This can happen. It can happen so easily that others may not even notice the change for days. You're about to learn the painless way to break a dangerous and painful habit.

In return, you will have to keep your end of the bargain. I will ask you to do three things:

Please do not turn to the end of the book first.

Please do not try to apply any of the ideas in the book until you come to them in their natural order.

And please do not set an unrealistic target date. You will not stop smoking tomorrow by reading this. You won't stop smoking for perhaps ten days or two weeks. Until that target date, you may even light up a few more cigarettes than you normally would. But on the realistic day of your choice, you will be through with smoking.

And it won't hurt a bit.

Not very long ago, Americans learned that a part of the cranberry crop then on the market was thought to be contaminated by a carcinogenic agent. The cranberry industry was almost wrecked by this disclosure; housewives not only shunned the shipments that allegedly contained the agent, but also temporarily boycotted all other forms of this fruit—juices, jellies and sauces, whether fresh or frozen or canned, and even when they were known to be made from berries just as pure as cranberries should be.

And despite frantic countermeasures which included juice-drinking and jelly-tasting in Washington by distinguished public officials—accompanied by widespread publicity contending that one would have to eat mountains of contaminated berries in order to be adversely affected—most Americans, in the name of better health, resolutely resisted tradition and temptation. That year our holidays were berry-less.

Mine were. But at Thanksgiving dinner, somewhere between the turkey and the pudding, we began to talk about cranberries; and one of the guests raised an interesting question. "Why is it," he asked, "that one public announcement about a relatively small number of berries can produce a boycott—while twenty years of hullabaloo about cigarettes and cancer has had absolutely no effect on tobacco sales?"

MY SHERLOCK HOLMES INSTINCTS ARE AROUSED

There's something you should know about me at this point. For many years now, a large part of my income has come from writing detective stories for magazines, radio and television. And when I'm presented with a knotty problem, I love to dig around for answers. The more confusing the leads, the happier I am about ferreting out the facts.

This book probably began on that day in November, 1959, when the odd behavior of our cigarette-smoking nation became strikingly, surprisingly apparent to me.

What is the magic, I wondered, that apparently makes cancer caused by cigarettes more acceptable or tolerable than cancer caused by a cranberry? What leads some of my golf cronies to buy a costly golf-course buggy and ride it from green to green in order to "save their hearts," while they calmly continue to smoke? (The death-rate from coronary heart disease for heavy smokers has been set by some authorities as at least twice that for non-smokers; is it okay to die from smoking, but wrong to die while walking from the eighth hole to the ninth?)

Putting my questions in another way: Why, in the face of current medical knowledge, do Americans smoke four hundred billion cigarettes a year? Why, despite personal resolution, do we as individuals find it so incredibly difficult to stop smoking? Why is it that cigarette sales keep climbing, despite the vigorous educational efforts of such groups as the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association?

Within a few weeks, I began to find answers to these questions.