"Detroiters have as much sense of history as a herd of cattle": a review of Motor City Blue.
From Thursday, 1 August through Saturday, 3 August, I read my first e-book checked out from the library, on my Kindle: the first book in Loren D. Estleman's Detroit-based Amos Walker private eye series, Motor City Blue (NY: Open Road Integrated Media, 2011 [original publication date 1980]; ISBN: 978-1-4532-2261-4; 256 pps.). This was actually a re-read, as I'd previously read it over 25 (*sob!*) years ago.
Motor City Blue is a fun introduction to Amos Walker, an ex-MP and Vietnam veteran in his early 30s who adopts a deliberately retro style as an insurance investigator and private eye; aside from the Chandleresque similes, an office with an always-unlocked waiting room, a fifth of Hiram Walker (no relation, except perhaps via infusion) nestled securely in his desk drawer, an unapologetically old fashioned taste in movies and music, and unabashedly retrograde opinions on feminism and various races, creeds and sexual orientations, Walker is constantly adorned with a trench coat and fedora (indeed, numerous characters make pointed references to his fedora, the kinder comments being along the lines that he's the first person under fifty they've seen wearing one in a dog's age). Estleman's assured writing style is really able to sell this homage / remake of The Big Sleep, with a gleefully twisted plot involving pornographers, prostitutes, a runaway ward of a dying Kosher Nostra gang lord (who has the deceptively Amerindian-sounding name of Ben Morningstar; however, one should recall that "morning star" was one of the names for Lucifer, both of whom were identified with the planet Venus), a resurgent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion (and yes, film fans, reference is made to the 1937 Humphrey Bogart movie about them), and the unsolved murder of a firebrand union organizer named Freeman Shanks. Oh, and a possible case of accident insurance fraud.
I first read Motor City Blue over twenty-five years ago, and, while I enjoyed it, I didn't enjoy it enough to seek out others in the series at the time (although I did go on to read other Loren D. Estleman books, such as the second book in his series about the hitman Peter Macklin, Roses Are Dead -- in many ways still my favorite book by Estleman -- and six of the seven books in his loosely-connected Detroit crime series); I'm not sure why I liked it so much more upon re-reading it: maybe it's because I'm older and a little more appreciative of a well-written story firmly rooted in my (rapidly diminishing) native metropolis; maybe it's because I've come to realize that there's only so many times that I can re-read Raymond Chandler without becoming a dreary cliché; maybe it's because I've read a lot more mediocre or out-and-out lousy books since then, and therefore am not nearly as dismissive of writing that is "merely" solid, entertaining, and craftsmanlike as I used to be. I suspect that people who aren't already enamored of Detroit and its history, warts -- hell, suppurating buboes -- and all, may not be quite as impressed with Motor City Blue as I am. (As another lifelong resident tells Walker, in Chapter 12, "'Call it River Rouge or Ecorse or Hamtramck or Farmington or Dearborn, it's all Detroit and it stinks.'")
Of course, how much you dig Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and the tropes of the hardboiled private eye genre, will also determine how well you like Motor City Blue. While Estleman is far from being as misanthropically provocative as, say, James Ellroy, his Amos Walker isn't exactly politically correct either; if you can't get past Marlowe's ethnic slurs and pejorative references to gays, well, Walker's use of same will likely also piss you off, especially given the fact that Motor City Blue was written some forty-odd years after Marlowe's heyday (The Long Goodbye excepted). Given that some of the main bad guys here are a pair of Georgia crackers relaunching a KKK splinter cell, Walker's prejudicial remarks call to mind the old joke about an alcoholic being someone who drinks more than his doctor: apparently Walker is meant to be just aces with his references to "wops," "sheenies" and "fags," just so long as he doesn't drop the "n-bomb" (or target people for murder based on their ethnicity).
While there are a number of wonderful, often grin-inducing, lines to be found in Motor City Blue, lines that beg to be shared, I'll content myself with citing only one more passage: it's when Walker (who cops to having been named after one half of an old radio show) schools a smart-mouthed ex-cabbie in the employ of Ben Morningstar, in Chapter 13:
"'I'm down at the heels because I'm honest. Some of us are in this business. We're the guys the slick ops in the sharp tailormades hire at the professional courtesy rate of fifty or a hundred a day to do the work their clients engage them at for three hundred. Your boss may can me and throw his green into office bars and computers and flashy receptionists with nothing to do all day but answer the telephone and ball the department head, but he'll still be hiring me or someone like me. He'll just be shelling out more to the middleman. I may charge whiskey to expenses, but when I do I write it out clear and firm on the accounting sheet. He won't get that from anyone in a higher tax bracket.'"
