On a recent used bookstore trip, I intentionally collected a number of paperbacks from authors I'd only read a few books from (as well, of course, as favorites). One of those was Stuart Kaminski's MURDER ON THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD, featuring P.I. Toby Peters. I think I'll have to read more of these.
Read on for why.
Read on for why.
Previously, I'd read some of Kaminski's Inspector Rostnikov novels, featuring a Soviet police detective behind the Iron Curtain, as well as his Kolchak the Nightstalker tie-in works. I wasn't familiar with the Toby Peters series (Kaminski's longest) until I saw this.
The Toby Peters novels predate the Rostnikov novels by several years (Kaminski's first two novels, I now know, Kaminski continued to write about the character until his passing in 2009). Written in a very different style than I'm used to from Kaminski, this work is both lighter and in a way, more entertaining as far as I'm concerned.
The year is 1940, the place is Los Angeles, and Toby Peters is both a former cop and former trouble-shooter for Warner Brothers, now turned private eye. Called to MGM (Metro Goldwyn-Meyer) by none other than Judy Garland, Peters is tasked with investigating the murder of one of the little people who played a Munchkin in the film adaptation of Oz, over a year after the film has wrapped, all while being charged with keeping it quiet to avoid damaging the studio's reputation.
As I mentioned, the tone of the book is very light and the pace brisk. Toby Peters is a typical wisecracking, underpaid P.I., and both he and the book remind me of a lighter version of Max Allan Collins's Nate Heller mysteries, as both are filled with real locations and people (including Clark Gable, Raymond Chandler and others), though of course the events in this novel are entirely fictional.
I don't need to go too much into the plot, as it's more functional than anything else, but as I said, the tone is light, the pace is brisk, the dialogue is often funny and I enjoyed it a great deal. There's something like two-dozen of these mysteries and I plan to read more at some point in the future. It'll be interesting to see how the books evolve over the 30 plus years Kaminski was writing.
Recommended if you see copies!
The Toby Peters novels predate the Rostnikov novels by several years (Kaminski's first two novels, I now know, Kaminski continued to write about the character until his passing in 2009). Written in a very different style than I'm used to from Kaminski, this work is both lighter and in a way, more entertaining as far as I'm concerned.
The year is 1940, the place is Los Angeles, and Toby Peters is both a former cop and former trouble-shooter for Warner Brothers, now turned private eye. Called to MGM (Metro Goldwyn-Meyer) by none other than Judy Garland, Peters is tasked with investigating the murder of one of the little people who played a Munchkin in the film adaptation of Oz, over a year after the film has wrapped, all while being charged with keeping it quiet to avoid damaging the studio's reputation.
As I mentioned, the tone of the book is very light and the pace brisk. Toby Peters is a typical wisecracking, underpaid P.I., and both he and the book remind me of a lighter version of Max Allan Collins's Nate Heller mysteries, as both are filled with real locations and people (including Clark Gable, Raymond Chandler and others), though of course the events in this novel are entirely fictional.
I don't need to go too much into the plot, as it's more functional than anything else, but as I said, the tone is light, the pace is brisk, the dialogue is often funny and I enjoyed it a great deal. There's something like two-dozen of these mysteries and I plan to read more at some point in the future. It'll be interesting to see how the books evolve over the 30 plus years Kaminski was writing.
Recommended if you see copies!
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