A four-book Donald Westlake (under the Pen Name Samuel Holt) series about Gender Flipped White-Dwarf Starlet Sam Holt, who has spent years suffering from a bad case of Typecasting after the cancellation of his beloved detective series, and finds himself caught up in multiple real-life murder investigations.
Tropes:
- Action Politician: While he isn't a physical fighter, the second book features a prominent politician whose actually dedicated to fighting corruption and comes across as the Hero of Another Story.
- Bury Your Gays: The first victim in the third book is a Butch Lesbian, although several other gay characters appear and survive.
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Cast the Expert: Sam was an actual cop before he got a job playing a detective. - The Comically Serious: Sam's lawyer Morton Adler has his moments.
- Cut Short: Westlake had plans for six novels but only wrote four after his Pen Name was outed, due to having started the series in the first place to write something new, anonymously.
- Engineered Heroics: In What I Tell You Three Times is False, the villain-a struggling actor who is passionate about playing Sherlock Holmes-commits a murder just so that he can solve it and the publicity will give him an In-Universe Career Resurrection.
- Intrepid Reporter: Sam's friend Terry Young, who is eager to tackle murder investigations aimed at prominent figures, and who Sam consults both before and after Terry becomes a suspect in his second case.
- The Jeeves: Sam's valet Robinson, who once played a butler on TV.
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: A friend of Sam goes down this path in the first book after first being kidnapped by a terrorist group wo wants to use his house and then deciding to abet them and cash in on the movie rights.
- Marry Them All: A variant. Sam had a lot of causal girlfriends in his career's prime but has since gone down to two serious girlfriends, Anita in New York and Bly in Los Angeles. He hasn't been able to choose between either of them, and while no one is really happy about it they've settled on a compromise of him being with whichever city he's in at the time.
- Mutual Envy: Envy might be a strong word, but Sam's friend and fellow actor Brett Burgess (who does lots of guest star and bit character stuff) is disappointed that he's never had a big role with a steady paycheck and a lot of fame to it. Sam appreciates how Brett feels, but resents how he suffers from Typecasting that keeps him from getting hired for any new and different rules, while Brett is still an active actor and gets to play a variety of different characters.
- Mystery Magnet: Sam becomes involved in four murder mysteries over the course of about a year.
- Private Detective: Sam's old cop partner (and the murder victim) from the second book, as well as some of his associates who survive by deliberately taking a less active role into his investigation of the mob.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: While there are some bad cops in the series, each book which has any police presence has at least a few who take Sam seriously.
- Ten Little Murder Victims: The third book has Sam and several other actors who play detectives (and their significant others) filming a commercial on an island when they get stranded there and people start being murdered.
- Typecasting: Exaggerated to the point of parody. Sam has been unable to get any acting roles besides his criminologist role Packard (a character he's tired of playing) since his show stopped due to being so connected with that role.
