The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
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.
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.
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.
Hack became obsessed with motorcycle gangs after he bought a used Vespa scooter in 1967 and fancied himself quite the hellraiser. He and some other “biker” friends watched Marlon Brando in “The Wild Ones,” got excited and tried taking over a small town. They spent the weekend in jail until one of his friend’s mother bailed them out. The Vespa was stolen a few weeks later by a gang of roving bicycle thieves.