High Midnight — Stuart M. Kaminsky

A forties Hollywood PI does not forsake Gary Cooper: “Like all of Toby [Peters’s] adventures, High Midnight is high entertainment” (The Cincinnati Post).   When laconic leading man Gary Cooper needs a detective, he does the smart thing and hires Toby Peters, sleuth to the stars. But the man he finds in Peters’s office isn’t the famously discreet private eye—it’s the dentist who shares his office, who’s always had a fantasy of playing gumshoe, and happily agrees to take care of Cooper’s blackmail problem. Impersonating Peters, the dentist bungles the case disastrously, and setting it right will be like pulling teeth.   Cooper is in trouble with a Chicago gangster named Lombardi, who’s come to Los Angeles intending to set himself up as the cold cuts king of California. Thanks to the dentist’s meddling, he wants the actor dead. When Cooper hightails it with his old drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway, it’s up to Peters to avoid a showdown.  High Midnight shows once again how Edgar Award winner Stuart M. Kaminsky “has a delightfully original mind enriching—rather than just borrowing from—an old literary form” (Los Angeles Times).