Bullet for a Star

Hollywood detectiveToby Peters does a job for one of Tinseltown’s finest

It’s been four years since security guard Toby Peters got fired from the Warner Brothers lot for breaking a screen cowboy’s arm. Since then he’s scratched out a living as a private detective--missing persons and bodyguard work, mostly--but now his old friends, the Warners, have a job for him. Someone has mailed the studio a picture of Errol Flynn caught in a compromising position with a very young girl. Although Flynn insists it’s a fake, the studio is taking no chances. Toby is to deliver the blackmailer ＄5,000 and return with the photo negative. It should be simple, but Flynn, a swashbuckler on and off the screen, has a way of making things complicated. Though he isn’t impressed by movie stars, if Toby Peters isn’t careful he may end up dying for one.

Stuart 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. Kaminsky 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.