“Never Cross a Vampire,” by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Never Cross a Vampire, by Stuart M. Kaminsky (St. Martin’s Press, 1980). Cover illustration by Joel Iskowitz.

This was the fifth of Kaminsky’s 24 novels starring 1940s Los Angeles gumshoe Toby Peters. It finds the disheveled yet determined Peters (né Pevsner) being called in to help aging Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi. As Bev Hankins recalled in her 2024 review of the tale,

Someone has been sending America’s favorite vampire threatening messages and nasty little packages. Lugosi hires the Hollywood private eye to look into the case. Peters meets a whole group of vampire-wannabes who seem to dote on Hollywood’s Count, but does one of them think they can replace Lugosi as the king of vampires? Before Peters can get very far into the suspects and motives behind the poison pen, he’s asked to take on a second case. This time it’s the murder of an agent and the prime suspect is William Faulkner, a southern author who has decided to try his hand at screenwriting.

I seriously considered including this book (one of my favorite Peters yarns) in Killer Covers’ summer celebration of fictional P.I.s, but ultimately decided to swap it out for its 1979 predecessor, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.