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,
Roscoe Arbuckle as his co-star. In 2005, jazz trumpet player Dave Douglas released the album "Keystone", dedicated to the work of Roscoe Arbuckle. It contains a DVD which features the movie "Fatty and Mabel Adrift" (1916/ Keystone – Triangle), starring Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Al St. John, and Luke the Dog. In April and May 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a 56-film, month-long retrospective of all of Arbuckle's known surviving work, running the entire series twice. Arbuckle is the subject of a 2004 novel titled "I, Fatty" by author Jerry Stahl. "The Day the Laughter Stopped"