Toby Peters Mysteries, Part 2 – Stuart M. Kaminsky Free Audiobook

Written by Stuart M. Kaminsky
Read by Christopher Lane , Tom Parker, Stephen Bowlby, Jim Meskimen, Brian Holsopple, Johnny Heller,
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Mixed
Unabridged

Stuart M. Kaminsky (September 29, 1934 – October 9, 2009) was an American mystery writer and film professor. He is known for three long-running series of mystery novels featuring the protagonists 1. Toby Peters, a private detective in 1940s Hollywood; 2. Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, a Moscow police inspector; and 3. veteran Chicago police officer Abe Lieberman. A later series followed Lew Fonesca, a process server from Sarasota, Florida.

The Toby Peters mysteries by Stuart Kaminsky are period pieces with an enjoyably wry style.

Toby Peters is a private detective with sore feet, a bad back, and a tendency to bruise easily. He lives on a strict diet of hot dogs, tacos, shredded wheat, and disaster, and spends most of his time, if not in the hospital— at the wrong end of a gun. Peters can’t get through the day without finding a corpse or losing his shoes or both, but he has a reputation for keeping his mouth shut…

13. Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1988) Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins Stephen Bowlby

Scaly-voiced and bug-eyed actor Peter Lorre has become one of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood, especially after appearing in the Sam Spade crime drama, The Maltese Falcon, last year. Yet Hollywood PI Toby Peters still has to contend with his landlady believing the star of Think Fast, Mr. Moto, is Japanese. Whether playing an Asian detective or a weaselly villain, one role Lorre will probably never get is romantic lead—except apparently in real life. Because the distraught dentist who shares offices with Peters insists his wife has run off with Peter Lorre and begs the detective to find her.

As it turns out, the boyfriend in question is a Peter Lorre impersonator—perhaps an even more bizarre romantic choice. But by the time Peters finds him, the mimic is doing a terrific imitation of a corpse. The bullet was meant for the real Lorre, who has just become the gumshoe’s client—whether he likes it or not.

14. Buried Caesars (1989) Length: 6hrs 10min Stephen Bowlby

It’s September 1942, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur believes he’s got what it takes to win the war in the Pacific—but he’s got a personal problem to take care of first. An aide has run off with his war chest, his donor list, and a handful of embarrassing private letters: a haul that would make the general a perfect target for blackmail and derail the post-war presidential run he’s planning. This is one battle he can’t afford to lose.

So the general enlists Det. Toby Peters, who has built a reputation for discretion among Hollywood’s elite, not to mention the White House. Forming a surprising alliance with former Pinkerton agent and legendary crime novelist, Dashiell Hammett, Peters follows the trail to Angel Springs, California, and a mysterious millionaire who’s definitely no angel. In protecting the general from blackmail, Peters hopes to avoid paying the ultimate price himself.

15. Poor Butterfly (1990)

1942 is a dangerous year to stage Madama Butterfly. Although Puccini’s masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension a year after Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against cast and crew….But someone is doing more than making idle threats—a self-styled phantom of the opera. When a workman on the opera house renovation is killed, the maestro, Leopold Stokowski, the conductor who starred in Disney’s Fantasia, calls Hollywood PI Toby Peters to catch a madman.

16. The Melting Clock (1991) Duration: 05:08:00 Tom Parker

In wartime Los Angeles, jobs are scarce for private eye Toby Peters. Into this grind of reality comes a hefty dose of surrealism in the person of Salvador Dali. Dali has seen his latest publicity stunt go fatally, frighteningly wrong. Drawn into a bizarre new world of mustaches without faces and watches melting on the Victory Drugstore grill, Toby has to hunt down precious paintings and priceless clocks, while wading through a growing thicket of bodies.

This is one of the best – Written in a style similar to Dashiell Hammett’s, this Toby Peters crime story is read with the panache and drama of the strong, silent type. Reminding one of Humphrey Bogart when he played Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Tom Parker, with tongue firmly in cheek, reads Kaminsky’s succinct descriptions of the quirky Salvador Dali and his entourage; listeners can almost hear him drag on a cigarette and see it dangling from his lip. Set in wartime L.A., the story draws Toby into a bizarre art world of mustaches without faces, crumbling stone women and melting watches. This one keeps listeners tuned in for the big finish. S.C.A. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

17. The Devil Met A Lady (1993) Duration: 06:10:03 Christopher Lane

“I’m here,” came a familiar voice.

I turned…and found myself looking at Bette Davis no more than a half a dozen feet in front of me. She strode forward around two couples and stood in front of me with a smile that could kill. The orchestra had picked up the theme and it was hard to hear her as she said, “Why are you following me?”

Why has the fabulous Bette Davis—the best known face in the world behind Roosevelt and Hitler—been kidnapped, not once, not twice, but three times? What in the world does this star abduction have to do with Third Reich designs on America’s plans for a top-secret superbomber? And who else but Hollywood private eye Toby Peters to plunge into this hair-raising adventure in pursuit of the answers? Spending about a third of his waking time on the phone and another third on his back (usually in hospitals), Peters penetrates a hapless spy ring composed of fourth-rate Tinseltown tough guys. He delves far too deeply for his own good into the bedroom peccadillos of America’s glitter set, and, as bodies stack up around him, he sets off to the rescue of a movie goddess. But who’ll protect Toby Peters from the divine Miss Davis?

18. Tomorrow is Another Day (1995)

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 ablaze 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 Confederate extras in line. When the fire was over, he found one of them dead, impaled on his own sword.

