One of my favorite living mystery authors is Stuart M. Kaminsky. His web site can be found here:
A former film professor at Northwestern University, he had written over fifty novels in the last twenty-0dd years and has four very desperate main characters for each series. The one I have read the most of by far is the Toby Peters books. Peters is a private eye working in Southern California during World War II. He is a former cop turned movie studio guard turned PI whose misadventures combine humor and excellent period detail and sharp plotting. If James Ellroy had a sense of humor, he would write something like Kaminsky does.
The hook for each of his twenty-some Toby Peters books is that each case has something to do with either a Hollywood star from that era (Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Bela Lugosi, et al) or with some other celebrated non-acting figure like Albert Einstein or Joe Louis. DashiellHammett and Raymond Chandler both make cameos in a different Peters mystery. Almost all the books are set in the rough-and-tumble world of Raymond Chandler's 1940's LA, although a few take Toby out to New York or San Francisco.
One book, "Dead Caesars", even features General Douglas MacArthur making a hush-hush visit to Los Angeles in 1942 and hiring our hero to stop a murderer.
The celebrity angle is the hook--it gets you to read a book to see how much fact and fiction the author can blend together. What keeps you coming back for more in the series is the gallery of "ordinary" characters who are in Toby's orbit. Some of them are part-time irregulars in Toby's quest to solve crimes (preferably before the police or the FBI pin the felonies on his big-shot clients or, better yet for John Law, our hero himself.) Some are the eccentrics who live with Toby in a West LA boarding house run by the scatter-brained and nearly deaf Mrs. Plaut. The bizarre landlady thinks Toby--whom she calls "Mr.Peelers"-- is not a private eye at all--despite his attempts to convince her of his true identity. Rather, she is certain her renter is both somehow a bug-and-termite exterminator and book editor. Toby devotes his off-hours to reading her rambling and endless chapters on Plaut family history (the better to stay in her good graces.) Also, there's Jeremy Butler, an ex-pro wrestler turned poet who manages the Farraday where "Peters Investigations" shares an office with another fun character, Sheldon Minck, a literally myopic and milquetoast dentist who administers much pain to his patients and has an endless and often hilarious capacity for self-pity and messing up even the simplest tasks Toby asks him to do.
Also, throw in Toby's ex-wife, an ex-stewardess turned travel agent who just married in the latter books to a B-film actor, and his current girlfriend (the waitress Anita Malone) who drives a car much better than he does and loves going to the pictures on Friday nights and No-Neck Arnie, a garage mechanic who keeps Toby's dilapidated Crosley automobile barely running and who has a host of weird theories on how the USA can win the war against the Axis Powers and you have a sample of the Kaminsky's imagination when it comes to characters.
And, for one more example among so many, there's his brother Phil, a nasty LAPD homicide detective who is almost never in anything resembling a good mood and has violent mood swings against his fellow officers and suspects alike. And the type of brother whose fists clench the moment his younger sibling even shows up at his office door. Phil is an old flat foot who should retire but the war and its lack of civilian manpower keeps him on the job.
The details of wartime Los Angeles are plentiful without being obtrusive. The books feel like they could have been written at the time. And Kaminsky is a fine writer to boot, an Edgar Award winner and a five time nominee. If you like mysteries and film history or both, this is a fun series that's worth look. Mr. Kaminsky also has a series of "Abe Liebermann" novels featuring a present-day Chicago police detective known as the Rabbi". Liberman's's Law" and "Liberman's Day" are quite good detective novels as well. Kaminsky also has a series about a Russian detective and an amateur Sarasota, Florida sleuth named Lew Fonesca. (The author now makes his home near there.)
My favorite Toby Peters novels are "The Fala Factor" with Eleanor Roosevelt and Buster Keaton, "Satan Met a Lady" with Bette Davis, "A Fatal Glass Of Beer" with WC Fields and "A Few Minutes Past Midnight" with Charlie Chaplin.
Oddly enough, the "Toby Peters" series has never been dramatized on television or at the moKaminskyfar as I know. Kaminsky did spend some time in "Hollywood", writing the screenplay for Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America". Hopefully, some producer will smarten up one of these days and do a series from these well-crafted books.
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