Angus and Robertson sold three million copies of Ion Idriess' sixty-some books before he died in 1979. But in 1931, as he was working on what would be Lasseter's Last Ride, he was looking for an angle. In filling the gaps between the few facts with detailed descriptions of lands and people he had never seen, he found it - and promoted it - in Magic and Mystery. Idriess' fictional account of the last months of the life of Harold Bell Lasseter gave birth to a legend that has repeated in dozens of books, films, poems, podcasts, websites and exhibitions, is memorialised in the names of a highway and a casino, and has spawned searches and scams that continue nearly a century later. Idriess was probably surprised at its success and chose not to tamper with a winning formula when inconvenient material soon emerged. To do that he had to control the evidence and continued to insist on his narrative's unimpeachable adherence to fact. Reef Madness exposes how Idriess confected his first successful book and why the story of a failed prospector became a quintessentially Australian myth.