Five years later, Peters scratches out a living as a private detective for Hollywood’s best known stars. Now it’s Clark Gable who needs his help. He’s been getting death threats. On the back of a cryptic poem, the sleuth finds a list of people on scene the night the extra died. Two are already dead, and the rest are next. Sure enough, one of those marked for death is Gable. The other is Toby Peters . . .

19. Dancing in the Dark (1996) 6 hrs and 18 mins, Jim Meskimen

Luna Martin, the moll of a well-known Los Angeles gangster nicknamed “Fingers” (because he likes to cut them off), has demanded dance lessons from Hollywood’s finest hoofer—and whatever Luna wants, Luna gets.

To sidestep the flirtations of the lead-footed lady, Astaire hires private investigator Toby Peters to pose as a dance instructor and take over the lessons. But when someone cuts in and cuts Luna’s throat, the grieving gangster makes Peters an offer he can’t refuse: Find the killer—or go from having two left feet to one foot in the grave. Now, instead of punishing the parquet, the silver screen’s most famous song-and-dance man is pounding the pavement with his new partner—a rumpled, middle-aged gumshoe who just wants to live to shuffle through another day . . .

20. A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997) Tom Parker

Under names like Otis J. Raisincluster, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham III, W. C. Fields squirreled away nearly a million dollars in banks across the country during his vaudeville days—before he became one of the silver screen’s most recognizable funnymen. But it’s no laughing matter when a burglar has the audacity to rob him blind, stealing his bankbooks and cleaning out his accounts. Steaming, the comedian hires Hollywood private investigator Toby Peters to track down the missing dough and protect what remains of his nest egg.

On a cross-country road trip through small-town 1940s America, a frequently inebriated Fields and a frequently exasperated Peters encounter complications in the form of the Amish, John Barrymore, and the Ku Klux Klan. But can they catch their elusive quarry—Lester O. Hipnoodle?

21. A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001) Jim Meskimen

In 1943, Charlie Chaplin is far from the most popular man in America. His communist sympathies and romantic indiscretions with young women have enraged everyone from right-wing radicals and the Ku Klux Klan to furious fathers….But when a knife-wielding intruder breaks into his house one night, the maniac isn’t talking politics. He demands Chaplin stop making his latest black comedy about a man who murders wealthy women for their money—and specifically tells him to stay away from one Fiona Sullivan. Who?

Chaplin turns to the shamus to the stars, Toby Peters, to keep him from harm and apprehend his nocturnal visitor. Peters’s lead on Fiona comes from a most unlikely source—his landlady, Mrs. Irene Plaut, knows the woman. Rallying his crew of diminutive Gunther Wherthman, wrestler Jeremy Butler, and dentist Sheldon Minck, Toby’s determined to catch the midnight madman before Chaplin is silenced forever.

22. To Catch a Spy (2002) Jim Meskimen

A Few Minutes Past Midnight). Having solved cases for the likes of Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and the Marx Brothers, Toby now takes on as a client Bristol’s own Archibald Alexander Leach, aka Cary Grant. A note at the start explains that King George VI awarded Grant a medal in 1947 for somewhat vague services during WWII. Kaminsky supposes Grant to have been a British intelligence agent, his job to detect the activities of Nazi sympathizers in Hollywood. Married to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton at the time, he finds more pro-Nazis among his wife’s rich friends than among the acting community. Grant hires Toby, who packs a .38 with which he’s unable to hit the broad side of a sound stage, to deliver a satchel of money in the dark of night to a man who’ll give him an envelope in return.

Need anyone ask what occurs? Shots ring out. The man Toby is to meet dies with the name “George Hall” on his lips, while Toby receives the first of many conks on the head, knocking him cold. Toby and the acrobatic Grant at his lithe best make an appealing team. The tone is light, the pace brisk, the tongue firmly in cheek. The series may be tissue thin by this point, but fans are in for a merry ride.

23. Mildred Pierced (2003)– 6hrs 52min Jim Meskimen

Mildred Minck is an unremarkable woman—until one tragic night in June 1944 when she becomes the first citizen of Los Angeles to be murdered by crossbow. The prime suspect is her husband, dentist Sheldon Minck, who’s found standing over her body with the weapon in hand, raving that only Joan Crawford can identify the killer. It seems like a natural insanity defense, but Sheldon wants his neighbor, private investigator Toby Peters, to prove his innocence. The dentist is telling the truth about one thing: Joan Crawford was there.

The steely silver screen beauty is in the middle of a comeback, about to star in a film noir based on a James M. Cain novel, and insists Peters keep her name out of the papers. In exchange, the glamorous eyewitness points the sleuth toward the Survivors of the Future, a band of crackpot survivalists that the dentist was hoping to join. Sheldon’s new friends want him sprung, but only because they want him dead . . .

24. Now You See It (2004) Jim Meskimen

The final Toby Peters Hollywood whodunit from the Edgar Award–winning author is “a marvelous magic trick of a mystery” featuring Harry Blackstone (Booklist, starred review).

When an anonymous rival demands that master illusionist Harry Blackstone reveal his secrets on stage or die, the magician hires Toby Peters and his brother, ex-cop Phil Pevsner, to run security for his show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Of course, Peters doesn’t expect the job to include replacing a showgirl for Blackstone’s show-stopping sawing-a-woman-in-half trick after the saboteur has stolen the blade.

Peters’s brief career in magic is only the first surprise as a blackmailing con man turns up shot in a dressing room backstage and one of Blackstone’s competitors ends up dead at a testimonial dinner. With “The Great Blackstone” now a murder suspect, the sleuth will need to pull a rabbit out of a hat to solve this mystery . . .

This book is chaptered so you can find the magic tricks easies….