Warwick Easton is a cop - a movie cop, that is. When this vaudevillian lands in California, his screen prospects look bleak. But a bathtub meeting with Mack Sennett, lands him a stunts-and-chases job. Danger is to be expected in the work of Keystone Cops - but murder is quite another thing. Put a solemn Englishman into police uniform and thrust him into the crazy world of Keystone Film Studios in 1916 and you have the premise for this novel. The King of Comedy, Mack Sennett, insists on calling the new cop Keystone. But comedy turns swiftly to crime. Shocking things occur that are not in any script – a horrific death on a rollercoaster, a body in a bungalow, the disappearance of a girl, a shooting on a beach. Keystone the cop gets on the trail. His mission: to find the adorable and much abused blonde actress, Amber Honeybee. The action is threaded through the real stories of silent comedy stars Mack Sennett, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand.
Author
Peter (Harmer) Lovesey (born 1936 in Whitton, Middlesex) is a British writer of historical and contemporary crime novels and short stories. His best-known series characters are Sergeant Cribb, a Victorian-era police detective based in London, and Peter Diamond, a modern-day police detective in Bath. Lovesey's novels and stories mainly fall into the category of entertaining puzzlers in the "Golden Age" tradition of mystery writing. He is also well known as a writer of non-fiction histories of track & field athletics and several of his novels have used the sport as a theme. His first-ever book in 1968 was The Kings of Distance, a study of five great runners, Most of Peter Lovesey's writing has been done under his own name. However, he did write three novels under the pen name Peter Lear. Lovesey's novels and short stories have won him a number of awards, including both the Gold and Silver Daggers of the Crime Writers' Association, of which he was chairman in 1991/92. In 2000, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in crime writing and in 2018 he was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. Peter Lovesey lives near Shrewsbury. His son Phil Lovesey also writes crime novels.
