The Official " Identify from a vague desciption" thread

[Eats_Crayons]

*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic *
**I remember a novel that I read in the 80’s about a college professor, who, for some reason, has to go undercover in a gay community (might have been greenwich Village) to find a gay serial killer. He’s like working as a bartender in a gay bar and he gradually becomes drawn into the community and the “lifestyle.” (he is ostensibly straight at the beginning of the novel). I remember a lot of the story and characters, but cannot remember the title or the author. (I remember a character with the nickname “Eric the Red” for instance). It was a really good book, and i’ve been trying to figure out what it was called and who wrote it for years. Can anybody help? **

That sounds like Cruising by Gerald Walker.

The book was a psychological thriller written in 1970, and was made into a movie in 1980 starring Al Pacino as a cop, not a professor. The film sparked many, many protests worldwide for it’s dreadful depiction of gays in the most depraved and violent stereotypes. Originally, Brian De Palma was going to direct the movie, but ended up passing on it. It was directed by William Friedkin instead and it became known as an “exploitation thriller”.

I’ve been told that the movie does not live up to the book. Both have been historically regarded with disdain by the gay community.

Due to the social context of the film, if you do a search, you’re more like to find info like this about the movie, rather than the book.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Thank you, Charmian, but it’s not Cruisin’, although they had very similar themes. When I originally bought the book, I thought it was reminiscent of Cruisin’ but it was a more positive depiction of the gay community.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I think it may have been written by Felice Picano, but I have never been able to find it in any bookstores under his name.

[delphica]

I had a slow day at the office, and came across this thread for the first time. I have two possible suggestions for folks who posted descriptions WAY back (I hope they do vanity searches)

JSexton posted

This thread sparks a memory of a book I vaguely (natch) recall reading in, oh, middle school or so. It was about two adolescent friends (both boys), one of whom was having prophetic dreams that wuld come true in odd ways. I remember a toy train being significant, and an elevator, and that the climax of the book took place in an old house where parts of all the dreams appeared.

I think there may have been little bit of time travel involved, and I’m almost positive one of the boys dies at the end.

Could this be The Viaduct by Roy (or possibly Ray) Brown? It’s about a boy, who does have a friend, who lives in an old house with his grandfather. After finding old photographs of his ancestors, who also lived in the same house, he begins having dreams about the past that eventually lead him to discover a secret passage and other things that have been hidden in the house for generations. The train is a real train, not a toy. In these dreams, he somewhat “befriends” another boy who lives in the past, who is actually his great great uncle, or somesuch. That boy does die young.

Also, Tangent said

One is a young adult book about a small group of high school students (from a private school, maybe?) who go on a bicycle trip (no adults go with them) across some backcountry paths and roads. The trip takes a few days, they camp out in tents and I think in a barn once. The story is about their relationships with each other and some difficulties they encounter on the trip. At least some of them use nicknames from LOTR-- I remember specifically that one of them went by “Gollum.” That’s about all I remember, but I remember that I really like the book when I read it at about age 13 back in 1985.

This sounds like <i>Bicycles North!</i> by Rita Ritchie. There are four kids on a bike trip, they camp in tents, stay in a barn, and sometimes stay at youth hostels. Part of the plot involves taking water samples along their route – one of the kids has a job assisting a researcher with gathering samples, and that’s the motivation for the bike trip. The book gives a lot of very earnest tips about safe biking and camping, like “Gee whiz, don’t you know you should always use proper hand signals to indicate a turn?”

[BiblioCat]

Two books, young adult-type, I remember reading when I was maybe 12-13 or so.

1. A group of teenagers go to summer camp, and go on overnight campout. While on that campout, we learn that the one group of kids are all considered “troublemakers” and that the counselor is supposed to kill them with (I think) poison Kool-Aid, and that their parents were behind it, to get rid of their “problem” kids. They aren’t killed, but I forget how it ends.

2. An isolated village (maybe an island?) is a training facility for assassins, and the whole village is in on it, parents and kids alike. All I can remember is a young boy, dressed as a Boy Scout, with a hypodermic hidden in his hand, loaded with poison trying to kill the President by shaking his hand.

Anyone remember either of these?

[JRootabega]

The movie is How to Steal a Million starring Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn.

That’s really strange, because I found a page for that movie while doing a Google search, and I was sure that was it, but then I only found “boomerang” in a description of the music or something like that. Ah well.

[Ben]

Are computer games allowed?

Back in the Apple ][ days I used to play this game with lo-res graphics. You were stuck in a maze, and you would wander around and meet people who, as I remember, had bowler hats and/or handlebar mustaches. (Yeesh- this sounds like The Prisoner set in the 1890’s…) Some of them would always lie, some would always tell the truth, etc., and you could ask each one a question or ask them to give you something. The things they gave you would be maps, compasses, lie detectors, etc., but they wouldn’t necessarily work like they were supposed to. So if a guy in a bowler tells you that people with mustaches always lie, but a guy with a mustache gave you a lie detector, and it says the guy with the bowler is telling the truth, blah blah then when a guy in a bowler gives you a map, can you trust it?

Does anyone know what game this was, and where I can get a copy? It seems to me that it’s such a basic idea and was so cool to play that it should be a classic, but somehow it’s been overshadowed by, you know, Wumpus and Twonky.

[Ben]

*Originally posted by TPWombat *
**That would be Psychomania.
Hope you appreciate that. Took me half a friggin’ hour to dredge it up out of my memory (I knew it would bug me for the rest of the day if I didn’t get it )
**

Arg! I was so excited about being able to identify something, and I got scooped!

[Ben]

Actually, I think I’ll retry an old “ID from vague description” question that never got answered:

Back when I was a kid I saw the last 10 or so minutes of a British SF movie on TV. The movie seemed to date from the late 60’s or early 70’s, and it had four people, one of whom seemed to be their leader and the scientist of the group. They were on some kind of spaceship or space station, and IIRC there was a multi-armed robot, like Gog (or is it Magog? I can never remember), if you’ve ever seen photos of Gog. They used some sort of matter transmitter that landed them back on Earth in a ditch, and a policeman came up to them and asked them what was going on. They all had a group chuckle over the knowledge that he would never believe the truth.

I also seem to remember that there were shower caps that you could wear to pump knowledge into your brain. The show had such a Dr. Who feel that I thought at the time that it might be a Dr. Who episode (I hadn’t seen Dr. Who at the time, but had read a lot about it.) However, the scientist definitely wasn’t Dr. Who. Plus, there was no tardis.