Toby Peters Mysteries, Part 1 – 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…

1. Bullet for A Star (1977) Duration: 04:09:09 Christopher Lane

Toby Peters looked at the glossy photograph. Yes, that was Errol Flynn in the picture. And, yes, there was a girl with him…a very young girl. They were both birthday naked, and seemed to be enjoying themselves. No wonder Flynn and Warner Brothers were nervous.Toby found the picture where he was supposed to find it. He wasn’t planning to get hit on the head, though, or to find a corpse when he awoke…the first in a series of corpses scattered all over Hollywood.

The trail Toby follows in order to clear Flynn—and himself—takes him throughout the film colony and, finally, onto the set of The Maltese Falcon, where Bogie, Lorre, and Greenstreet find themselves playing roles that weren’t rehearsed, but whose execution must be picture perfect.

2. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1978) 04:20:39 Christopher Lane

It is November 1st, 1940. In the famous sound stage of The Wizard of Oz on the MGM lot, a little man is lying face-up on the yellow brick road. Someone has murdered a Munchkin.

Toby Peters is summoned to the scene of the crime by a very young and frightened starlet named Judy Garland. He begins to put together the scanty clues. Within an hour, he is hired by Lewis B. Meyer himself, to keep the name of Judy Garland (and MGM) clean of the scandal, and to hold off the police and the newspapers. But before long, Peters realizes that he is on to nothing less than a plot threatening the life of Judy Garland. Enlisting the aid of Judy, Clark Gable, and Raymond Chandler, Peters uncovers clue after clue. But the odds are heavily stacked against him.

3. You Bet Your Life (1978) 5 hrs and 27 mins, Jim Meskimen

As a hard-boiled Hollywood PI enlists Al Capone’s help to save the Marx Brothers, Kaminsky “makes the totally wacky possible” (The Washington Post).

It’s 1941 and the Marx Brothers’ first movie for MGM, Go West, has the country in stitches. But now Chico Marx is worried he’s going to need stitches when he receives a severed ear in the mail—a simple message from a Chicago bookie who wants $120,000, or else. Chico is baffled because, although he loves to gamble, he’s never made a bet in Chicago. Desperate, he turns to the king of Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, who puts in a call to Toby Peters.

A Hollywood private detective who’s proven himself adept at keeping scandals out of the tabloids, Peters flies to Florida for an interview with Al Capone, deposed lord of the Chicago underworld. The retired bootlegger’s mind has gone soft, and he doesn’t know anything about Chico’s bookie, but he suggests Peters speak to his brother. With Scarface’s good word as an introduction, the PI heads to Chicago. But it will take more than a good sense of humor to keep Groucho, Harpo, and especially Chico from getting axed.

4. The Howard Hughes Affair (1979) Duration: 05:18:27 Christopher Lane

Toby Peters has a reputation for keeping his mouth shut…so when a nervous young billionaire finds a spy at his dinner party, he wants Peters on the job.

It’s 1941 and that young billionaire is Howard Hughes, a man with his fair share of enemies—and they’re about to become Peters’ enemies as well. With a boatload of unsavory characters on his trail, Peters gets himself into an assortment of unlikely situations, and it takes Basil Rathborne to extricate him—lending a hand with a flourish that would have pleased Sherlock Holmes himself.

5. Never Cross a Vampire (1980) Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins, Brian Holsopple

It’s January 1942–.The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany is marching through Russia, and two Hollywood lights are watching their stars dim.

Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor who, years before, had chillingly introduced millions of Americans to the noble Count Dracula and is now struggling hard for a comeback, has just received his latest death threat, a hat box containing a small bat with a tiny stake impaled through the heart. Private eye Toby Peters, with no client on the books and a stomach that cries out for tacos and the occasional beer, agrees to give the job a try.
His business doubles in sound and fury when William Faulkner, the nation’s most distinguished author gone Hollywood, is accused of firing three fatal bullets into the chest of a movie agent he hardly knew. If a connection exists between these wildly dissimilar cases, Peters will find it. The question is will it be in time?

6. High Midnight (1981) Duration: 05:41:33 Christopher Lane

Someone wants Gary Cooper to make a movie he isn’t interested in making, and whoever it is wants him badly enough to get nasty about it.

Cooper takes to the hills, accompanied by a writer named Ernest Hemingway, chased by men with blood in their eyes and murder in their hearts. The problem is that Cooper can’t shoot straight and Hemingway can’t operate without native bearers and an elephant gun.
Toby Peters can’t shoot either, but he doesn’t need help… much. Just give him a bowl of cereal and time to decide his next move and Toby will get everything straightened out. Now, if he can only keep Lombardi the gangster from making good on his threat to turn him into kosher hot dogs… .

Not the best book of the series – Despite these promising elements, though, the story line and characters are weak. Narrator Christopher Lane makes a gallant effort to infuse some life into this audiobook.

