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Descubre un mundo infinito de historias

Escucha y lee

Stuart M. Kaminsky

Toby Peters tries to protect a Western star against a vicious salami-mogul. 

Toby Peters is enjoying a moonlighting gig as the house detective at a hot-sheets motel when two giant men come to take him for a ride. They're Chicago toughs, visiting Los Angeles with their boss, Lombardi, who has come west to establish himself as the cold-cuts king of California. His message to Peters is simple: Stop asking questions and tell Cooper he didn't find anything. Or else. 

 

'Cooper' is Gary Cooper, who recently hired a detective named Toby Peters to quiet a blackmailer. But that wasn't Toby -- it was the dentist who shares his office. The amateur sleuth bungled the case so badly that now they're all in danger from Lombardi, the blackmailers, and anyone else with a hot head and a .45. If Toby Peters can't sort this out quickly, the next batch of Lombardi hot dogs will be made of one hundred percent pure-ground detective.

mysteriouspress.com

The Toby Peters Mysteries

High Midnight

As a favor to his brother, Toby Peters does a job for a fading Hollywood diva. 

You can't trust a man who's dressed as Mae West, especially not in Mae West's house. One of Hollywood's earliest sex symbols, the whip-smart blonde's star has fallen since the Hays Code cracked down on the racy repartee that made her famous. Her latest project is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, whose only copy is stolen just after she finishes her first draft. Tonight she's having a Mae West party, with every guest a man dressed as her. The thief is among those in drag, and Toby Peters has come to tear off his wig. 

 

He's there as a favor to his brother, a brutal cop who had a fling with West when she first moved to Hollywood. But this is more than a theft. The crook wants to destroy Mae West, and he has murder on his mind.

He Done Her Wrong

Detective Toby Peters hunts the men who killed his ex-wife's new husband. 

Heavyweight champ Joe Louis did not want to find a dead body today. After passing the afternoon with a woman who is not his wife, he's jogging on the beach when he sees two men standing over a corpse. He raises his fists, and they run. Toby Peters is even more sorry to see the body than Louis, for in a way, the dead man is family. Toby's ex-wife called him that morning, begging him to find her husband, who had disappeared after a week of threats on his life. This was not the way she wanted him found. 

 

Peters agrees to help Louis stay out of the papers while he investigates the murder. But when he learns that the dead man had lately taken a serious interest in boxing, a connection to Joe Louis starts to look like a fatal mistake.

Down for the Count

Only Toby Peters stands in the way of a plot to murder Albert Einstein. 

A dentist dangles from the window of a swanky Park Avenue hotel. Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who's very far from home, clutches the man by his jacket, which tears slowly, stich by stich. A dead man lies on the bed, while his killer batters the room door, which is going to pieces as quickly as the dentist's jacket. Somehow, this entire mess is Albert Einstein's fault. 

 

Two nefarious groups have been threatening the great physicist. One, a ring of blackmailers who claim to have evidence that he has been passing nuclear secrets to Russia. The other, a gang of Nazi assassins intent on doing away one of the most famous opponents of Hitler's rule. Einstein hires Toby Peters to nip both problems in the bud. But if Einstein can't figure it out, what chance does Toby have?

Smart Moves

Toby joins forces with a famous PI to save a general from embarrassment. 

The uniformed man standing before Toby Peters is General Douglas MacArthur, a soldier who considers himself the only man who can defeat the Japanese. But though he may be all-powerful in the South Pacific, today he is in Los Angeles with a problem only a detective can solve. The general has an eye on a post-war promotion to the White House, and an aide has stolen his war chest, his donor list, and a handful of embarrassing private letters. To get them back, Toby may need some help. Lucky for him, he's just met Dashiell Hammett, one of the finest crime novelists of all time. Dodging his mistress while he's waiting to rejoin the army, Dash needs amusement and thinks Toby's case sounds like a lark. 

 

In fact, the assignment proves dangerous. Toby may not be a soldier, but he's finally gotten a chance to die at a general's whim.

