A good start

In the brief first chapter of Bullet for a Star (1977), Stuart Kaminsky works Charlton Heston, William Faulkner, Pat O'Brien and Errol Flynn into the story, setting the pattern for the 23 other name-dropping Toby Peters mysteries that would follow.

Peters is a private investigator based in Hollywood during the 1940s whose cases always involve movie stars or other famous people from that era. In Bullet for a Star, Errol Flynn is being blackmailed with a fake photograph showing him in a compromising situation with an underage girl, and the studio hires Peters to pay the money and retrieve the photo and the negative. It's not that simple, of course, and soon there are a series of murders, with Peters himself becoming the main suspect.

Always complicating these novels is the fact that our hero's brother is a homicide detective with a love-hate relationship with Toby. Sheldon Minck, the hapless dentist with whom Peters shares an office, appears briefly, while other regulars in this wonderful series have yet to be introduced.

This first Toby Peters adventure, if not as funny as those that would follow, sets the pattern. Why the first book in the series remained unread by me for so long I cannot explain.