7. Catch A Falling Clown (1981) Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins Jim Meskimen

The gorilla doesn’t like clowns. Normally that wouldn’t bother Toby Peters, since detective work tends to keep him far away from animal cages, but tonight he’s dressed as a clown and locked in with the ape. The animal’s handler told him not to worry – gorillas don’t eat people. They just like to tear their arms and legs off. What the ape doesn’t understand is that Peters is here for his protection. Earlier that week, someone electrocuted an elephant, and the gorilla, as one of the star attractions in this second-rate circus, is next on the hit list. Someone is killing animals to kill the circus, and if that doesn’t work they may move on to human prey. Toby Peters has a shot at unraveling this big top mystery, as long as he survives his night in the gorilla’s cage.

8. He Done Her Wrong (1983) Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins Stephen Bowlby

He Done Her Wrong is one of the most ingenious of the Toby Peters mystery series, for it has all the ingredients of the perfect crime.

As a private eye, Toby Peters has had some pretty impressive clients over the years, but none of them has been quite as memorable as his latest: a tough-as-nails, sharp-witted, damsel-in-distress named Mae West. Mae, it seems, has discovered that her only copy of her sizzling autobiography is missing. Without hesitation, Peters agrees to track it down. But after taking a beating from a man named Ressner—a thief, a master of disguise, and, even more dangerous, a frustrated actor—Peter realizes that his job is just beginning. Following the trail of Mae’s scandalous memoirs soon leads Peters into the midst of a family feud of Herculean proportions, and a California sanitarium from which he must make a daring escape worthy of Ressner himself…

9. The Fala Factor (1984)

With “shades of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett,” a 1940s Los Angeles private eye must recover FDR’s kidnapped dog (The San Diego Union-Tribune).

Working in Hollywood, private eye Toby Peters has met a lot of phonies. But his newest case concerns a four-legged faker who threatens the fate of the free world. A few classy dames have crossed the detective’s doorstep, but none can touch the hem of the dress of the First Lady herself, Eleanor Roosevelt, who’s come to him on a matter of top-secret national security Six months after Pearl Harbor, Mrs. Roosevelt has developed a terrible suspicion. She thinks the president’s sprightly Scottish terrier, Fala, has been kidnapped and replaced by an imposter, and she wants Peters to find the real rover—for without him, all may be lost.

10. Down for the Count (1985) Duration: 05:32:13 Tom Paeker

Private eye Toby Peters follows boxing as much as the next guy, but he never expected to encounter heavyweight champion Joe Louis this way: covered with blood and standing on a deserted beach next to the corpse of Peters’s ex-wife’s husband. The champ is innocent, but he has something to hide, and Toby agrees to protect the Brown Bomber from the police and the press.

Following up on names he gets from the dead man’s address book, Peters soon finds himself in Reed’s gym, embroiled in a sensational fight scam that may ring the final bell for him. Bruised and battered, Peters meets up with an overzealous Santa Monica cop with a special fondness for the L.A. phone book, a sleazy boxing manager with lousy taste in suits, and a trio of ham-fisted heavies who remind him of the Three Stooges.
Along with his ragtag band of friends and assistants, Peters follows a bloody trail of deception that leads full circle, to the same deserted beach and some startling revelations.

11. The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986) Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins, Johnny Heller

Something about Lewis Vance’s story doesn’t add up. The guy claims to be John Wayne’s stand-in, and he’s called Det. Toby Peters about a possible job involving the star. But when Peters meets him in a seedy hotel room, Vance slips him a mickey. After Peters comes to, his head pounding, he sees the real John Wayne pointing a .38 at him. Vance was not exactly a dead ringer for the Duke—but he is dead, lying on the hotel bed with a bullet hole drilled in his forehead. And it’s a dead heat as to who’s more confused—the gumshoe or the movie star.

On screen no one gets the drop on the Duke, but in real life someone’s trying to kill him. Wayne hires Peters to get to the bottom of things, and soon he’s tangled up in a twisted conspiracy that also involves a dubious desk clerk named Teddy Spaghetti, the Russians, and none other than the Little Tramp himself, Charlie Chaplin.

12. Smart Moves (1987) Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins, Stephen Bowlby

It’s April 1942, the world is at war, and LA private detective Toby Peters has been summoned to Princeton, New Jersey, to deal with a situation of the utmost gravity—the world’s greatest physicist is being threatened. Blackmailers claim to have evidence that Albert Einstein has been passing nuclear secrets to Russia, and Nazi assassins want to do away with one of the most famous opponents of Hitler’s rule. Sounds like a formula for disaster, trying to keep Einstein from harm but also trying to stay alive himself.

Incorporating cameos from Paul Robeson and Frank Sinatra, Edgar Award–winning author Stuart M. Kaminsky “has such a good time writing, and he so loves the period, that the reader is swept along willy-nilly” (The New York Times Book Review).