Month: April 2023

Yammering Yenta

An excerpt:

Dating the Yenta was like dating a loaded .45 — aimed at your own head. You never knew when it would go off. You just knew it would be messy when it did. And the odds were better than 50-50 they’d be scrapping your brain and guts off something, even while her mouth was still running.

“It will be fun,” she said. These were the words she always said right before I would be sucker punched in the gut by someone whose life and conduct she couldn’t help critiquing. In this case, “It will be fun” was said while gazing at the door of a dive bar whose clientele had spent most of their food stamp money this week on MAGA apparel.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

But then I saw that grand canyon of a mouth start to open, and I knew I had no choice.

“Sure,” I continued. “Let’s check it out.”

My spleen and my teeth would be the least of my losses that day. So sit back, and hear the story of how I ended up on Death Row, while the Yammering Yenta became the widow of one Rudy Guiliani, and then the lover of one E. Jean Carroll. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Thin Man’s Wife

Myrna Loy was a huge star in the 1930s and 1940s best known for her onscreen partnership with William Powell, especially as Nick and Nora Charles in the popular “Thin Man” series of mystery movies. Hack fell in love with Loy in those films and grew to detest Powell, so he wrote this novel in which his signature team of great detectives, Jonny and Boris, have an affair with Nora Charles and her dog Asta so they plot to murder Nick. They ultimately come up with an outlandish plan where she trains Asta to brutally attack Nick, leaving him dead in a pool of his own blood. Since the police in those movies are nitwits and Nick isn’t around to solve the case, they get off scott-free.

He Liked to Watch

Hack was a big fan of “The Bob Newhart Show” in the 1970s but wrote this after he became obsessed with the concept that Suzanne Phleshette, who played his wife on the show, was much too beautiful to be believably married to the titular character. While most of Hack’s work based on television shows and movies resulted in legal action, no one could really argue with this one.