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The Prisoner of Splenda

The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel written by Anthony Hope in 1894 which became a theatrical warhorse in the early 20th century and was adapted into many movie versions, the best of which is a 1937 film starring Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and directed by John Cromwell (father of Babe star James Cromwell). It has an insane plot in which an Englishman on a Ruritarian holiday discovers that he is the exact double for the country’s prince, a charming fellow but a desperate alcoholic who is kidnapped on the eve of his coronation as part of a coup by his evil brother, so the Englishman must step in to save the day. We’ve all seen ripoffs of the concept in movies from The Great Dictator to Dave (and a marvelous satire in a large section of The Great Race) but this is what started it all, and it’s still highly enjoyable.

Hack wrote this version when he ordered coffee at a diner and threw a tantrum to end all tantrums when the only sweetener they had was Splenda. The wild thing is that even though it has almost the exact same plot of The Prisoner of Zenda, he had never heard of the story before and was greatly surprised when he was the subject of a plagiarism suit by the Halliburton Corporation, which had somehow become the owner of Hope’s copyright.

Redd Foxx/Dead Foxx

It’s our beloved friend Eddie Frierson’s birthday!

One of Hack’s favorite Eddie stories is back in the 1990s when Eddie and Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. ran computer sports leagues and made elaborate video presentations of the championships. In 1991 during the baseball championship series, Eddie’s announcer Pigworthy Manhattan and Jonny’s announcer Sam Grunion talked nonstop about Pigworthy’s obssesive and perverse relationship with his gay lover, Sanford and Son star Redd Foxx.

It was all good fun and they knocked out the commentary for the games that afternoon for “broadcast” (meaning the video would be played for their friends in the league in Jonny’s tiny living room) the following Saturday. Until Eddie went home and Jonny flipped on the news to discover that Redd Foxx had died of a heart attack while they had been recording their merciless taunts about his fictional gay relationship.

Shortly afterwards, Jonny’s phone rang. It was Eddie on the other end.

“We KILLED Redd Foxx!!!”

The Eye of the Beholder

This is one of Hack’s more esoteric novels, inspired by a holiday called Beautiful Day, which celebrates all things of beauty. Hack had an idea for a story in which the hero seeks out “true beauty” but he and his cover artist Jonny M. discussed what was beautiful to them and they could only think of hot chicks, to which their male friends agreed. Jonny’s pug Boris suggested pug food, so that was thrown into the mix but the resulting story was only seven pages long. Fortunately, Hack started getting suggestions from female acquaintances along the lines of painting, music and natural phenomenons like sunrises, inspiring faces, and the white plastic bag from American Beauty, which gave Hack enough material (padded by a bunch of his signature anal sex scenes) for a full-length novel (and one of his better ones).

The Pug Ate His Face

When his cover artist Jonny M. told Hack that if he ever became incapacitated, it would be his fate for his pug Boris to eat his face within 15 minutes of the dog not receiving a treat when he demanded it. Hack was delighted at the idea of Jonny’s face being devoured in that fashion and immediately wrote this novel around the mental image.

Murder on the Super Chief

The Super Chief was the express train between New York and Los Angeles that was favored by the Hollywood elite in the 1930s and 1940s. Hack had long wanted to write a murder mystery set on the train but when he discovered that Agatha Christie had already written Murder on the Orient Express using precisely the plot that he planned to use, he sued her for plagiarism even though her book had been written 45 years before and he had yet to commit a word to paper. After losing the case in court, he wrote his version anyway which is almost a word-for-word rewrite of Christie’s book except that the characters are classic Hollywood stars and the murderer turns out to be Groucho Marx. Both Christie and Marx sued and were victorious in court, even though Hack was so destitute that they never collected a penny.