Category: Literature

The Red-Headed League

When Hack heard that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were public domain, he decided to adapt them into the Jonny-Boris universe. Hack being Hack, his “research” consisted only of looking at a list of titles and coming up with completely new stories from scratch based on them.

He was inexplicably still served with numerous plagiarism lawsuits.

A Late Night Pee

Hack so enjoyed the pulp novel Hoodlum Alley that he wrote this rip-off, having completely forgotten that he himself had written the original. Unfortunately for Hack, when Hack learned that he had been plagiarized, he sued the plagiarist for everything he had, so Hack had to cough up a huge settlement, all of which wound up going towards Hack’s attorney fees. Hack ended up filing for bankruptcy yet again, and the bad publicity sent the book sales into the toilet.

The Male Sleaze Rectum

Hack’s favorite novel is Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, which contains a scene in which a thousand dollar bill goes missing, so detective Sam Spade performs a strip search on the femme fatale anti-heroine. The scene was excised from the famous 1941 film version starring Humphrey Bogart (when the notorious Production Code in effect at the time didn’t permit such onscreen shenanigans) but it’s included in the 1931 pre-code adaptation in which the luscious Bebe Daniels is the recipient of the humiliating frisk.

When Hack wrote this rip-off of the Hammet story, he included the pat-down, but he inexplicably made Jonny M. the target of it instead of the female lead (who is physically an exact double for Bebe Daniels). The result is disturbing, to say the least.