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,
Nick Carter (comic strip) for TV and later adapted for comic-strip magazines. Several stories were drawn by Silver (Guido Silvestri) and Clod (Claudio Onesti). Nick Carter stories features a great number of parodies of famous themes and characters of literature, film, TV and history. An incomplete list includes: Nick Carter (comic strip) Nick Carter is an Italian comic strip created in 1972 as a semi-animated cartoon, for "Gulp!", one of the most popular Italian TV shows of that decade. The creators were Guido De Maria, as director and writer, and Franco Bonvicini ("Bonvi"), as co-writer and artist. The first run comprised 11 stories, later