Recommend a good detective/police procedural series

quote:

---

He got canned, got married, got divorced, got a job as security guard at Warner Brothers, got the boot by Jack Warner himself after Toby broke the arm of some cowboy star who "made the mistake of thinking he was as tough in person as on the screen." Down on his luck, running out of options, Toby set up shop as a private eye, not particularly fussy about the kind of cases he takes.

The books work well as good old-fashioned, b-movie entertainment. Not too heavy, straight-forward plots, full of colourful characters, who pop in and out of the series. You can just picture character actors playing these roles. Toby still carries a flame for Ann, his ex-wife; but has a thing for Carmen, a waitress. Meanwhile, his brother Phil is a Homicide dick out of the Wiltshire Police district whose favorite means of dealing with Toby is slapping him around. Then there's Mrs. Plaut, Toby's deaf landlady who calls him Mr. Peelers; Jeremy, the sensitive, muscle-bound poet/janitor and former professional wrestler; Gunther, the multi-lingual Swiss midget, and Toby's best friend; and Sheldon Minck, cigar-chomping, alcoholic, nearly-blind, incompetent, grubby dentist/oral surgeon who shares an office with Toby.

The whole series reeks of popcorn. If you love old movies, this series is a blast from the past!

---

quote:

---

Though not as doggedly determined as Sam Spade or as quick with the quip as Philip Marlowe, hard-boiled private eye Toby Peters investigates the most entertaining cases because his beat is Hollywood during the Golden Age. While working for such legendary stars as Errol Flynn or Mae West, Toby rubs elbows with other real-life film actors or powerful film industry personnel, offering an inside look at Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. The hapless private detective was the creation of mystery novelist and screenwriter Stuart Kaminsky, who wrote 24 Toby Peters novels between 1977 and 2004.

Kaminsky was more than a mystery novelist. He was also a screenwriter and a professor of film. I was fortunate enough to be one of his graduate students when he taught at Northwestern University. During my first year in the program, my classmates and I were intrigued with our mystery-writing professor and eagerly devoured his first few Toby Peters novels. While I enjoyed the interaction of a fictional private eye with real-life movie stars, relishing the nostalgia, I didn’t realize just how clever they were. Sadly, Stuart Kaminsky died in October 2009... His death prompted me to revisit the Toby Peters mysteries, and I discovered that no book series could be more irresistible to movie lovers of all types, from the film historian to the star-struck fan.

---