Though not as doggedly determined as Sam Spade or as quick with the quip as Philip Marlowe, hard-boiled private eye Toby Peters investigates the most entertaining cases because his beat is Hollywood during the Golden Age. While working for such legendary stars as Errol Flynn or Mae West, Toby rubs elbows with other real-life film actors or powerful film industry personnel, offering an inside look at Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. The hapless private detective was the creation of mystery novelist and screenwriter Stuart Kaminsky, who wrote 24 Toby Peters novels between 1977 and 2004.

Kaminsky was more than a mystery novelist. He was also a screenwriter and a professor of film.  I was fortunate enough to be one of his graduate students when he taught at Northwestern University.  During my first year in the program, my classmates and I were intrigued with our mystery-writing professor and eagerly devoured his first few Toby Peters novels. While I enjoyed the interaction of a fictional private eye with real-life movie stars, relishing the nostalgia, I didn’t realize just how clever they were.  Sadly, Stuart Kaminsky died in October 2009, and, though he was 75, I was shocked to hear the news, in part because it made me realize that my years at Northwestern had been so long ago and that time takes no prisoners.  His death prompted me to revisit the Toby Peters mysteries, and I discovered that no book series could be more irresistible to movie lovers of all types, from the film historian to the star-struck fan.

THE FIRST TOBY PETERS MYSTERY

In the first novel, Bullet for a Star (1977), Errol Flynn hires low-rent, middle-aged detective Toby Peters to track down some compromising photos; in the last, Now You See It (2004), famed magician Harry Blackstone seeks Toby’s protection from jealous competitors. In between these adventures, Toby worked for many legends of Hollywood—Judy Garland in Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977), John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986), Bette Davis in The Devil Met a Lady (1993), Mae West in He Done Her Wrong (1983), Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierced (2003), and more. Despite his famous clientele, Toby never got any richer, and he never left Mrs. Irene Plaut’s boarding house. The elderly, nearly deaf Mrs. Plaut believes Toby to be an exterminator and a book editor, and she is constantly handing him pages of her manuscript to look over. Other regular characters are equally eccentric, including Toby’s good friends Gunther Wherthman, a multi-lingual midget who was part of the cast of The Wizard of Oz, and Jeremy Butler, a poet-wrestler with both brains and brawn. Toby’s office is in the same building as Dr. Sheldon Minck, a less-than-professional dentist who whines a lot, and Toby—a private detective—is often at odds with brother Phil Pevsner—a police detective.

While the regular characters have their charms, it’s the real-life stars and members of the film industry who are at the center of the plots, and that is the key to the popularity of the series. In an interview with the online publication Crescent Blues, Kaminsky referred to the Toby Peters’ series as “dramatic nostalgia.” He recognized that the appeal of his books for most readers was the combination of the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the nostalgia for the 1940s—a simpler era when the world seemed to be divided into good and evil, black and white.

The narratives of the Toby Peters novels are deceptively simple; the events in the plots were not necessarily designed to add up to a thrilling, linear story with exciting twists and turns. Instead, Kaminsky constructed plot events to self-reflexively parallel those that occurred in actual films of the real-life stars. For example, in Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, Judy Garland thwarts the murderer by throwing coffee on him much like Dorothy saves the day by tossing water on the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. In To Catch a Spy, Cary Grant saves Toby’s life by reaching out his hand and pulling him to safety just as his character does with Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. This is the hallmark of Kaminsky the film historian who had seen hundreds of movies, and, in translating key scenes into plot events for his novels, revealed an understanding of the original films’ structures and subtexts.

Likewise, in order to turn the movie stars into well-rounded dramatic characters, Kaminsky drew on their real-life experiences from the era or their actual personality traits. In He Done Her Wrong, Mae West’s knack for inspiring female impersonators is used in a sequence in which the blonde bombshell hosts a party of Mae West look-alikes to flush out a thief who is a master of disguise. In To Catch a Spy, the story exaggerates Cary Grant’s real-life stint as an informer for British Intelligence, who once asked him to keep his eyes and ears open for anti-Allies sentiment in the film industry, which was home to many German and Austrian immigrants during World War II.

Today, most classic-movie lovers tend to remember the legendary stars of the Golden Age as a combination of their screen images and their actual biographies. And, Kaminsky seemed to understand this because he smoothly fused star image and real life in his depiction of the stars in the Toby Peters series. Tapping into the traits of the stars’ images painted them as special, larger than life, or different from the rest of us, while focusing on aspects of their real lives made their depiction appear accurate and believable.  Most importantly, Kaminsky understood that movie stars mean something to us as a culture—no matter how much academics and intellectuals try to deny it—and this was also taken into consideration in his portrayal of them.

