Category: Detective

The Client Yada Yadaed

This book was inspired by the famous “Seinfeld” episode “The Yada Yada” in which Elaine (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) conversationally edits a story about a sexual encounter with “yada yada…I never heard from him again.” After writing dozens of unanswered angry letters to the producers of “Seinfeld” demanding to know the details of what she “yada yadaed” over, Hack wrote his version of what happened which was just 139 pages of sordid sexual encounters between the character and a series of men, women and animals who inexplicably show up at her apartment. It won Hack a National Book Award.

The House Dick

Hack came to sexual maturity in an age when hotels still employed house detectives to ensure that couples who stayed under their roofs were married and not just there for Godless hanky panky. Since the vast majority of his sexual activity at the time was with syphilitic prostitutes, he carried a bogus marriage license to display at check-in which would typically result in his being beaten to a pulp in the alley behind the hotel by the house dick. This novel is a remembrance of those golden times.

The Client was on the Titanic

Hack’s obsession with actress Frances Fisher caused him to watch the film “Titanic” over a hundred times and he became consumed with theory that the door that Rose floated to safety on at the end while Jack froze to death clinging to its side was easily big enough to hold Rose and Jack. While most of Hack’s books top out at about 175-200 pages, this one is over fifteen hundred pages long because it contains Hack’s elaborate theories about why the door couldn’t hold them both.

The Diner of Death

Hack used to go to a diner where he would stare at a beautiful woman eating her breakfast with such intensity that she became unnerved and was certain that he wanted to kill her. Hack became so offended that he actually did devise a plot to kill her but it got derailed when he found out that her boyfriend was devising a plot to kill him. Long story short, Hack switched to Denny’s but wrote this book about the experience.

The Client had a Hugh Rack

Hack has been trying to get his friend Harmony Sanchez into the sack for year but since she finds him physically repulsive, it’s doubtful that it will ever happen. That didn’t stop Hack from writing this detective novel as a tribute to her “epic pair of boobs” (as he describes them on page one) in which the character based on her has no money so she has to pay the detective by letting him “titty fuck the shit out of her.” Surprisingly, it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel although the president of the Mystery Writers of America (who give out the prize) was immediately voted out of office after the announcement.

The Client was a Corpse

This was the first of Hack’s hugely successful “The Client Was A…” mystery series. A beautiful heiress is found murdered until she shows up at a detective’s office asking him to solve the crime, even through she has nothing to pay him with but anal sex. The exciting climax at the top of “the big Jesus statue in Brazil” is considered one of Hack’s most famous sequences.