The Big Boat to Bye-Bye - Hardcover

Weiner, Ellis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0451213963 ISBN 13: 9780451213969

Publisher: NAL, 2005

Synopsis

When obscene outtakes from a popular children's TV show fall into the hands of would-be blackmailers, private investigator Pete Ingalls is called in to find the culprits and save the show, only to come face to face with murder in the wonderful world of puppets, in a hilarious mystery by the author of Drop Dead, My Lovely.

About this title

About the Author:

Ellis Weiner was an editor of National Lampoon and a columnist for Spy. He has written humor pieces for The New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, Air & Space, and Modern Humorist. He is the author of The Joy of Worry (illustrated by Roz Chast), Decade of the Year, Letters From Cicely, and The Northern Exposure Cookbook, and is the co-author with Sydney Biddle Barrows of Mayflower Manners.

From Publishers Weekly:

Pete Ingalls, the PI throwback with the overdrive mind and tongue to match, takes on the sordid, violent world of puppetry in his second adventure with a Chandler-style title (after 2004's Drop Dead, My Lovely). Weiner, a former National Lampoon editor, uses a rapid-fire technique that sprays gags and gimmicks—some wildly off-target, some dead-on—in a parody of the hard-boiled PI novel. The producers of PBS kids' show Playground Pals contact Ingalls because someone is blackmailing them with a stolen outtake of obscene puppetry. The ethnically diverse, uniformly bland puppets shed their inhibitions and shred their image on the film, which the thief promises to post on the Internet unless he's paid $1 million. Ingalls dresses the part of a 1940s PI (double-breasted suit with padded shoulders, ample pleated trousers, broad and stylish headwear) and speaks in the same outmoded fashion (pal, sugar, babe). Ingalls bumbles and thrashes his clueless way through the cutthroat world of performers, producers and creative geniuses composing the universe of children's television. Luckily for Ingalls, he's assisted by Stephanie Constantino, an aspiring actress who does some pretty talented sleuthing when she's not saving Ingalls from himself. Adding spice is a wonderful shaggy-dog story involving three women and a lost necklace.
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About this edition

• Publisher: NAL
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0451213963
• ISBN 13: 9780451213969
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288