The Solipsistic Detective: "The Agonized Mind"

Is the moon real when you are not looking at it? If you are just like most people, and you believe that reality is what one can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, then J. Riley is as real as electrons, the economy, and the number 5 (that which also cannot be experienced through the human senses). Perhaps J. Riley is really the author Hippolyte Flandrin writing under a different name in a last-ditch attempt to sell a few more copies of his strange, incomprehensible books? Perhaps. J. Riley lives in New York City, which probably is real even though it only appears to some people some of the time, with his wife who appears to be real to most people most of the time, and a bulldog who at no time is real to anyone else.