Bobby Gold

Anthony Bourdain

So for a while I've had this idea to do a series with Bourdain as a kind of new age Nero Wolfe - every restaurant he goes through a death occurs. Putting his gastronomic skills to best use, the Wolfe/Bourdain character identifies the cause and the culprit. It's a kind of food.mystery genre. Bourdain is so hard-boiled he can pull this off. So i started reading him and found this book. It's interesting in the way he skips the annoying little details and gets straight to the character and the plot. He landmarks the era and the passing of time with details on clothes.

Bobby Gold at twenty-one, in a red-and-white Dead Boys T-shirt, blue jeans, high-top Nikes and handcuffs... etc

Bobby Gold in work clothes; black sport jacket, black button-down dress shirt, skinny black tie, black chinois and comfortable black shoes...

Bobby Gold in black Armani suit, skinny black tie, black silk shirt and black Oxfords sat at the banquette...

You get my drift.


A few pertinent lines from the book that might be useful for the series idea:

p32:
For Eddie Fish, menus were like the Dead Sea scrolls, the Rosetta stone, the Kabbalah and Finnegan's Wake all rolled into one impenetrable document. There were hidden messages, secrets that had to be rooted out before it was safe to order. There was, there had to be, Eddie was convinced, some way of getting something better, something extra - the good stuff they weren't telling everybody about. Somebody somewhere was getting something better than what appeared here. Someone richer, taller, with better connections was getting a little extra and Eddie was not going to be denied,.

p37
Bobby recalled overhearing one of the NiteKlub cooks, talking about what one could do to a particularly hated customer's food. 'Copper oxide, dude', the cook had said. 'You can get it in, like, hobby shops, for chemistry sets. You sprinkle that shit in somebody's food, bro'? They gonna slam shut like a book - then it's lift-off time! We're talking projectile vomiting! We're talking explosive diarrhea - that motherfucker's going off like a fucking bottle rocket!'