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 hardboiled crime noir fiction as The Long Goodbye, The Maltese Falcon, To Have and Have Not, The Red Wind, The High Window,...