Nick and Nora Charles the bantering, romantically involved detective duo has become a well-used trope in literature, stage, screen, and television ever since. The characters first appear in Dashiell Hammett's best-selling last novel "The Thin Man" (1934). Nick is an alcoholic former private detective who retired when he married Nora, a wealthy Nob Hill heiress. Hammett reportedly modeled Nora on his longtime partner Lillian Hellman, and the characters' boozy, flippant dialogue on their relationship. (The novel also mentions that Nick was once a Pinkerton detective, as was Hammett.) The novel is considered one of the seminal texts of the hard-boiled subgenre of mystery novels,
Fatty Finn the limitations of the strip and on 10 June 1928 he introduced an adventure theme by involving Fatty in fanciful tales of pirates, cannibals and highwaymen. The editor, Errol Knox, was not impressed and Nicholls reverted to the accepted style of comic. In June 1929 he introduced another adventure sequence but was again discouraged by Knox. In 1930 "The Sunday News" was amalgamated with "The Sunday Guardian" (which had become the home of Meggs) and the two comic characters were forced to co-exist in the one colour supplement. In 1931 Nicholls travelled to the United States returning in 1932, where