What's Bully Reading? 2024 #15: The Naked Clone

My fifteenth book read of the year: The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery, by Conor Lastowka, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Sean Thomason, the writers and performers at RiffTrax, who have made a pretty good running joke of actoe Nick Nolte living a grizzled, homeless life of dumpster-diving and derring-do.


And hey, comics folks, that's artwork by Bob Fingerman (Minimum Wage and more) on the cover!

It's a noir down-and-out private eye comedy novel, which each chapter being tag-team written by one of the RiffTrax writers and then left for the next creator to follow up on. Sorta like D Challenge, then, huh? — except a lot more rooting through piles of rats. Among the mysteries half-conscious Nick nolte has to tackle aret he titular (tee hee) clones, missing movie executives, and a multiverse of Nicks, including a duck Nick Nolte, who is (quite logically) named Duck Nolte. Leading to one chapter beginning:


That duck later saves Nick Nolte's life.

I suppose the proper place to read this book would be in a grim and gritty place like a taco restaurant in Penn Station, which is exactly where I read this, except Penn Station and its restuarants are no longer noir and are actually more well-lit and clean, which would be a staggering loss to any down-on-his-luck private dick looking for a suitably scene-setting location in which to have his novel read. Believe me: there's a Shake Shack and a Chick-Fil-A scheduled for this place soon.

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I enjoyed The Naked Clone quite a bit, and it was very funny. If you've laughed at Mike Nelson's nolte bits on RiffTrax, pick this one out of your local garbage stuffed dumpster and give it a read.