Riot in the Arsenal: a review of Loren D. Estleman's Jitterbug.
I read Jitterbug by Loren D. Estleman (NY: Forge (Tom Doherty Associates), 2000 [first published in hardcover October 1998; first mass market paperback edition published February 2000]; ISBN: 0-812-54537-0; 303 pps.) from Monday, 20 July through Friday, 24 July.
The 6th book in order of publication of Loren D. Estleman's loosely-connected Detroit Crime series (and chronologically the third of seven in the series), Jitterbug is a look at Detroit in 1943, plagued by a fictional psycho-killer obsessed with life during wartime, who is hunted by a not too racist police lieutenant named Zagreb who heads up a special four-man team called the Detroit Racket Squad (dubbed "the Four Horsemen" by the local press); the city is under considerable strain due to the influx of workers from the southern states (one of whom, a serious young black man named Dwight Littlejohn, is the book's third tight third person POV), lured by high-paying factory jobs in the various plants of "the Arsenal of Democracy": the Ku Klux Klan led a walkout by some 25,000 white workers that shut down the Packard plant in April of that year, and the black neighborhood and nightclub district of Paradise Valley was the target of racist animosity....
Jitterbug is a quick, entertaining novel festooned with crisp, chuckle-worthy dialogue that is often profane and always proudly un-PC ("politically correct") that isn't so much a detective story or thriller as it is the story of city undergoing some major transformations thanks to an endless river of government contracts and a concomitant stream of even more ethnicities than had already swelled the city's population in the previous few decades. Detroit itself is the major and most believable character here (contrary to the blurb from the Chicago Tribune on the front cover of the mass market paperback edition). If you have an interest in Detroit and Detroit-area history, Jitterbug will likely tickle your fancy and leave you wanting more -- but more stories of the real people that left their mark, for good or ill, on the city (particularly Harry Bennett, Henry Ford's much-feared hatchet man and de facto leader of the Ford Motor Company), not of Estleman's serviceable but ultimately unremarkable cut-outs. (Although his grizzled reporter Connie Minor, who played memorable roles in Whiskey River and Edsel, makes a welcome, Gandalf-like cameo appearance in Chapter Twenty to fill in the readers on a bit of back-story and give the lieutenant some pointers in his murder investigation.)
Estleman trots out so much of his research in the pages of Jitterbug, name-checking an encyclopedia-like roster of 1940s-era athletes, politicians, businessmen, musicians and brand names (Sealtest milk!), that it threatens to turn into a piece for Nostalgia Illustrated; even if you have a liking for such minutiae, it eventually becomes cumbersome: an otaku-esque / Rain Man-like list-making exercise whose ultimate purpose is to beat the reader/listener into submission. One can't help but observe that Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett forbore from such almost ritualistic attempts to ground their narratives to a specific time, and that an overzealous effort to do so comes off at best as special pleading.
That said, time spent reading an Estleman book is rarely time wasted, and for my money, he should be the Detroit-area crime/detective/western writer getting the big love from critics, hipsters and Hollywood, not Elmore ("Dutch") Leonard. But what do I know?
The 6th book in order of publication of Loren D. Estleman's loosely-connected Detroit Crime series (and chronologically the third of seven in the series), Jitterbug is a look at Detroit in 1943, plagued by a fictional psycho-killer obsessed with life during wartime, who is hunted by a not too racist police lieutenant named Zagreb who heads up a special four-man team called the Detroit Racket Squad (dubbed "the Four Horsemen" by the local press); the city is under considerable strain due to the influx of workers from the southern states (one of whom, a serious young black man named Dwight Littlejohn, is the book's third tight third person POV), lured by high-paying factory jobs in the various plants of "the Arsenal of Democracy": the Ku Klux Klan led a walkout by some 25,000 white workers that shut down the Packard plant in April of that year, and the black neighborhood and nightclub district of Paradise Valley was the target of racist animosity....
Jitterbug is a quick, entertaining novel festooned with crisp, chuckle-worthy dialogue that is often profane and always proudly un-PC ("politically correct") that isn't so much a detective story or thriller as it is the story of city undergoing some major transformations thanks to an endless river of government contracts and a concomitant stream of even more ethnicities than had already swelled the city's population in the previous few decades. Detroit itself is the major and most believable character here (contrary to the blurb from the Chicago Tribune on the front cover of the mass market paperback edition). If you have an interest in Detroit and Detroit-area history, Jitterbug will likely tickle your fancy and leave you wanting more -- but more stories of the real people that left their mark, for good or ill, on the city (particularly Harry Bennett, Henry Ford's much-feared hatchet man and de facto leader of the Ford Motor Company), not of Estleman's serviceable but ultimately unremarkable cut-outs. (Although his grizzled reporter Connie Minor, who played memorable roles in Whiskey River and Edsel, makes a welcome, Gandalf-like cameo appearance in Chapter Twenty to fill in the readers on a bit of back-story and give the lieutenant some pointers in his murder investigation.)
Estleman trots out so much of his research in the pages of Jitterbug, name-checking an encyclopedia-like roster of 1940s-era athletes, politicians, businessmen, musicians and brand names (Sealtest milk!), that it threatens to turn into a piece for Nostalgia Illustrated; even if you have a liking for such minutiae, it eventually becomes cumbersome: an otaku-esque / Rain Man-like list-making exercise whose ultimate purpose is to beat the reader/listener into submission. One can't help but observe that Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett forbore from such almost ritualistic attempts to ground their narratives to a specific time, and that an overzealous effort to do so comes off at best as special pleading.
That said, time spent reading an Estleman book is rarely time wasted, and for my money, he should be the Detroit-area crime/detective/western writer getting the big love from critics, hipsters and Hollywood, not Elmore ("Dutch") Leonard. But what do I know?