The Mensch Who Liked Egg Creams

k A INTERNATIONAL Crime ?l Mystery . MADISON DAVIS The Mensch Who Liked egg Creams: Memories of Stuart Kamin sky The first time I met Stuart Kaminsky (1934-2009) was inSpain, about twentyyears ago. Iwas new to the mystery game and basking in the warm acceptance ofmy first novel when Iwas invited to attend the Semana Negra, that grand carnival held each year to celebrate the "black" or crime novel. Authors from around the world gathered inMadrid and got aboard the "black train" for the long ride toGij?n on thenorthern coast. The train was a special one, normally set aside for theking of Spain, with beautiful woodwork, linen-covered dining tables, and free-flowing wine. Despite all the attention Stuartwas drawing from the international writ ers and criticsaswell as theSpanish press, he seemed much more con cernedwith the comfortof his wife, Enid Peril, and theiryoung daughter Natasha, whom I remember wearing a dress likeAlice inWonderland's and charming even the most super cilious authors. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the cel ebrated Mexican novelist and driv ing forcebehind theSemana Negra, promised Stuart a special gifton his arrival at the festivalgrounds, and it turned out tobe a big gift?literally. The gates to the festival grounds were built in the formofgiant books, tall as theGate of Ishtar,and one of them was Stuart's Never Cross a Vam pire. If I remember correctly, there were only three other "books": Ray mond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, a novel by Spain's Manuel Vazquez Montalb?n, and, I think,The Mal tese Falcon. Stuart seemed amused by the honor, but he had to be pleased. Annually for several years, thousands of people walked past an Oldenburg-sized Jam?s te cruces con un vampiro, with Bela Lugosi staring out at them from the cover. Of the hundreds of thousands of crime writers since Poe, the Sema na Negra had placed Stuart in a special class. The division between "high" and "low" culture is a peren nial issue of contention inEuropean crime writing circles. Can a detec tive novel be considered literature? Many European crimewriters push hard against the confinement of popular culture toa ghetto, and Stu art's Toby Peters novels represented the union of high and low, the cre ation of a new category?"without borders," as Paco Taibo would say. Toby Peters, with the firstnames of Stuart's two sons, is a fictional detective who works Hollywood in the 1940s. Throughout the two-doz en novels, he encounters the great movie stars from JoanCrawford to John Wayne toBela Lugosi. Because* Stuart was a profes sor of film,many people wrongly assumed that his characterizations of the legends of Hollywood were authentic. However, Stuart made it clear at every opportunity that he based them upon the popular images of these stars. The disso nance between persons and their World Literature Today public personae can be enormous, as the current obsession with the Tiger Woods story proves. Even a celebrity can believe his own per sona, which is why so many of them end up searching the cracks in an analyst's couch forthecoins of their identities. Kirk Douglas once recounted reminding JohnWayne (who had just criticized Douglas's choice to play the "suicidal wimp" Van Gogh), "John,we're not tough guys. We play tough guys." There is a level of sophisticated postmod ernism in Stuart's embracing the fictional identities of real people in a fictional context. It is easily under estimated by those who mistaken ly insist that realism is the highest value in fiction. The Toby Peters serieswas just one of thepopular series by Stuart. In 1981, the same year inwhich Mar tinCruz Smith roared through the best-seller lists with GorkyPark, Stu art began the Inspector Rostnikov series, similarly set in the Soviet Union. Rostnikov continued through fifteennovels (the sixteenthwill be published posthumously), and the 1989 installment, A Cold Red Sunrise, won an Edgar Allan Poe award for best novel. Stuart's Abe Lieberman, a Chicago policeman, appears in ten novels., and Lew Fonesca, a process server in Sarasota, Florida, in six. Stuart also wrote three CSI: New Yorknovels, a couple ofRockford Files novels, a variety of nonfiction

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