High Midnight (1981)

This time Toby has to protect Gary Cooper from a semi-retired gangster who wants to corner the LA cold cuts market... and make a movie, starring Cooper. Or else.

Toss in Ernest Hemingway getting manly and boxing with Toby, a Spanish freedom fighter with delusions of "fascisti" all around, Babe Ruth and some of his baseball friends, and assorted washed-up actors and filmmakers and a few small-time mobsters.

And one of them is willing to kill anyone who gets in the way of "High Midnight" being filmed, with Gary Cooper as the lead role. And when Cooper won't do it, he becomes the next target.

Toby is his usual loyal detective with a face bad guys can't resist punching. With his standard back-up, the midget Swiss translator, the ex-wrestler-turned-poet, and the messed-up (and generally messy) dentist.

The usual fun and adventure, mystery and famous faces, places, and times. I love Kaminsky's Toby Peters adventures, in large part because they never fail to transport me to their world. It's like being in The Big Sleep or Maltese Falcon. Always fun. ( )

Lombardi the gangstar, Lombardi's henchman Marco, Toby's brother Lieutenant Pevsner, and Toby's landlady Mrs Plaut and last but not least, Gary Cooper, who has hired Toby to investigate a blackmail which turns into murder and as Cooper is driven into the hills with a writer named Ernest Hemingway, who it seems can't actually handle things himself without "native bearers and a .500 express, and since Cooper can't shoot onlyToby's is left to come to the rescue. Great adventure, with glamorous Hollywood stars, High Midnight is another terrific Toby Peters Mystery with Stuart Kaminsky at his best..

"High Midnight" by Stuart Kaminsky is a winner all the way. Private investigator Toby Peter's client is none other than Hollywood star Gary Cooper, who is being pressured by a gangster to make a movie called "High Midnight" (this is before "High Noon") that Cooper doesn't want to make. Pretty soon bodies start piling up, and it is Peters who is the prime suspect after two of the bodies are found in his apartment. He must find the killer before he either gets killed himself or thrown into jail by his own brother, a Los Angeles cop.

Along the way, Peters bumps into Babe Ruth and Ernest Hemingway, the latter of whom gets involved in a gun battle along with Peters and Cooper, sort of a comic gunfight at the OK Corral. ( )

I've read a few of the STUART KAMINSKY books featuring TOBY PETERS primarily because It evokes the forties era. I was a little boy in the early part of that era and it holds many warm memories for me. I'm a sucker for anything written using that time period. The books themself are easy to read with familiar characters of the era thrown in. ( )