The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
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.
National Sandwich Day!
Happy heavenly birthday to Claudette Colbert!
Colbert is one of our favorite movie stars from the 1930s and 1940s, winning an Oscar for It Happened One Night and starring in such classics as Cleopatra, The Egg and I and Since You Went Away. But our favorite Colbert film is the infamous 1932 camp classic The Sign of the Cross, which features an outrageously wonderful performance by Charles Laughton as Nero and perhaps the sexiest character of 1930s cinema in the form of Colbert’s Empress Poppaea. She was immortalized in one of the most famous nude scenes of the era when Poppaea takes a milk bath attended by her gaggle of slaves, a sight so deeply planted in Hack’s psyche that he wrote this novel about it.
Hack, Boris and I hope everybody is okay as SoCal braces itself for a day and a half of heavy rain in the wake of Tropical Storm Hillary. But we did think it was a bit much when we went grocery shopping last night and the shelves were emptied by nervous folks who were preparing for Armageddon. The cashier at Trader Joe’s told us that he could see the wisdom of staying off the road on Sunday and Monday but he didn’t see any reason why the store should have sold out of toilet paper by 9:00 a.m.
Like all of you, Hack’s favorite holiday is National Avocado Day which takes place today. As part of the celebration, he wrote this thriller where the mob tries to do in Jonny and Boris by feeding them poisoned avocado. It’s destined to become a holiday classic.
