Move over, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. There’s a new gumshoe named Brute Ballingham.

Together with secretary Moolada and nephew Pinky, this hard-drinking private detective is sucked into the seedy 1940s New York crime underworld.

The Excruciating Hello is a five hour wild and bizarre post-modern pastiche of such hard-boiled crime noir fiction as The Long Goodbye, The Maltese Falcon, To Have and Have Not, The Red Wind, The High Window, Trouble Is My Business, The Lady in the Lake, Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, and other noir classics originated by such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Chapter one: "The Camp Kilmer Case"
Chapter two: "The Sizable Slumber"
Chapter three: "The Burmese Albatross"
Chapter four: "Pinky’s Pancake Problem"
Chapter five: "The Greasy Tide"
Chapter six: "To Have a Lot and Not Have a Lot"
Chapter seven: "Treble Is My Business"
Chapter eight: "The Green Wind"
Chapter nine: "The Lady up a Creek"
Chapter 10: "The High Widow"
Chapter 11: "Adiós Me Damas"
Chapter 12: "That Monkey Has No Tail"