High Midnight

Stuart M. Kaminsky

Dec 2011 · The Toby Peters Mysteries Book 6 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A forties Hollywood PI does not forsake Gary Cooper: “Like all of Toby [Peters’s] adventures, High Midnight is high entertainment” (The Cincinnati Post).
 
When laconic leading man Gary Cooper needs a detective, he does the smart thing and hires Toby Peters, sleuth to the stars. But the man he finds in Peters’s office isn’t the famously discreet private eye—it’s the dentist who shares his office, who’s always had a fantasy of playing gumshoe, and happily agrees to take care of Cooper’s blackmail problem. Impersonating Peters, the dentist bungles the case disastrously, and setting it right will be like pulling teeth.
 
Cooper is in trouble with a Chicago gangster named Lombardi, who’s come to Los Angeles intending to set himself up as the cold cuts king of California. Thanks to the dentist’s meddling, he wants the actor dead. When Cooper hightails it with his old drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway, it’s up to Peters to avoid a showdown.
 
High Midnight shows once again how Edgar Award winner Stuart M. Kaminsky “has a delightfully original mind enriching—rather than just borrowing from—an old literary form” (Los Angeles Times).

About the author

DIVStuart M. Kaminsky (1934–2009) was one of the most prolific crime fiction authors of the last four decades. Born in Chicago, he spent his youth immersed in pulp fiction and classic cinema—two forms of popular entertainment which he would make his life’s work. After college and a stint in the army, Kaminsky wrote film criticism and biographies of the great actors and directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In 1977, when a planned biography of Charlton Heston fell through, Kaminsky wrote Bullet for a Star, his first Toby Peters novel, beginning a fiction career that would last the rest of his life./divDIV /divKaminsky penned twenty-four novels starring the detective, whom he described as “the anti-Philip Marlowe.” In 1981’s Death of a Dissident, Kaminsky debuted Moscow police detective Porfiry Rostnikov, whose stories were praised for their accurate depiction of Soviet life. His other two series starred Abe Lieberman, a hardened Chicago cop, and Lew Fonseca, a process server. In all, Kaminsky wrote more than sixty novels. He died in St. Louis in 2009.