Category: Crime

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.

Murder at the Nudist Colony

Happy heavenly birthday to the great Burt Lancaster!

Honestly, Hack just wanted to write a book titled “Murder at the Nudist Colony” and when he found out Lancaster’s birthday coincided with its release date, he just had the cover artist redo the cover with the actor in his Elmer Gantry role as the victim. The story is more about Jonny the detective running around the nudie colony seducing the women who stay there.

Police Chick

Hack was blind drunk through most of the 1970s so he has only a hazy recollection of the Angie Dickinson TV series Police Woman. But he has a vague memory of one episode where Angie is captured by a baddie and he orders her to take off her bra so he can check for concealed weapons. Angie is saved from the horrors of having to expose her boobage to the fiend at the last second but Hack decided to base an entire novel on the scenario.

Bodily Injury Liability Coverage

Happy heavenly birthday to the great Barbara Stanwyck!

Ms. Stanwyck’s most famous film, Double Indemnity, has an immortal scene where the insurance inspector played by Edward G. Robinson shows up at her lover Fred MacMurray’s apartment so she has to hide behind his door to avoid Robinson seeing them together.It’s a great tense scene except that no building code in the world (then or now) allows a door to open out into a hallway like that. If it did, you would flatten anyone in the face who knocked on it.

That scene irritates Hack so much that he wrote a whole novel inspired by it.