced on by three of Tyson's security detail, who evidently mistook the book strapped to his ankle for a weapon wielded by a crazed fan. The last David saw of his first novel was Mike Tyson walking away and tossing it into a box beside his table.

"The Baddest Man On The Planet" would not pause his career to front a piece of speculative fan-fiction. This setback only strengthened David's resolve.

What had started in 2011 as a silly idea drafted during a pop-culture argument about Rocky IV between friends travelling through Rajasthan, India, had become a fully-fledged (albeit short) novel.

David's only concept, in those early days, was to share the mysterious book with friends without telling them that he was in fact the seductive author.

The initial run of 30 copies was printed by a small business in Sheffield that makes corporate calendars, renowned locally for publishing such great works as the 2015 Tyremart Supersaver Calendar, and the Accountant's and Financial Planner's Guild Yearbook.

"They remain my publisher to this day — they are the House of Noy," David explained to Alexei once the game was up.

"Although I'm worried they've gone bust because they're not answering emails or calls this last week."

When David finally admitted that he was Todd Noy, Alexei walked around in a near daze, beaming. David explained that, in the beginning, he never had any intention for the book to go anywhere; no trajectory or plan.

It was hard to believe, but that Goodreads review about Chala, the one that kicked off the whole Noy mythology and hooked Alexei, had not been pre-arranged, and was written independently by the real Robert Swift.

The two were acquaintances; specifically, Robert was David's sister's-husband's-sister's-husband's best friend.

Or, put another way, David was Robert's best friend's-wife's-brother's-wife's-brother.

Robert came up with the Chala tale after David filled him in on the Noy saga over drinks at a wedding.

After the setback with Tyson, one of David's friends encouraged him to set up a spoof Facebook page as a front for a mysterious entity named the Noy Estate.

Soon messages poured in from strangers in countries David had never visited. Someone, probably David — although who could say for sure any more? — referenced the book on Wikipedia, and as a result quite lazy journalists were quoting an author that David had concocted on a whim.

But the most enduring turn came when he was contacted by an enthusiastic and sweet comedian from Australia, a boy with Greek heritage so excited in the backstory of Todd Noy and his whereabouts that it encouraged David to deepen the Noy mythology and his deception. It also began to stress him the hell out.

"I was always super paranoid," David admitted, "because I didn't want to take the magic out. The real fun of it was me playing with you guys, who seemed to be enjoying it as well."

Just as Cam suspected, Swarmer was written nearly entirely for Alexei, based on his questioning in their first interview.

"In a word, I feel cherished," Alexei replied.

For Alexei, the whole investigation had been about celebrating the work of a true outsider artist, and the creativity of everyday people not based in ambition or cynicism, dollars or pounds, or climbing the publishing and media ladder.

David, a quiet and peace-loving man who lives in Sheffield and works in an administrative role, who enjoys simple pleasures like reading and playing piano, was surprised and swept up in it just as much as Alexei.

What began as an art project for himself, a joke that brought little moments of humour and joy to share with friends, ended with him becoming a genuine author, and a creator who never considered himself to be creative.

After the mystery of Noy dropped away, what was left was a genuine bond between the two men. They had long ago stopped messaging about Todd Noy, and instead shared their love for the movies of Adam Sandler and Mike Myers. Alexei realised he could honestly refer to David as a friend, and his first ever pen-pal.

There was one more secret Alexei needed to reveal to Cam.

"In the last two weeks, since we recorded that interview with David, he made me one of the admins on the Drago: On Mountains We Stand Facebook page," Alexei said.

"Oh my God, shut up," Cam shouted. "So we start this podcast with you wanting to know who Todd Noy is, and now you are Todd Noy?"

"Eventually I did become the man himself, I guess."

"Well who the hell am I then," Cam whined, "Some shmo?"

Once inside the Noy empire, Alexei saw the project's true scope: correspondence with hundreds of Rocky fans around the world over nearly a decade, and the long threads between David and his friends debating the best direction to take the Noy story while keeping Alexei and Cam on the hook. It was a victory as pure as Rocky's over Ivan Drago.

"We saved the world," Alexei said, holding his fists in the air like Rocky Balboa triumphing for the freedom-loving USA over the godless Ruskies.

Cam gave this some thought.

"Are you sure?"

Credits

Writer : Michael Dulaney

: Michael Dulaney Editor : Andrew Davies

: Andrew Davies Illustrations: James Fosdike and Michael Dulaney

James Fosdike and Michael Dulaney Special thanks to The Noy Estate

Topics: internet-culture, crime-films, film-movies, mystery-films, film, mystery-books, crime-fiction, crime, sport, sydney-2000

First posted