I just saw on the sff.net homepage that Stuart Kaminsky died.  He was one of my writing heroes.  (And before that, he was one of my academic heroes too.)

I’m now extra glad I got to meet him down in Owensboro two years ago at the Discovering New Mysteries drama festival.  I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much, but was ever so pleased that he was on the committee that selected my play to be performed there.

Kaminsky wrote four mystery series, all different, and yet all with the longtime storyteller’s depth of character and setting.

The first, and my favorite was the Hollywood series featuring down on his luck P.I. Toby Peters (or Tobias Pevsner, as he was named at birth).  Kaminsky was a film historian who concentrated on genre, and was one of the first to look at it in terms of academic criticism.  So the Toby Peters books were kind of a segue into writing genre fiction himself.

The series took place in Hollywood, and started just before the war.  Each book “starred” a Hollywood star or two as the client, and at the end of each book, Toby received a call from the star of the next book, propelling him on to the next adventure.  Kaminsky was a meticulous researcher, and these back to back stories moved through real historical time, with Toby hearing radio broadcasts and reading real headlines.

The first one, A Bullet For A Star (featuring Errol Flynn), was moody, tough and sexy, as a hard-boiled novel should be, although a lot of Kaminsky’s natural humor and great sense for the absurd shined through. He dashed through the lovely lunacy of Murder On The Yellow Brick Road (with Judy Garland). By the time of the third book, You Bet Your Life (featuring the Marx Brothers) the humor had fully taken over – although the series never really lost the philosophical weight.

He was a major influence on everything I’ve ever written. There’s an awful lot of Toby in Mick McKee.

The other series were just as meticulously researched, just as grounded in reality.  They were more serious and gave him more outlet for the deeper philosophical existentialism that he did so well – always touched with humor and an understanding of the absurdities of the universe.

While I think he got more acclaim for his Rostnikov books, police procedurals about about detectives in Russia, my other favorite series of his was his Lieberman series – about an elderly Jewish detective in present day Chicago who must deal with the conundrums of family, crooks, fellow cops, victims and congregational politics (although he himself is an agnostic).

I was just getting warmed up to his last series, about Lew Fonesca, a deeply depressed dropout of society who, in his flight from the tragedy of his wife’s death, drove until he ran out of gas in Sarasota. There he would live as a hermit, if he didn’t take occasional jobs as a process server, and as an unlicensed detective.

He wrote a wonderfully dippy (and twisty) play about a bumbling bank robber who takes the denizens of a small bookstore hostage for the Discovering New Mysteries festival. And he wrote other plays, and teleplays, and also media tie-in books for The Rockford Files and Columbo.

I have nearly all of his books, and maybe I will go back to what I used to do, re-reading them slowly, dripping them out one or two a year to make them last while I wait for a new one.  Or maybe I’ll sit down and just read them all again in a row. That will last me quite a while.