The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery

The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery

by Conor Lastowka, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Sean Thomason

Blurb:

This hilarious mystery was written serially by the minds behind RiffTrax, with each writer picking up where the last left off.

There’s trouble in Hollywood.

Big surprise, Sheepdip, there’s always trouble in Hollywood. But for Yours Truly, Nick Nolte, private dick, actor, entrepreneur, collector of exotic and often dangerous commodities, and People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (1992), Hollywood is a filthy, decaying, half-empty swimming pool, and I’m gonna dive in head-first.

Someone’s kidnapping Hollywood bigwigs? Hell, I wish I’d thought of it first. Clones runnin’ amok from Pismo to Tijuana? Sounds like fun, hand me a gun. A dame in distress willing to hire me for a sack a’ quarters? I’m in. I’ll even put on my best shirt for the job, which is easy, ’cause it’s my only shirt. A diabolical plot to mess with the space-time continuum and take over Tinseltown, maybe the whole damn world? I’m on the case. I might get distracted, or black out a few times, or both, but I won’t stop till I bring in these evil peckerknobs and win the heart of the femme fatale…

…Sorry, blacked out there for a minute. Maybe an hour. Maybe a day—look, who’s counting?

So strap in, Shortpants, it’ll be one full-throttle, mind-twisting, weirdass ride, and I got the wheel. Just hand me that bag a’ pills and that can a’ Sterno and try not to scream so damn much.

—Your Pal,

Nick

My Reaction:

(Donald and I read this together to fill in gaps between 372-Pages podcast episodes.)

This is one crazy ride.  I can recommend it for hardcore Rifftrax fans, but if someone unfamiliar with Rifftrax were to read it, they'd be baffled.  Considering that it wasn't really planned out like a normal novel—and that it was passed along from author to author, chapter by chapter, I don't think it would be fair to critique the plot as I would with a typical book.  There were some laugh-out-loud moments, and I think that's the most you can ask of something that's essentially a strange writing experiment.

I do wish there were some sort of key or something at the end to indicate which person wrote which chapters.  We speculated about that as we read and would've been interested to check the accuracy of our guesses.