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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