Tag Archives: Stuart M. Kaminsky

Fiction, Reviews

‘Vengeance,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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The Round-Up was one of the many odd-ball restaurants in Sarasota, a town known more for its well-heeled tourists and wealthy retirees who lived on the offshore Keys than its cuisine. There are some good restaurants and there is a h*ll of a lot of variety, including the Round-Up, which boasted a red-on-white sign in the window, “The Best Chinese Tex-Mex in Florida.” Few challenged this claim, especially not the homeless who wandered past every day.

Revisiting an old favorite, one of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lew Fonesca mysteries. My fondness for these books rests largely (in my perception) on the degree to which I identify with the hero, so I was astounded, on this second reading, to realize what a very good book Vengeance is – and what a dynamite twist ending it features.

Lew Fonesca is a process server living in Sarasota, Florida. He settled here when his car broke down. Three years ago, he was a district attorney’s investigator in Chicago, but his wife’s death in an auto accident put him into a tailspin, leading to his despairing drive south. Now he rents a small office and lives in a little room behind it. He gets around town by bicycle, and reads books or watches old movies on VHS for entertainment. He’s a small man, balding, middle-aged, and depressed. He has one friend, old cowboy Ames McKinney, whom he once helped to locate his old partner, who’d stolen a fortune from him. It ended in a classic six-gun showdown.

Lew isn’t a private eye, but people are starting to come to him to find people for them. In Vengeance, he’s first visited by Beryl Tree, a middle-aged woman from Kansas whose 14-year-old daughter has run off. Beryl is pretty sure she’s in Sarasota with her father. She’s also pretty sure he’s molesting her.

He also has a second client, a wealthy man whose trophy wife has disappeared, after cleaning out their bank accounts. The man swears he just wants Lew to give her a message, an offer of reconciliation. Lew finds the man a little fishy, and is less interested in this case.

The Lew Fonesca books aren’t exactly hard-boiled, but they’re certainly not cozies either. Perhaps they should be called over easy. Lew isn’t a tough guy (he’s lucky to have gun-toting Ames to back him up), but he’s tough in his own way – just because he doesn’t give a rip. Death doesn’t mean much to him anymore.

Except that he’s just met a woman – a social worker – who sparked his interest for the first time since his wife’s death. Fortunately, he has a good psychologist to talk these matters over with.

I loved this book. The Lew Fonesca series is my favorite section of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s considerable literary portfolio. Highly recommended, with cautions for very dark, mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lieberman’s Choice,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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I have made no effort to read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman books in chronological order. So reading Lieberman’s Choice slings me back almost to the beginning – it’s the second in the series. Rather unlike the others; Abe Lieberman himself is almost a peripheral character here, though a consistently present one.

Bernie Shepard, a Chicago police detective, shoots his wife and her lover (another cop) to death one day. Then he climbs to the roof of his apartment building, where he has already constructed a bunker of concrete blocks. He informs the police that he has rigged bombs around himself. He will blow up a good chunk of the city, he says, unless Detective Alan Kearney, whom he blames for turning his wife into a “whore,” comes to meet him on the roof in the early morning.

The story follows as Abe and his partner Bill Hanrahan assist in countermeasures, not always strictly legal ones, meanwhile dealing with a crazy man (sadly, a crazy evangelical Christian) who is abusing his wife and child. Also we follow the mayor as he struggles with his conscience on one side and political calculation on the other. And, as always, Lieberman has quiet domestic drama within his own family.

It all ends in a sort of High Noon showdown, but one where truth is the chief weapon.

Lieberman’s Choice is good, consistent Kaminsky stuff. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Dark Place,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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“Don’t try to understand them,” said Lieberman. “Just rope those cows and brand them.”

“Wisdom according to Rawhide reruns,” said Bill with a smile.

“Don’t knock it,” said Lieberman. “One can learn much from the Scriptures and reruns in the middle of the night. The gift of insomniacs. God keeps up awake when we want to sleep so we can glean knowledge from the secret messages sung by Frankie Laine.”

I don’t know why I’m not more fascinated by the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman novels. They’re fairly easygoing mysteries, heavy on character. Not more violent than necessary.

