Created by Elizabeth Crowens
Pseudonym of Sheri Lane
For those of you who miss the star-studded, name-dropping Hollywood misadventures of Stuart Kaminsky‘s beloved Toby Peters, you might want to check out Elizabeth Crowens‘ similarly light-hearted novels featuring 1930s and 40s Tinseltown dick BABS NORMAN and her partner, best friend and aspiring actor, GUY BRANDT.
They made their debut in Hounds of the Baskervilles (2024), in which the two young private eyes are hired to find Basil Rathbone’s missing Cocker Spaniel, the apparent victim of a recent rash of celebrity dognappings.
But finding Sherlock Holmes’ missing mutt leads to what may well be their breakout case: finding Asta, the super-popular pooch from MGM’s boffo box office Thin Man series who’s also gone missing. MGM is offering big bucks, and that’s exactly what the fledgling B. Norman Agency desperately needs.
Their second appearance, Bye Bye Blackbird (2025) doubles down on both Hammett and the hard-boiled, when the pair are hired by Humphrey Bogart himself, who wants them to find out what’s behind a series of murders circling the filming of John Huston’s adaptation of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.
Just two books into the series, and the shout-outs (like, Babs’ cat is named Miss Marple) and the name-dropping is already threatening to boil over, with Rathbone, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Hammett, Nigel Bruce, Mary Astor, John Huston, Sydney Greenstreet, Lillian Hellman, Elisha Cook, Jr., Peter Lorre, and Jack L. Warner already called into service. It also suggests this series will be much more tightly focussed on crime fiction and particularly mystery films as their McMuffins rather than Kaminsky’s far more wide-ranging series, which trafficked in everything from politics and sports to espionage and the Cold War, and managed to spotlight everyone from The Marx Brothers to Albert Einstein to Joe Louis and General McArthur.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Crowens flits back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, her short fiction appearing in, among others, Black Belt, Black Gate, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and Hell’s Heart, mostly in the horror, mystery and alternate history genres.
NOVELS
- Hounds of the Baskervilles (2024) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Bye Bye Blackbird (2025) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
