Let's start with Club Alibi, a bar in Pomona's downtown pedestrian mall where the novel's action ends. "The Alibi was located on the west end of the mall..." Nunn wrote.

The Alibi is real, and to prove it, a photo of the bar accompanies this column (unless somebody forgot).

The Alibi building stands at Second Street and Park Avenue — yes, the west end of the mall — and while it's out of business, you get the sense from the exterior that it's not the sort of place you would have taken your mother. Unless your mother is a rough character, that is.

As for the Midway Bar, it really existed too, on Foothill Boulevard between Upland and Claremont, although not even a shell remains after the bar burned to the ground in the late 1970s. I don't want to say it was a tough joint, but lore has it the fire was set by one of the bar's own employees.

Pomona also had a neighborhood of aging tract homes known as Clear Lake, where vacuum cleaner salesman Earl Dean makes his dangerous sales call as the novel opens.

And the novel's historic Chinatown really existed too. It was a two-block string of shacks in Pomona roughly where Buffum's, now Western University of Health Sciences, stands.

The real-life version was built and occupied by Chinese laborers in 1885-86 after they'd finished building the Santa Fe Railroad, the Pomona Public Library's Susan Hutchinson says.

Pomona wasn't immune to a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. Citizens of Pomona banded together as the Non-Partisan Anti-Chinese League, just as Nunn said they did, to boycott Chinese businesses.

However, what Nunn said happened next — that after the Chinese left, "the citizens of Pomona put the torch to Chinatown" — may not have happened.

Although Hutchinson said local lore sides with Nunn, she checked several sources and found no mention of a fire.

No need to revoke Nunn's artistic license, though. After all, "Pomona Queen" IS a work of fiction.

Speaking of fiction, that would include the moment when the characters are headed west on the freeway and exit at White Avenue. You can only exit at White when you're eastbound.

And the Golden Ox burger stand, which Nunn placed at Fifth and Garey? Please. It's Fifth and Reservoir. (It's also great.)

Still, Nunn did his homework. In fact, he did it at the Pomona Public Library.

"He did a very thorough job," says David Streeter, the now-retired library employee who assisted Nunn over the course of a year.

One product of the research, the disease known as "the quick decline" that ravaged the orange groves, served double duty. Besides the history, Nunn used the phrase as a modern metaphor for the withering of the old Pomona Valley.

The novel's truth isn't all symbolism and dive bars, though. For instance, Streeter says there may be a reason the hero is a vacuum cleaner salesman - at one point, so was Nunn.

And these were some of the local readers' reactions to it:

"The book is now resting in my trash can with the rest of the garbage," writes reader Georgia Pavkovich, who got all the way to page 17 before tossing it. "Is this guy Kem Nunn your brother-in-law and you're trying to make him rich?"

Clearly my campaign struck a chord. By the way, I don't know Kem Nunn from the Flying Nun, but he's written several well-regarded novels and is a local product who shelved books at the Pomona Public Library in the early 1970s. Fellow page Doug Waite, now of the University of La Verne, says he shared a few dinners with Nunn, who was an aspiring writer even then.

Pavkovich wasn't the only reader put off by the language and seaminess of the novel. Much of it is true to life, though, as David Streeter, the now-retired Pomona Library employee who helped Nunn with his research, confirms.

"I think it's a very good read. (Nunn) really identifies what he calls the underbelly of the city. It's something that exists but 99 percent of the community is totally unaware of it," Streeter said.

"The main bad guy in there was based on two high school classmates (of Nunn's) who were quite brutal. I believe in shop class one of them attacked the instructor with a ballpeen hammer (just as described in the book). The roughness of the characters was not exaggerated."

Similarly, reader Tim Sunderland tells me the real Midway Bar was depicted accurately by Nunn as a place where bikers and college types rubbed elbows in the '70s.

"They never asked for identification," Sunderland recalled. "I think the bartenders reasoned that if you had the courage to walk into the place, you'd earned the right to a beer."

Meanwhile, reader Henry Olivares could identify with Cyclone Air Purifier salesman Earl Dean's nightmare sales call to scary biker Dan Brown's south Pomona home.

"I used to sell a Miracle vacuum cleaner to supplement my income over the summer," said Olivares, a former English teacher. "I recall an appointment to a Mexican household in Pomona at nighttime and being confronted by a home with no carpets or rugs."

He skipped the demonstration but gave them the free steak knives. Naturally, his bosses reprimanded him for not making the sale to the carpetless family.

Olivares liked the book, by the way, which put him in the majority - barely.

Diane Vieau enjoyed it: "The message of Pomona's selling out to the realtors should, I think, be heeded by communities like Chino, Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga which are quickly becoming the warehouse capitals of the world. ... Thanks for recommending the book."

Ditto for Greg Ryman: "Loved the history lesson and managed to enjoy the story after ignoring the metaphors."

Robin Heim was on the fence, engaged by the local history and bursts of poetic language but finding the overall novel weak.

Myrtice Coffman hated it: "Whatever prompted you to recommend such a tawdry, depressing, disjointed, foul-mouthed nonstory to a whole big valleyful of readers? Trusting you, I eagerly bought the book and waded through it, feeling the need for a hot bath after every chapter, hoping to discover some tiny bit of merit. There must have been two pages stuck together somewhere, because I never found it."

On the bright side, at least she got some baths out of it.