Yet they’re deceptive. There’s a lot of realism here – a profoundly Jewish understanding of the world as a dangerous, corrupt place where one needs to try to get along as peacefully and mercifully as possible.

In The Last Dark Place, Inspector Abe Lieberman of the Chicago police is boarding a plane in Yuma, Arizona, escorting a hit man who’s handcuffed to him. Suddenly an airport custodian pulls a pistol and shoots the prisoner dead. The custodian in turn is shot and arrested, but he can’t provide much information about who hired him to carry out the hit. Finding the answer to that question will be Lieberman’s next job.

Along with preventing a gang war between Chinese and Hispanic gangs.

And, perhaps most difficult of all, organizing and paying for his grandson’s bar mitzvah.

The Lieberman books are deceptive. They seem mostly quiet, even cozy. But they are mercilessly realistic, and Lieberman is an ancient kind of law enforcer – almost like the Judges of the Old Testament. As often as not he brokers street justice, even setting up the odd extrajudicial execution. For Lieberman it’s about people and community most of all, and sometimes the law just doesn’t understand.

The Last Dark Place is really a fine police story, for those of us who like our mysteries quiet.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Catch a Spy,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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It’s New Year’s Day 1944; the world war is winding down. But Toby Peters, shabby Los Angeles private investigator, has a new celebrity client – Cary Grant. Grant, a naturalized US citizen from England, has been doing unofficial work for British Intelligence. He has recently heard from a source among American Nazi agents, who has secret documents to sell. But the source doesn’t want Grant to bring the money; he has to send someone else. That someone is Toby Peters, who, despite being the smallest of small-timers, has a reputation for reliability and discretion.

But when Toby shows up at the designated exchange spot, people start shooting. The seller of the papers ends up dead, and the money and the papers disappear. Grant wants Toby to keep searching for the conspirators, and it will lead to great danger for Toby and all his motley friends.

The usual eccentric cast of characters is here as always – Gunther, Toby’s Swiss midget best friend, and Sheldon Minck, the worst dentist in the world. Jeremy Butler, Toby’s office landlord, who is also an ex-wrestler and a poet. Mrs. Plaut, Toby’s apartment landlady, who is almost totally deaf and inhabits a bizarre world of her own. Not to mention others.

When I think about it, in the end, the whole thing would have worked out better if Toby and Cary Grant had left the case to the FBI from the start. But it’s not about the plot, it’s about the Keystone Kops chase.

To Catch a Spy was lots of fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dancing In the Dark,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Another Toby Peters novel by Stuart M. Kaminsky. Light, seriocomic entertainment. Can’t go wrong with these. In fact, I think I found Dancing In the Dark a little funnier than most of the others.

Hard-luck Hollywood PI Toby Peters has been having a run of unaccustomed good fortune. He actually has a little money in the bank for a change, and his creditors aren’t hounding him. Then he gets hired by Fred Astaire. Astaire’s job poses certain challenges. A woman named Lyla, mistress to gangster “Fingers” Intaglio (who got his nickname because he likes to cut people’s fingers off) demanded he get her dancing lessons from Astaire. Once Astaire agreed, she started pressuring him to go to bed with her, or else she’d denounce him to her knife-happy boyfriend. Toby’s on the case, even if it involves learning to dance – a pastime for which he has zero talent.

Before he knows it, Layla has been murdered, and she’s only the first of a string of victims. Backed up by his cowardly dentist friend and his gigantic ex-wrestler/poet office landlord, Toby does his best to avoid gangsters, solve the murders, and keep Astaire out of the newspapers. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a new relationship with a woman who got away many years ago.

The sexual mores here are not ones I approve of (but what else is new?). And Toby makes a decision to let one suspect off that puzzles me.

On the other hand, at one point he finds himself dancing with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. That seems to me to qualify as a good day even if somebody’s shooting at you.

Bottom line – Dancing In the Dark is a fun book, and one of my favorites in a fun series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tomorrow Is another Day,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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A deal came up on a Toby Peters mystery by Stuart M. Kaminsky, and I bought it. Turned out I’d read it before, but it was fun to read again, and it turns out I haven’t reviewed it here. So, Tomorrow Is Another Day.

