RARA-AVIS: Re: 77 Sunset Strip

From: Dick Lochte ( dlochte@gmail.com)
Date: 13 Feb 2008


About Kookie -- no way was he a beat or even a hipster, exactly. He was cool, and the idiom he used was a faux teenage SoCal beachboy patois, closer to a ring-a-ding Sinatra wannabe than a jazzbo or coffee house habitué® No goatee on that boy, daddy-o. He was parking convertibles at Dino's on the Strip, for goodness sake. It should be noted that neither he, nor Dino's nor Jeff Spencer for that matter appear in the source novellas by Roy Huggins that first ran in Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post.

As for crime novels featuring beats, I think there were a few. They appear in Thomas Dewey's A Sad Song Singing, at least one of the Ross Macdonalds
(The Zebra Striped Hearse, maybe), a Travis McGee (boy, all those color titles run together, but maybe the one with the hot air balloons). Weren't the coffee house and the jazz club fairly standard locales for mysteries of the period?

Dick Lochte



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