Category: Detective

Whodunnit?

Hack wrote this novel as a companion piece to a mystery board game that he hoped would pay off his back-breaking personal debts but it just resulted in a massive plagiarism lawsuit from Hasbro over their game Clue that put him so deeper in debt that he not only had to declare bankruptcy for the sixth time but spend his free hours as an anti-fluffer in porn films for stars whose Viagra-induced erections wouldn’t go down after four hours requiring Hack to spit on them and curse about how easy the younger generation had it until the stiffies withered.

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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!!!”

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.