Buried Caesars

A prank by a flamboyant Spanish artist could cost Toby Peters his life. 

An ax-wielding monk hacks at the door. Toby Peters is on the other side, running as fast as his recently broken leg will allow. Alongside him is Salvador Dalí, dressed in a rabbit suit, insistently muttering 'grasshoppers' as they try to make their escape. Dalí insists on being carried across the lawn, so Peters hobbles along with the surrealist in his arms. They get in the car just as the monk chops down the front door. The car doesn't start, and the monk charges silently, the ax in the air. This is not the strangest thing that has happened to Toby Peters this week. 

 

Life has been odd ever since the call came from Dalí's wife. Peters, suffering from post -- New Year's malaise, was happy to look into the theft of three of Dalí's paintings. He had no idea that the investigation might end with his face being turned into abstract art.

The Melting Clock

To avenge a long-ago death, a killer puts Toby Peters in his sights. 

On December 10, 1938, Atlanta burned again. In the back lot at David O. Selznick's studio, sets from a dozen old pictures were pushed together and set alight to provide a backdrop for the climax of what Selznick promised to be the movie of the century: Gone with the Wind. Toby Peters, then just a studio security guard, was on hand to help keep the dozens of Confederate extras in line. When the fire was over, he found one of them dead, impaled on his own sword. 

 

Five years later, Toby scratches out a living as a private detective for Hollywood's finest, several of whom have just been marked for death. On the back of a cryptic poem is a list of names of men who were on the scene the night the extra died. Two are already dead. One is Clark Gable. The other is Toby himself.

Tomorrow Is Another Day

A huckster repeatedly robs a comedian, leading Toby on a cross-country chase. 

The bank accounts are in the names of men like Otis J. Raisincluster, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham, but any comedy connoisseur knows that names that nonsensical could come only from the twisted brain of W. C. Fields. When toiling on the vaudeville circuit, the acid-tongued comic actor opened a new account in every town he played, adding up to a mountain of bankbooks and nearly a million dollars squirreled away in banks across the country. When a burglar makes off with a stack of the books, Fields hires private investigator Toby Peters to protect his nest egg. Toby's going on a road trip, and Fields wants to come along for the ride. 

 

As the trail winds through the nation's smallest towns, complications pop up in the form of the Amish, John Barrymore, and the Ku Klux Klan. If the thief doesn't kill Toby Peters, W. C. Fields's ceaseless shtick might.

A Fatal Glass of Beer

A simple job turns treacherous when Toby Peters stumbles upon a corpse. 

It's a lucky thing that Cary Grant once trained as an acrobat, because Toby Peters's life is in the actor's hands. As the two men sprint through the pitch-dark woods, trying to elude the man with the gun, they come to a canyon ledge. With nowhere to go but down, they scramble over the side. Peters slips, and Grant grabs hold of his wrist. As the killer closes in, Cary's grip begins to falter. 

 

The job began simply. Grant hired the Hollywood detective as a bagman in a blackmailing hand-off. He gives Toby a satchel full of cash, to be exchanged for an envelope of the leading man's secrets -- not sexual or financial, but details of his work for the British crown. When the envelope bearer winds up dead, Toby and Cary dive into a complex plot of murder, money, and Nazi spies, which ends with them trapped in an all-too-literal cliffhanger.

To Catch a Spy

Toby and his brother team up to protect a magician from disappearing for good. 

In the six years since he lost his job working security at the Warner Brothers' lot, private investigator Toby Peters has taken cases from oddballs ranging from Peter Lorre to W. C. Fields. But none of them had the stage presence of Harry Blackstone, the greatest magician in the world. When an anonymous rival demands the illusionist reveal his secrets on stage or suffer the consequences, Blackstone hires Toby and his brother, ex-cop Phil, to run security at the show. 

 

What starts as a simple protection job turns dicey when Toby finds himself onstage, with a possibly unsafe magic saw about to slice through his midsection. Bodies pile up around the act, and the two detectives begin to think that the killer isn't a jealous member of the Los Angeles Friends of Magic, but rather the great magician himself.