Tips of the Fedora

• In The Straight Man by Roger L. Simon, P.I. Moses Wine passes himself off as detective writer Robert B. Parker.
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• Speaking of Parker, David Edgerly Gates has tipped his fedora to Spenser and Hawk in at least two short stories featuring Boston P.I.s Frank Thibault and Buddy Margolies, as well as a nod to George Higgins
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• In Lawrence Block's short story "Keller in Shining Armor", included in Hitman (1998), his hired assassin Keller goes to Muscatine, Iowa to do a job and ends up on the same block where Max Allan Collins lives. Collins, of course, created the character of Quarry, the first series to be based on the exploits of a hired killer (if you don't count James Bond, I guess).
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• In Murder On The Yellow Brick Road, Stuart Kaminsky's Hollywood eye Toby Peters spots a well-dressed guy in a flophouse lobby who later tails him. Turns out it's Raymond Chandler, doing research, soaking up some atmosphere. Toby tells him he's never heard of him.
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• Dashiell Hammett also showed up in Kaminsky's Buried Caesers, another of the Toby Peters books.
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• Bill Crider's Houston-based TRUMAN SMITH has an ornery old orange tomcat he calls Nameless. Now, it's either a nice little tip of the hat to Bill Pronzini, or he couldn't think of a name for the damn thing (which is actually Pronzini's excuse for never naming his eye).
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• In Chapter 17 of John Lutz's Tropical Heat, Florida eye Fred Carver and date visit a diner: "Carver took a bite of his pan-fried steak. He understood why the special was popular at The Flame, and why he'd never be a gourmet like a P.I. he'd met in Boston." (Gee, I wonder who he's referring to?)
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• In one of Benjamin Schutz's Leo Haggerty novels Mexico Is Forever, the big DC security agency that Haggerty manages needs something looked into in the Bay Area, so Haggerty contacts Dan Kearney at San Francisco's own DKA to look into it for him.
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• In a Sam Spade radio episode called "The Khandi Toothe Caper," Spade calls a colleague in LA to check on a lead. The colleague is none other than "Phil" Marlowe, and the actor who plays Marlowe in this brief sequence is Robert Montgomery, one of the "Gang of Four" who portrayed Chandler's detective on film during the 1940's.

For the flip side, see also Thumbs of the Nose.

List compiled by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Gerald So, Jim Doherty and Gene for their help.