Toby tries to clear a dentist accused of a medieval murder Though an otherwise unremarkable woman, Mildred Minck has the distinction of being the first citizen of Los Angeles to be murdered by crossbow. The police find her dentist husband, Sheldon, standing over the body with the weapon, swearing that only Joan Crawford can identify the real killer. An insanity defense seems a natural fit, but Sheldon wants his neighbor, private investigator Toby...

John Baxter attempts to fulfil his wife's dying wish to find their firstborn son, actor Dayne Matthews embarks on a personal search for truth, and theater director Katy Hart makes a decision that may completely transform her life.

Frank Denby and Groucho Marx arrive on the set of the new Ty-Gor film, a Tarzan knockoff, expecting to have Groucho do his humorous walk-on. What they find is that Randy Spellman, the star of the picture, has been murdered. Frank's wife, Jane, is only a few weeks away from having their baby and the amateur detective team has promised to lay off on the sleuthing. But when a stuntwoman who has gone missing is suspected of the murder, Jane insists they...

Toby hunts for the man who wants to kill a fallen star of silent film As Toby Peters crouches behind a tombstone, hiding from a crazed gunman, the private eye thinks of Charlie Chaplin. A few days earlier, the pioneer of film comedy sat in Toby's office, and told him of the hundreds of people who want him dead. Beloved when his public could not hear him speak, his political leanings have made him a pariah. Right-wing radicals, the Ku Klux Klan, and...

When her marriage to a Hollywood mega-star is over, actress Lizzie Pepper, America's Girl Next Door, decides to tell her side of the story and, in doing so, realizes that her romance wasn't what she and everyone else thought.

Vivien decides to spend a summer with her mother and gets a part in a soap-opera.

After fleeing to California to start a new life, Danny Ryan must decide whether he is going to do the FBI a favor that may make him a fortune or kill him. Danny Ryan, a young widower and mob underboss, has left the East Coast and settled in California with his young son in tow. The move has been good for Danny; in his new base of operations, his power, influence, and wealth have grown. Now he's heading up to Hollywood to rein in two of his crew,...

A film shoot by a world-famous director ends in disaster. It is a movie of Sophocles' Antigone and it is being shot in Pandaemonium, a town in Nevada, by Rudolf von Beckmann, a tyrant. The actor who narrates describes what happens when a director has too much power. By the author of Pinto and Sons.