The year is 1940. When a Munchkin is murdered, Los Angeles-based private eye Toby Peters is called before the real-life Wizard of Oz himself, legendary MGM head Louis B. Mayer in Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.
With help from none other than Judy Garland, Clark (You Made Me Love You!) Gable, and Raymond Chandler, Peters follows -- as the book description reads -- “a treacherous trail of clues … one as winding as the Yellow Brick Road, and deadlier than a field of poppies” to find a murderer even wickeder than the Wicked Witch of the West.
Have you ever heard those bizarre stories about a Munchkin suicide taking place during the filming of the Wizard of Oz?
Margaret Hamilton was badly burned when her flammable green makeup ignited, and the originally cast Tin Man, Buddy Ebsen, was sickened by his silver makeup, but absolutely no Munchlins were harmed in the making of this film!
At the end of the scene where the Tin Man has rusted shut and Dorothy oils him back to life, as the three main characters move down the road there is an image off in the background that many claimed was a hanged body – that of a munchkin who killed himself over a love affair gone bad.
Better quality prints and digitized copies of the film reveal that it simply one of the larger birds that the Los Angeles Zoo loaned MGM to give the indoor set used in this sequence a more "outdoorsy" feel.
So much for that mystery.
One of Barbara D’Amato’s freelance Chicago reporter Cat Marsala mysteries, Hard Road, also has an Oz theme.
Cat tracks down the unknown assailant who disrupted an annual Oz Festival by killing its security chief and attempting to murder the reporter herself.
In the telling of her story, D’Amato pays tribute to the extraordinary imagination of L. Frank Baum.
Hard Road includes an appreciation of Baum by D'Amato's son, Brian, and a 20-question quiz at the end – which you will surely ace after participating in this year’s Westport Reads Oz celebration.