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A Fatal Glass of Beer

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

WC Fields may be Hollywood's reigning jester, but he's no fool. For forty years he's cached over a million dollars of his lucre under assumed names in dozens of banks all over the country. The verdant towns have names like Coshocton, Ohio, and Rifle, Colorado. The noms de guerre have the distinctively Fieldsien ring of Otis Cribblecobblis, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham. But now a man who calls himself Lester O. Hipnoodle, a public menace with a maddeningly unspecified score to settle, has somehow lifted the great man's bankbooks and roams the nation cleaning out Fields' deposits.

America's flying fortresses successfully bomb the Nazi port of Rotterdam. In North Africa, General Montgomery advances on Rommel. British subs sink six Axis ships in the Mediterranean. And Toby Peters, the not always gainfully employed sleuth to the stars, has an assignment-get back Fields' money. From Altoona to Ottumwa, from Panguitch to Lompoc, Toby maneuvers a Cadillac sedan in the company of the martini-tippling, Indian club-juggling, pontificating Fields.

Hipnoodle taunts them with tantalizing clues and harries them with the occasional bullet. The ugly specter of the Ku Klux Klan and the immortal profile of John Barrymore cast their enigmatic shadows across their path. As Peters and Fields pursue their quarry, an additional, mysterious desperado lights on their tail, whose interest lies no so much in grabbing Fields' fortune as in canceling his-and Toby's-accounts. Permanently.

In the words of the perspicacious WC: "A glass of beer could be fatal and then where would the lovely urchins be?"

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 28, 1997
      The 20th appearance of Toby Peters, Hollywood's Golden Age PI, begins on April 1, 1943, and traces Peters's road trip with W.C. Fields as they try to catch up with the thief who is emptying out bank accounts the comedian has stashed in different states throughout the country. From L.A. to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska and Utah, they and their driver, multilingual Swiss midget Gunther Wherthman, remain just a step behind the man who assumes Fields's identity and cleans out one account after another, and only one step in front of Fields's former driver whom they thought had stayed in L.A. A murder in Iowa reveals that John Barrymore had been involved in what was intended as an elaborate caper. After stumbling into a KKK rally in Nebraska, the threesome learn that yet another party is involved in the thievery and are involved in a second homicide. Back in L.A., Toby connects up with his police detective brother and determines where the April Fool's Day joke turned into a fatally serious game. Kaminsky (Dancing in the Dark) balances one-liners from Fields with headlines about the war effort in this amiable adventure that delivers a nicely twisted plot with fully dimensioned characters, including the usually caricatured misanthropic comedian.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This is another entry in a series of mysteries set in old Hollywood; each features one or several famous movie actors or actresses. Here it's W.C. Fields, whose old bank accounts around the country are being looted. The story is routine; the joy comes from realistic contact with the great ones, and Kaminsky nicely captures Fields in all his eccentricities. Reader George Guidall does, too, enunciating Fields's famous intonation. The listener delights in that wonderful drawl and use of multisyllabic words. Guidall handles the other characters with equal ease. D.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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