My favorite Toby Peters mystery so far is A Fatal Glass of Beer, in which the hapless detective, his pal Gunther, and W.C. Fields take a cross-country excursion to prevent a mysterious thief from emptying out Fields’s many bank accounts. As expected, Fields’s love affair with alcohol and his tendency to substitute peculiar phrasing for common terms are major aspects of his character, but the comic actor’s lesser-known peculiarities are also woven into the storyline. While traveling the vaudeville circuit in the 1910s and early 1920s, Fields deposited his earnings in several bank accounts around the country, and this eccentricity is the basis of the storyline of A Fatal Glass of Beer. The novel begins when a thief breaks into Fields’s home and steals a handful of bankbooks from the actor’s messy desk. He flies to Philadelphia, Field’s hometown, and from there begins a cross-country trek to empty out the accounts in small towns across the Midwest. W.C. hires Toby to help him reach the banks ahead of the thief and then catch him in the act. Gunther tags along as the trio’s driver, and, despite his diminutive size, he has no problem handling Fields’s customized Cadillac with a built-in bar. Legend has it that W.C.’s bank accounts were opened using ridiculous names similar to those of the characters in his films, and the book makes this idea a funny and important part of the storyline. However, according to recent biographies of the real W.C., this was not true and the accounts were all opened in Fields’s name.

THREE OF THE BUNDY DRIVE BOYS: DECKER, FOWLER, AND BARRYMORE

Another tidbit from Fields’s real life was also a key part of A Fatal Glass of Beer. During the 1940s, Fields was good friends with John Barrymore, and both were members of the Bundy Drive Boys, a group of Hollywood legends and artistic types who drank hard and lived shortened lives because of it.  The group, whose members were famous for their destructive pranks on each other, also included Errol Flynn, Thomas Mitchell, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, screenwriter Gene Fowler, boxer Jack Dempsey, and art collector and painter John Decker, among others. The time frame of the novel occurs after Barrymore’s death, but the Great Profile’s love of practical jokes reaches from beyond the grave in the book, indirectly resulting in several deaths.

The capers experienced in the novel by W.C., Toby, and Gunther as they speed toward Los Angeles are exaggerated and sometimes outrageous, but the real Fields had a penchant for attracting mayhem, probably because he had little respect for social conventions, proper behavior, and even the law. A few years ago, I was researching Fields’s silent comedy It’s the Old Army Game for a book I cowrote titled Florida on Film. I was amazed and amused by the behind-the-scenes antics by Fields and the rest of the cast, which were often destructive and sometimes dangerous. It’s the Old Army Game was shot in then-tiny Ocala, Florida, during Prohibition, though that had little impact on the availability of liquor. One night, Fields and two cohorts drove to Miami and bought six cases of bootleg gin from a gangster, with the comic actor packing a .38 just in case there was trouble.

FIELDS'S SKILLS WITH POOL ARE NOTED IN 'A FATAL GLASS OF BEER.'

The final scene of It’s the Old Army Game was shot in Palm Beach, Florida, at an estate called El Marisol, which was the winter home of millionaire Edward T. Stotesbury. In this scene, Fields’s character, Elmer Prettywillie (no kidding), drives his family across the manicured lawn of the estate to have a picnic on the carefully cropped grass. The crew shot for five days on the estate, and the driving scene was staged several times. In the process, the hedges and gardens were destroyed, and deep ruts were cut in the lawn from Fields’s driving. Fields and the crew littered the grounds with cigar butts, food wrappers, and garbage, shocking the staff of El Marisol. According to some, W.C.—who was scarred for life from a childhood of poverty and abuse—took great delight in ruining the property of a member of the upper crust. I found the fictional mayhem of A Fatal Glass of Beer outrageously humorous but in keeping with the W.C. Fields I had researched.

Stuart Kaminsky created other detectives for other novels, including Russian cop Porfiry Rostnikov for a series set in Communist Moscow, Jewish police detective Abe Lieberman whose beat was Chicago, and Lew Fonseca, who worked as a process server in a series set in Sarasota, Florida. I have read and enjoyed some of these books, but none of them appeal to me like the Toby Peters mysteries, because I cannot resist legendary movie stars and the lore surrounding them. For fans of studio-era Hollywood and lovers of classic movies, I highly recommend this delightful series that paints a slightly tarnished but still romanticized portrait of the Dream Factory. To those who have read the Toby Peters novels, I would love to hear which one is your favorite and why.