Tue 19 Apr 2016
Archived Review: STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, paperback, 1979.
“Someone had murdered a Munchkin.” So begins the latest case of Toby Peters, last seen helping Errol Flynn out of a nasty blackmail scheme. This time it’s a frightened Judy Garland who demands that MGM allow our lowly Hollywood private eye to handle the affair.
Name-dropping is again as much of a nuisance as it is of nostalgia value, but rather amusing is the assistance of a rather famous mystery writer who happens to be in Hollywood at the time. More importantly, by the time he’s cracked the case, this time the raffish Toby Peters has begun to become a little more real himself, in a way equivalent to catching a glimpse of an actual person hidden behind the glitter and glamor visible up front on the silver screen.
Next up, the Marx Brothers.
Rating: B minus.
Bibliographic Notes: This was the second of twenty-four Toby Peters novels published between 1977 and 2004, a very nice run by anyone’s standards. For a complete list, along with the books in four other series Kaminsky wrote, plus two standalones, go here.
April 19th, 2016 at 1:41 pm
Not Kaminsky’s best work, but these set off a little mini genre of their own that had only been explored a little before hand. The historical mystery was nothing new, but the historical celebrity mystery had only been done in satire like Philip Wylie’s THE SMILING CORPSE, though both Gypsy Rose Lee and George Sanders published mystery novels.
Following these writers like George Baxt, Ron Goulart, and Max Allan Collins incorporated celebrities and not just historical figures in series. The Hollywood mystery had been around at least since the silent era in some form, the hardboiled version since Whitfield’s DEATH IN THE BOWL, but generally it featured strictly fictional characters, however transparently they resembled real life, or something like the Whitman series where stars like Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, and Ann Sheridan solved mysteries in young adult books but not as their glamorous Hollywood star selves.
April 19th, 2016 at 7:56 pm
Eventually the name-dropping got too much for me, and I stopped reading the books, no more than two or three after this one. That was quite a while ago, though, and I do enjoy Hollywood mysteries, especially now that I’ve visited LA a couple of times, so I think I’ll give Toby Peters a try next time I get a chance.
I’ve read any of Kaminsky’s other series: Inspector Rostnikov (16), Abe Leiberman (10), Lew Fonesca (6), or The Rockford Files (2 novelizations). Anyone have any recommendations?
April 20th, 2016 at 7:08 am
I’m with you. I quit reading the Peters books early but read all the Rostnikov, Lieberman, and Fonesca books. I’d recommend them all, in that order.