Finished IV - flashes of understanding

[Monte Davis]

> I unfortunately keep picturing Guy Noir and Johnny Dollar.

Hoo ha! I have only fragmentary 1950s memories of a few Johnny Dollar
episodes (as I do of a few Boston Blackie serial segments they dropped into
Saturday am TV). Both were definitely "stuff from before my time," ripe for
parody as in Nick Danger and Guy Noir. At the time I saw little of the
interesting continuities (and dis-) with Peter Gunn, Magnum PI, and so
forth.

One bridge was my parents' stash of S.J. Perelman anthologies, full of  New
Yorker shorts sending up pop culture from the silents to Vogue of the 1950s.
I can still quote lines from "Somewhere a Roscoe," his take on Mickey
Spillane & co., which could be dropped seamlessly into Nick Danger.

I didn't know most of the originals, but the verbal anarchy was enthralling
anyway (Perelman *did* co-write the scripts for the Marxists' Horse Feathers
and Monkey Business, after all, not to mention giving Catch-22 a crucial
boost). I suspect that broke important ground for my appreciation of TRP. I
don't even especially LIKE most detective fiction, yet I'm looking eagerly
forward to Inherent Vice, with its 2009 take on a 1960s re-working of
Chandler- and Hammett-esque 1930s mean streets of eucalyptus and jacaranda.

'Cause they're all one exceedingly twisty and re-entrant Street, foax, as
TRP told us in Malta (or was it Norfolk?) one night long ago.