Too Studly to Die

Hack’s jealousy over his cover artist Jonny M.’s success with women ultimately consumed him so deeply that he made several unsuccessful murder attempts on Jonny. They were such failures that not only did Hack usually injure himself trying to pull them off but Jonny was inevitably unaware that they had even been attempted. Hack ultimately concluded that Jonny was immortal even though the reality was that Hack was just a colossal fuck-up. Anyway, he wrote this book as an act of contrition.

The Tall Fiddler

This Jonny M. adventure was based on the exploits of Jonny’s buddy James “Tree” Cleveland, an accomplished fiddler whose serenades to the ladies got him more poon tang than Hack got in his wildest dreams.Hack got so excited after finishing it that he took his kazoo to a nearby girl’s Catholic school and played old Tony Bennett songs on the physical education field until he was dragged off by police.

Van Nuys Nights

Hack spent a night at his cover artist Jonny’s M.’s palatial Casa de Jonny estate in Van Nuys, California and was so impressed by the unending stream of gorgeous women who came to visit that he was convinced that Van Nuys was the erotic center of the universe. Jonny never had the heart to tell Hack that the women were there because he ran a porn studio out of his garage, so Hack maintains that opinion to this day.

The Vegeance of Madam Rosie

This is Hack’s final book about the stern and passionate Madam Rosie. His friend Rosanna De Candia told him that she’d “slice him from neck to nuts” if he completed it, so the story stops abruptly on page 78 and the rest is filled out by a short story Hack wrote in 1959 about cross-dressers in the US Coast Guard. Strangely, no one seemed to notice.

The Jet Setters

Hack wrote this in a fit of anger after his cover artist Jonny M. told him about the debauched weekend he spent on his friend Jesse Merlin’s yacht, to which Hack was pointedly not invited. Hack tried to make it a bleak tale about the empty lives of the super-rich, a sentiment undercut by his launching into a self-indulgent tirade every five pages about how much he wanted to go.

The King of Monte Carlo

Hack tried to reimagine the monthly poker games he played at his publisher John Kane’s studio apartment in the early 1960s as taking place in the glamorous world of a Monte Carlo casino. The result was an outlandish story about people walking around in white dinner jackets and floor-length evening gown playing Texas Hold ‘Em and drinking beer until a fistfight broke out over who had the biggest genitalia. It was critically panned but sold well to Hack’s core readership, who felt that he was telling their story.