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,
The Demi-Virgin 1921. "The Demi-Virgin" was Hopwood's first play written for Woods without a collaborator. Hopwood was inspired by an earlier theatrical adaptation of "Les Demi-vierges", an 1894 novel by the French writer Marcel Prévost that had been dramatized in 1895, but used little from it beyond the title. Hopwood's completion of "The Demi-Virgin" coincided with a scandal involving Hollywood actor Fatty Arbuckle, who was accused of manslaughter after the death of a young actress, Virginia Rappe, happened at one of his parties (Arbuckle was widely seen as innocent, and was eventually acquitted). Although the play was largely written before the scandal