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 spoiled star, who becomes apoplectic. The caricature of Arbuckle as a lecherous boor continued to be promulgated in the 1970s by some film writers such as Kenneth Anger in his controversial book "Hollywood Babylon". In an episode of the "Mathnet" segment of the children's public-television television series "Square One Television" (Season 2, Episode 1, "The Case of the Willing Parrot," presented in five sections over the course of a week of the overall show), fictitious deceased celebrity Roscoe "Fatty" Tissue was written as a parody of Arbuckle. Before his untimely death in 1997, popular comedian Chris Farley expressed interest in