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Product Description
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.
Amazon.com Review
Toby Peters has rubbed elbows with, and taken a beating for, most of the brightest stars from Hollywood's 1940s heyday. Judy Garland, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Charlie Chaplin--this disheveled, taco-gulping L.A. private eye has worked for them all. Usually to his regret. In Stuart M. Kaminsky's wacky but charming To Catch a Spy, he adds the terminally suave Cary Grant to his client list.
As 1943 comes to an end, with Allied bombs battering Berlin and Americans celebrating a new pork bonus among their wartime food stamps, Grant hires Peters to make a late-night swap of money for "compromising documents." ("I'm not being blackmailed over some crime or sexual indiscretion," Grant insists. "It's more important than that.") However, the mysterious messenger is shot before he can hand Peters the papers. His dying words: "George Hall." It's only the vaguest of clues, but enough to send Toby and Grant--who's working for British Intelligence Services--on a bungling chase that leads to a second corpse, a cabal of Nazi sympathizers, and a perilous confrontation on a moonlit precipice. What's most remarkable about this 22nd Peters outing is that it's just as welcome as the first, 1977's Bullet for a Star. Kaminsky, a film historian, employs his knowledge of Tinsel Town's "golden age" to both nostalgic and comic effect. More lighthearted than 2001's A Few Minutes Past Midnight, but still featuring Kaminsky's usually suspect cast of supporting eccentrics--including Irene Plaut, Toby's addled landlady, and dentist-from-hell Shelly Minck--To Catch a Spy is Raymond Chandler by way of the Marx Brothers. --J. Kingston Pierce
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