Fri 4 Dec 2015
Reviewed by Walker Albert: STUART M. KAMINSKY – Poor Butterfly.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[12] Comments
STUART M. KAMINSKY – Poor Butterfly. Mysterious Press, 1990; paperback, 1991.
Toby Peters, Kaminsky’s vintage private eye, is hired to find out who’s attempting to sabotage the reopening of the restored San Francisco Metropolitan Opera house.The year is 1942 and a major player is renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski who’s rehearsing the first production, Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.”
Toby drives to San Francisco and when it’s apparent he needs backup, he sends for his best friend, midget translator Gunther Wherthman, his chief muscle, ex-wrestler Jeremy Butler, and his landlord, dentist Sheldon Minck.
To these colorful characters, add the mix at the opera house that includes a murderous Phantom (of the opera), an evangelical minster (Reverend Adam Souvaine) whose minions are picketing the opening protesting the scheduling of an opera with a Japanese subject, and a prima donna for whom Toby falls in a big way.
This is feather light entertainment that is best savored before, during or after an afternoon nap. Short and light on substance but agreeable for a one time date.
Bibliographic Note: This is number 15 of 24 books in Kaminsky’s Toby Peters series, written between 1997 and 2004. You can find a complete list here, along with covers for most if not all, along with lists of books in his several other series.
December 4th, 2015 at 11:10 pm
They are light fare, but sometimes you want a souffle and not a steak. I don’t think Kaminsky got enough recognition for how effortlessly he did the historical mystery mixed with the hardboiled screwball Hollywood model.
December 4th, 2015 at 11:42 pm
I’ll have to read another sometime. I read the first two and I got so annoyed when Kaminsky got the time references of some real life events wrong (movies, radio shows and the like) that I wasn’t able to sit back and enjoy the story. I was pretty serious about things like that back then.
December 5th, 2015 at 1:32 pm
Steve, Does this mean you are no longer serious about such things? I once had a batch of Kaminsky, but never read any of them so I was unaware how light they were.
December 5th, 2015 at 1:33 pm
I like Walter’s suggestion that they can even be read during a nap. I think I do that a lot.
December 5th, 2015 at 2:55 pm
Randy
Am I as serious about such things as I used to be? Maybe, maybe not. I will find out the next time I read one of the Peters book. You will read about it first right here.
As for Walter’s reading habits during nap time, I was wondering if anyone was going to notice that.
December 5th, 2015 at 3:53 pm
I would highly recommend you skip past these and read Kaminsky’s superior series about Insp. Porfiry Rostnikov and Abe Lieberman (separate series, I should add). I’ve read a couple of the Peters books but all of the others. I also liked Kaminsky’s non-fiction, like his DON SIEGEL: DIRECTOR.
December 6th, 2015 at 1:14 am
The Rostinkov and Lieberman series are by far better books, but the Peters books are fun and not intended to be much more and I doubt many readers noted the mistakes about dates and such.
Whenever anyone, myself included, complains about those sort of mistakes I always think of illustrator Herbert Morton Stoops who wrote to famed cowboy artist Charles Russell worried about depicting horses in an illustration for one of James Warner Bellah’s cavalry stories for the Post leaping a campfire in a manner that would break their legs in reality.
Russell wrote back that Stoops should not worry, that he, Russell, had “broken more horse’s legs than all the gopher holes in Montana.”
If I like the story or book in question otherwise I consign such mistakes to the “gopher holes in Montana,” category, though I am more forgiving now having written for forty years than when I was just a reader.
December 6th, 2015 at 6:28 pm
Steve (5) There’s a restaurant in town with a menu labeled “Before, During and After” — meaning appetizers, drinks and desserts. I was reminded of that when I saw Walter’s remark about reading Kaminsky before, during and after a nap. Perhaps only Walter knows what he meant by that.
December 7th, 2015 at 4:00 pm
Walter,
I know exactly what you mean about reading one during a nap. I felt that way about most Carter Brown, Frank Kane, and Doc Savage books. You could read them with one eye closed and the other only half open.
December 7th, 2015 at 10:14 pm
And yet, he published 25 of these little jems. Guess who inherited Mr. P’s agency and worked cases into the ’50s and ’60s?
December 7th, 2015 at 10:33 pm
That’s a tease, John. I have no idea. I hope you’ll let us know, or me, if I’m the only one.
December 8th, 2015 at 12:22 am
John has just replied by direct mail, but I can’t imagine that he would mind my mentioning this, the answer to my question:
Spyfall (Stan Wade L.A. P.I. Mysteries) (Volume 1) Paperback – October 14, 2015
by John Hegenberger
“In October 1959, someone is out for revenge against young L.A. PI, Stan Wade, who has solved a few cases for his main client, Walt Disney. When a CIA agent mistakenly dies in Stan’s place, Stan initiates a revenge investigation that leads him outside the country, and his own comfort zone, to stop a nuclear threat to Europe that will remain classified until 2012.”
and more on the way.