It’s 1943. Toby Peters, small-time Los Angeles private eye, gets a call to meet with Clark Gable. Gable is supposed to be overseas with the Air Force, where he’s trying to get himself killed in his grief over the death of his wife, Carole Lombard. But he’s briefly on leave, and somebody has been sending him threatening notes. It all seems to harken back to an incident during the filming of “Gone with the Wind,” where an extra was accidentally stabbed to death with a saber. The notes are cryptic, but they seem to indicate that the dead man was the note-writer’s father, and that he blames a group of people who were present on set – including Gable. And he means to kill them all, finishing up his murder spree with an attack on the Academy Awards banquet.

Though Gable is clearly a tragic character, the story as a whole is farcical, in the great Toby Peters tradition. Why a star of Gable’s magnitude would hire a PI who can do no better for a security team than his fat dentist, his retired wrestler landlord, and his “little person” best friend is a very good question, but they bring it off in the end, with only a few innocent bystanders lost along the way.

Light entertainment from a master mystery writer. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Down For the Count,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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He was one of those guys who look around when you talk about money because they can’t imagine any legal way they might earn it.

I reviewed another of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels the other day. Toby, a low-rent Los Angeles PI in the 1930s and ’40s, tends to be hired – under seriocomic circumstances – by various movie stars and celebrities to clear their names.

Down For the Count begins with Toby looking down at a murdered man on the beach – and up at Joe Louis, heavyweight champion of the world. Louis explains that he saw the man being beaten and ran up to help, but the killers got away before he got there. Toby, who is a fight fan and respects Louis, believes him. He advises the champ to run off before the police get there, and then undertakes to find the real murderer for him, so he won’t be implicated in a scandal.

Toby knows who the dead man is, because his widow (who happens to be Toby’s ex-wife) just hired him to locate the man. Investigation reveals that he had gotten involved in investing in boxers and arranging “cards.” Losses in such enterprises had gotten him involved with some of the nastiest characters in the LA underworld. There is no lack of suspects – or of tough guys (including cops) eager to rearrange Toby’s face, at best.

The Toby Peters books are always amusing. I enjoy the characters and the period flavor of Down For the Count. This one has a darker ending than most in the series. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Buried Caesars,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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There are still a few of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels left that I haven’t read. But now I’ve read Buried Caesars, in which Toby meets Douglas MacArthur and Dashiell Hammett.

The Toby Peters novels, in case you’re not familiar with them, are set in Hollywood in the 1930s and ʼ40s. They are semi-comic in spirit, finding our private eye hero taking jobs for one famous figure or another (usually, but not always, movie stars), though he never achieves financial success, continuing to live in a shabby boarding house and sharing his office with a low-rent (and low-hygiene) dentist.

It’s 1942, and Toby is summoned to a large estate, where he meets a man who isn’t supposed to be in this hemisphere. General Douglas MacArthur is supposed to be in the Philippines, but he’s come home in secret to deal with a personal crisis. Certain of American victory, he has – he explains – made some plans for running for president after the war. He prepared some strategy papers for his campaign which would be highly embarrassing if they were made public at the present time. And now one of his aides has stolen the papers and is in California offering them to the highest bidder. MacArthur wants Toby to investigate because he’s a) known to be discreet, and b) almost unknown otherwise.

Toby promises to turn all his resources to the task. His problem is that his resources are in fact very limited. However, he is surprised to find a famous man in the dental chair of his office-mate – the author Dashiell Hammett. Hammett explains that he’s trying to enlist for the war (in spite of his age), and the army tells him he has to get his teeth fixed. He’s (temporarily) off the bottle, he has a couple days free, and he’s curious to see whether he still retains some of his old skills as a Pinkerton detective. So he and Toby set out together.

Clues lead them to a castle in the desert, where a crazy millionaire is plotting a military coup, but he’s not the only suspect. Toby will also pick up a stray cat and a framed photo of Wallace Beery in a woman’s wig.

Buried Caesars is undemanding entertainment. I always resent Dashiell Hammett in real life (as opposed to his novels, which I love) because of his unrepentant Communism, but as usual, author Kaminsky steers clear of the most controversial stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Fatal Glass of Beer,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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“I find his movies deeply sad,” Jeremy said as we were driving.

“I don’t think he’d be happy to hear that,” I said. “He thinks they’re comedies.”

