Category: Literature

Rosanna

Hack’s buddy, actor Eddie Frierson, recently gave an interview in which he was asked to name his favorite Halloween film. Frierson gave the offbeat (but excellent) suggestion of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson. It’s the story of a late middle-aged widower named Maxim de Winter (played by 33 year-old Olivier aided by some pretty unconvincing white shoe polish in his hair), who marries a beautiful poor young thing who is never referred to as anything but “the second Mrs. de Winter” (a really excellent performance by Ms. Fontaine) and takes her to his magnificent mansion, only to have her life made miserable by the spectre of de Winter’s first wife Rebecca and her devoted but VERY unnerving housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Anderson).

Hack thought that it was a great suggestion for both a Halloween film AND as a subject for one of his trademark rip-offs, especially since today is the late Ms. Fontaine’s birthday and he didn’t have any other good ideas for covers for us to post.

Happy heavenly birthday to Joan Fontaine!

The Thin Man Needs a New Liver

Hack has been binge-watching the old Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, and he was taken aback by the profligate drinking in the films, especially by Nick Charles. That’s a bold statement considering that Hack is on his third liver, so he decided to write a realistic Thin Man novel, where Charles is at death’s door because of his drunkenness and hasn’t been able to sexually perform in decades. It’s actually a fun read.

Boris The White

When Hack’s publisher John Kane heard the news reports about the death of Boris, he ran to the van that Hack lives in that’s parked in the parking lot of the North Hollywood Shakey’s, certain that it would mean the end of the Jonny & Boris saga. Hack told him to calm down, took the dog-eared copy of The Two Towers from under the passenger seat, and told him to come bac tomorrow.

The next day, Hack had this manuscript waiting for him. To everyone’s astonishment, it’s freakin’ awesome.

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.