Toby Peters Mystery
16 primary works • 24 total works
The year is 1940 and Los Angeles-based private eye Toby Peters has been asked to track down a murderer stalking the back lots of one of Hollywood's most powerful movie companies. This is the first paperback publication of a noir classic which has been out of print for over 12 years.
Hollywood gumshoe Toby Peters - who has played sleuth to such movie luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, the Marx Brothers, Bette Davis, Mae West and Charlie Chaplin - now finds himself working for Cary Grant. The assignment seems simple enough - Grant merely wants Toby to deliver a package and pick up an envelope at Elysian Park in the middle of the night. But at the critical moment of the exchange, a shot rings out and Toby finds himself with a corpse on his hands, a lump on his head, grass in his mouth and a dying man's words - the name George Hall - on his mind. Now in pursuit of a murderer, Toby and Cary Grant follow a trail of clues that leads them to a second dead body, a nest of Nazi sympathisers, and finally to a nighttime confrontation with a determined and well-armed killer on the grounds of an estate at the edge of Laurel Canyon. As always, Toby can count on the aid of his friends: a melancholy dentist; a huge wrestler-turned-poet; a suave, multilingual, Swiss little person; and Mrs Irene Plaut, Toby's daffy but dogged landlady.
All four lend Toby their dubious talents in a riotous plot that brings the hapless private eye and unflappable Cary Grant to a genuinely cliffhanging climax.
All four lend Toby their dubious talents in a riotous plot that brings the hapless private eye and unflappable Cary Grant to a genuinely cliffhanging climax.