One likes to think that Chandler would have nodded in approval as he read this.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.
Motor City Blue is a fun introduction to Amos Walker, an ex-MP and Vietnam veteran in his early 30s who adopts a deliberately retro style as an insurance investigator and private eye; aside from the Chandleresque similes, an office with an always-unlocked waiting room, a fifth of Hiram Walker (no relation, except perhaps via infusion) nestled securely in his desk drawer, an unapologetically old fashioned taste in movies and music, and unabashedly retrograde opinions on feminism and various races, creeds and sexual orientations, Walker is constantly adorned with a trench coat and fedora (indeed, numerous characters make pointed references to his fedora, the kinder comments being along the lines that he's the first person under fifty they've seen wearing one in a dog's age). Estleman's assured writing style is really able to sell this homage / remake of The Big Sleep, with a gleefully twisted plot involving pornographers, prostitutes, a runaway ward of a dying Kosher Nostra gang lord (who has the deceptively Amerindian-sounding name of Ben Morningstar; however, one should recall that "morning star" was one of the names for Lucifer, both of whom were identified with the planet Venus), a resurgent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion (and yes, film fans, reference is made to the 1937 Humphrey Bogart movie about them), and the unsolved murder of a firebrand union organizer named Freeman Shanks. Oh, and a possible case of accident insurance fraud.
I first read Motor City Blue over twenty-five years ago, and, while I enjoyed it, I didn't enjoy it enough to seek out others in the series at the time (although I did go on to read other Loren D. Estleman books, such as the second book in his series about the hitman Peter Macklin, Roses Are Dead -- in many ways still my favorite book by Estleman -- and six of the seven books in his loosely-connected Detroit crime series); I'm not sure why I liked it so much more upon re-reading it: maybe it's because I'm older and a little more appreciative of a well-written story firmly rooted in my (rapidly diminishing) native metropolis; maybe it's because I've come to realize that there's only so many times that I can re-read Raymond Chandler without becoming a dreary cliché; maybe it's because I've read a lot more mediocre or out-and-out lousy books since then, and therefore am not nearly as dismissive of writing that is "merely" solid, entertaining, and craftsmanlike as I used to be. I suspect that people who aren't already enamored of Detroit and its history, warts -- hell, suppurating buboes -- and all, may not be quite as impressed with Motor City Blue as I am. (As another lifelong resident tells Walker, in Chapter 12, "'Call it River Rouge or Ecorse or Hamtramck or Farmington or Dearborn, it's all Detroit and it stinks.'")
Of course, how much you dig Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and the tropes of the hardboiled private eye genre, will also determine how well you like Motor City Blue. While Estleman is far from being as misanthropically provocative as, say, James Ellroy, his Amos Walker isn't exactly politically correct either; if you can't get past Marlowe's ethnic slurs and pejorative references to gays, well, Walker's use of same will likely also piss you off, especially given the fact that Motor City Blue was written some forty-odd years after Marlowe's heyday (The Long Goodbye excepted). Given that some of the main bad guys here are a pair of Georgia crackers relaunching a KKK splinter cell, Walker's prejudicial remarks call to mind the old joke about an alcoholic being someone who drinks more than his doctor: apparently Walker is meant to be just aces with his references to "wops," "sheenies" and "fags," just so long as he doesn't drop the "n-bomb" (or target people for murder based on their ethnicity).
While there are a number of wonderful, often grin-inducing, lines to be found in Motor City Blue, lines that beg to be shared, I'll content myself with citing only one more passage: it's when Walker (who cops to having been named after one half of an old radio show) schools a smart-mouthed ex-cabbie in the employ of Ben Morningstar, in Chapter 13:
"'I'm down at the heels because I'm honest. Some of us are in this business. We're the guys the slick ops in the sharp tailormades hire at the professional courtesy rate of fifty or a hundred a day to do the work their clients engage them at for three hundred. Your boss may can me and throw his green into office bars and computers and flashy receptionists with nothing to do all day but answer the telephone and ball the department head, but he'll still be hiring me or someone like me. He'll just be shelling out more to the middleman. I may charge whiskey to expenses, but when I do I write it out clear and firm on the accounting sheet. He won't get that from anyone in a higher tax bracket.'"
One likes to think that Chandler would have nodded in approval as he read this.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.