“Comedy does not mean we must laugh,” said Jeremy. “It is the reverse of tragedy. It suggests that life can continue without hope.”

The late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels are amusing reads, and they take a high road. I mean by that that a novelist, when producing stories about old Hollywood stars, would naturally be inclined to give the public what they want – sleaze and scandal. But Kaminsky (who was, I think, a very decent man), chose to handle them lightly, in comic stories. We get to see the stars at their best and most sympathetic.

The challenge of that approach seems to have been considerable in A Fatal Glass of Beer, in which Toby’s client is W. C. Fields. It’s hard to make Fields a likeable character, but Kaminsky does manage to make him a sympathetic one.

It’s 1943. Toby Peters, who for comic purposes persists as a low-rent PI, in spite of all the celebrity clients he’s served over the years, is facing some changes in his life. His ex-wife, for whom he’s carried a torch for years, is getting married to a movie star. He consoles himself, however, with a new girlfriend. He’s considering moving out of his broom closet office in a dentist’s office, due to a conflict with the dentist’s wife. And he’s reached a truce with his estranged brother, the cop, now that his sister-in-law has cancer.

W. C. Fields shows up with a problem that could have happened only to him. Over the years, during his vaudeville days, he put his financial eggs in many baskets by opening savings accounts, under assumed names, in various banks across the US. Now someone has stolen a number of his bank books, and is going around to the banks and withdrawing the funds. Fields wants Toby to accompany him on a road trip, to hunt the scoundrel down and recover the bank books and stolen money. Toby can use the business, though Fields is a challenging travel companion. Toby enlists his midget friend Gunther to serve as driver, and they set out on their transcontinental odyssey in Field’s Cadillac, fully equipped with a built-in bar and a stock of liquor in the trunk.

The hunt is a slapstick affair, until people start getting killed. Secrets are revealed, leading to further secrets. And W. C. Fields comes through it all unfazed, insensitive to others’ needs, dependent on alcohol, securely anchored in the persona he has created for himself, though we perceive more and more that in his heart he’s deeply lonely and sad. That Kaminsky succeeds in making us care about him is a testimony to his characterization skill.

I’d describe A Fatal Glass of Beer as one of the best entries in this classic series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lieberman’s Folly,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Dr. Ernest Hartman’s office was in Uptown on Bryn Mawr right next to the el stop. Dr. Hartman’s patients could, while they were waiting or having their fluids drained or taken, indulge in neighborhood bird watching. The trains came rumbling in front of his window and a sharp-eyed woman with the flu or man with a murmur would occasionally spot a Black-Jacketed Daytime Mugger on the platform, though you were more likely to catch sight of a Fleet-Footed Purse Snatcher.

Stuart M. Kaminsky was one of my favorite 20th Century mystery writers, and I’ve reviewed a number of his books before – though not recently, because I think I’ve read most of them. But I’d never read Lieberman’s Folly, which happens to be the first book in his classic Abe Lieberman series.

Abraham Lieberman is 60 years old, a veteran Chicago police detective. He’s a loving father and grandfather, a devout Jew, and an advanced student of human nature. A fragile and old-looking man, he’s no hard-boiled cop. He’s more likely to offer an understanding ear than a punch in the jaw.

His partner is Bill Hanrahan, a tough Irishman who’s crawled into a bottle since his wife left him. Bill’s essentially a good cop too, but he’s been letting his work slide for a while.

Abe likes to spend off-work time – when he’s not with his family – hanging out with a group of old men at his brother’s delicatessen. It’s there that Estralda Valdez, a high-priced hooker and one of Abe’s informants, comes to ask him for protection. Somebody wants to kill her, but she’s leaving town. Could they keep watch on her apartment until she’s gone?

Abe can’t do it that night because of a domestic crisis. But Bill has nothing better to do. Unfortunately, he spends too much time, at his post in a Chinese restaurant across the street, drinking and flirting with a waitress. Estralda is stabbed to death, and their captain is not happy when he hears the story.

Through a narrative rich with eccentric characters and surprises, Abe will do his quiet best to uncover secrets and balance the scales of justice.

Lieberman’s Folly was – like most of Kaminsky’s work – solidly crafted and sympathetic. I enjoyed it very much.