John Blumenthal’s The Case of the Hard-Boiled Dicks is supposed to be a spoof of hard-boiled detective novels. The cover has a number of visual puns (hard-boiled eggs, a stiff wearing shoes with gum on the bottom), and the humor inside doesn’t get much better.
A really good spoof understands the material being mocked; this book does not. It appears that that author felt all of hard-boiled detective fiction could be summed up with the simile “she had legs that wouldn’t quit–not even on [insert gag reference].” It’s sad that I have just written roughly a quarter of the book’s contents with that last sentence.
The book reads like it was written by the guys who directed Airplane!
No, that’s not a compliment.
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