Stuart Kaminsky; Guardian obit with an interesting correction
Hyfler/Rosner
Michael Carlson
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 October 2009 18.48 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/28/stuart-kaminsky-obituary
Stuart Kaminsky wrote the English dialogue for Once Upon a
Time in America. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros
The author of more than 70 books, including four different
detective series, Stuart Kaminsky, who has died aged 75,
wrote in the tradition of the pulp wordsmiths. His first
series, featuring the shabby private eye Toby Peters, was
set in 1940s Hollywood and reflected that era's
light-hearted, fast-paced crime stories. Kaminsky came to
detective fiction from academia, but the ease of his prose
was anything but academic, belying the scholarship behind
his work and the depth of his characterisation.
He was born on Chicago's west side. He inherited his love of
detective fiction from his father, who devoured pulp mystery
magazines. He was drafted after high school and served as a
medic in France. After graduating from the University of
Illinois at Chicago, and periods working in public relations
and as a photographer for a Milwaukee newspaper, he received
his PhD in 1972 from Northwestern University. His
dissertation was on the film director Don Siegel, which
began a long friendship.
Kaminsky taught in the new film programme at Northwestern
and published biographical studies of Siegel and Clint
Eastwood, as well as a groundbreaking study, American Film
Genres (1974). He edited a critical study of Ingmar Bergman
and wrote biographies of John Huston and Gary Cooper. During
this time he also wrote five novels, none of which was
published, with one rejected as "pretentious". When plans
for an official biography of Charlton Heston fell through,
he wrote Bullet for a Star, the first Peters novel, in just
three weeks. It was published in 1977 and was an immediate
hit with fans of the genre.
Kaminsky described Peters, whose names came from the
author's two sons, as "the anti-Philip Marlowe" - a
muddling, unglamorous detective operating in Hollywood's
glitzy heyday. Inspired by Andrew Bergman's two recent
novels about the 1940s private investigator Jack LeVine, the
series reflected Kaminsky's knowledge of film and his love
for the pulps. The books featured offbeat stock characters,
including Peters's brother, a Los Angeles detective who
resents Toby changing his family name of Pevsner. Over 24
novels, Peters encountered celebrities as disparate as Joe
Louis, Albert Einstein, Salvador Dal� and Joan Crawford (in
the 2003 title Mildred Pierced). The last Peters novel, Now
You See It, was published in 2004.
Death of a Dissident, Kaminsky's first novel featuring the
Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, was published in
1981, coincidentally just after Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky
Park. As a paperback original, it was lost in that book's
acclaim, but one of the later Rostnikov novels, A Cold Red
Sunrise, won the 1989 Edgar award. They were written
entirely from research. When Kaminsky finally visited Russia
in the 1990s, he took great pleasure in being introduced at
a journalists' lunch as "the man who knows more about this
city than any of us sitting here". The 16th Rostnikov novel,
A Whisper to the Living, is due to be published next year.
The Siegel connection led Kaminsky to work with Sergio Leone
on the Italian director's final film, the gangster epic Once
Upon a Time in America (1984), for which Kaminsky wrote the
English dialogue. In the 1980s he published his only two
non-series novels: When the Dark Man Calls (1983) became the
French film Fr�quence Meurtre (1988), starring Catherine
Deneuve, and was remade as a TV movie in 1995, while
Exercise in Terror (1985) was filmed as Hidden Fears (1993).
He also wrote screenplays for Enemy Territory (1987) and
Woman in the Wind (1990).
One of Kaminsky's students was Sara Paretsky, who produced
her first novel, the bestselling Indemnity Only (1982),
about the detective VI Warshawski, while attending his
writing classes at Northwestern, and dedicated it to her
tutor. In 1989 he moved from Chicago to Sarasota, Florida,
and taught film at Florida State University. He wrote books
on film and TV production, as well as American Television
Genres (1991).
Kaminsky began two more series which drew closely on his
background. Lieberman's Folly (1990) introduced the Jewish
Chicago cop Abe Lieberman, based on Siegel, and his Irish
partner Bill Hanrahan. Nine further novels about the pair
followed. Vengeance (1999) was the first of six books about
Lew Fonesca, a low-rent private eye in Florida. He also
wrote two novels continuing the popular TV series The
Rockford Files, and three based on CSI: New York.
In Sarasota he was active in a writers' group, The Liars
Club, and he also wrote a number of plays, including You Can
Run But You Can't Hide, about Joe Louis. With his second
wife, Enid Perll, he started a publishing venture, Mystery
Vault, reprinting neglected crime classics and original
fiction. In 2006 he was named a grand master by the Mystery
Writers of America.
Kaminsky had contracted hepatitis C while serving as a medic
in France after university and suffered a stroke earlier
this year while waiting for a liver transplant. He is
survived by Enid, their daughter, Natasha, and his two sons
and another daughter, Lucy, by his first marriage.
. Stuart Melvin Kaminsky, novelist, born 29 September 1934;
died 9 October 2009
. This article was amended on 29 October 2009. The original
stated that Stuart Kaminsky was a conscientious objector.
This has been corrected.