Tag Archives: Stuart M. Kaminsky

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.

Fiction, Reviews

The Rostnikov novels, by Stuart M. Kaminsky: An appreciation

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A Whisper for the Living

I’ve been spending my New Year holiday in a manner delicious to me – staying at home mostly, resting, and trying to let a new set of medications kill off this bronchial infection that’s taken up residence in my respiratory system. I think the next step, if this fails, is tenting and fumigation.

And so I finished at last Stuart M. Kaminsky’s fascinating police procedural series set in Russia, starring Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. I’ve reviewed several of these books before, so I’ll just do a blanket appreciation of the series here. It’s weary to work to put up a string of direct links to each volume on Amazon. So here’s the link to Amazon’s list of Rostnikov books.

The books are remarkably consistent, and yet there are major changes over time. Rostnikov and his team remain generally intact all through, with only limited alterations (major or minor) in relationships and domestic situations. There’s young detective Sasha Kotch, constantly bedeviled by a libido that threatens his marriage, and might result in his losing his children. He suffers greatly with guilt, but not enough to really change his ways. His peace of mind is not improved by the constant meddling of his mother, a deaf woman who refuses to use her hearing aids, turning every conversation into a shouting match.

There’s Emil Karpo, “the Vampire,” a man who aspires to becoming the perfect Communist machine. He excels in logic and eschews human relationships. And yet humanity creeps in. Regular liaisons with a prostitute morph into genuine human tenderness. The loss of that relationship, along with the fall of the Soviet Union (traumatic for Karpo) leave him in genuine existential despair. It’s hard to create a Communist character with whom I am willing to sympathize. Kaminsky succeeded with Karpo. Continue reading The Rostnikov novels, by Stuart M. Kaminsky: An appreciation →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death of a Russian Priest,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Death of a Russian Priest

“You are a true believer,” she answered. “A true believer needs a cause or he will wither. It is known in the lives of the saints that a man is twice blessed who embraced the devil before he embraces God. I see it in your eyes. During the service for Father Merhum the Holy Mother found you.”

I’m kind of flying through Stuart M. Kaminsky’s series of Russian police procedurals starring Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Moscow detective. Rostnikov is a squat man whose nickname is “the Washtub.” He drags along a crippled leg, a souvenir of his teenaged service in World War II. When not solving crimes, he likes to fix his neighbors’ plumbing, read American crime novels, and lift weights. He is a man of deep compassion who approaches his cases from human understanding. Though his passion for justice has often brought him into conflict with police officials and the KGB, his native shrewdness has allowed him and his team to stay on the job. He always has to compromise somehow, the world being what it is, but he survives.

The series is longer than I realized, and it extends past the fall of the Soviet Union. In the unsettled times of Glasnost and Perestroika, Rostnikov’s demotion to a division with mostly ceremonial duties proves a career advantage. His successful investigations raise his division’s prestige, and its lack of political connections allows it to rise unimpeded in the political chaos.

I’m not going to review the whole series, which I haven’t finished yet, but Death of a Russian Priest stood out for me. In the new Russia, the Orthodox Church is reasserting itself, but does not stand unchallenged. Father Vasili Merhum of the village of Arkush, after performing his final mass before leaving town to lead a protest against government policies, is murdered with an ax. Porfiry Rostnikov is sent to investigate, along with a faithful member of his team, Emil Karpo. Karpo is a troubled soul. A dour, impassive man who looks like a vampire, his whole life has been spent in monk-like devotion to the Communist Party. Now his god has failed, and he operates on automatic pilot, troubled by frequent migraines. What made this book particularly interesting to me was Karpo’s reluctant attraction to what he sees in the church, the only institution that appeals for the same kind of commitment he longs to give. Continue reading ‘Death of a Russian Priest,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Black Knight in Red Square’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Black Knight in Red Square

In the second Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov police procedural by Stuart M. Kaminsky, Black Knight in Red Square, the shrewd Moscow police detective faces the challenge of terrorism. The Moscow Film Festival is going on, and someone just poisoned four hotel guests – two Russians and two foreigners.

Rostnikov’s superiors assign him and his team to investigate – but on the quiet. Keep it out of the news. He suspects strongly that they expect him to fail, and that they are fine with that. He’s expendable. But Rostnikov has his own agenda. He’s working out a way to emigrate to the West with his Jewish wife.

In the midst of a three-pronged investigation, one of Rostnikov’s assistants – the dangerous-looking fanatic Communist Karpo – will come face to face with an adversary who is his equal in shrewdness and single-minded devotion to a cause. The climax is highly dramatic and satisfying. We also get to see Rostnikove participate in a weight-lifting competition.

What can I say? It’s Kaminsky, so it’s a satisfying story, full of well-conceived and rounded characters. Also it’s set in summer. I can bear Moscow a little better in summer than in winter. (That comment should indicate how good the author is at evoking place and climate.)

Recommended.