"Only priests hear the truth the first time through": a review of Estleman's Angel Eyes.
On Saturday, 3 August, I read the second book in Loren Estleman's Amos Walker series, Angel Eyes (NY: Open Road Integrated Media; 2011 [original publication date 1981]; ISBN: 978-1-4532-2253-9; 200 pps.), another e-book checked out via inter-library loan.
The second book in Loren D. Estleman's series about a Detroit-based Vietnam vet / retro PI named Amos Walker, Angel Eyes is a quick potboiler about a dancer at an underground nightclub who hires Walker to find her before she disappears; the case is tied in with the disappearance of a judge en route to a fishing expedition in Canada and the embattled head of the Steelhaulers Union. Along the way Walker confronts detectives who have little use for the Miranda and Escobedo rulings, a shifty nightclub owner, union legbreakers, the wife, stepson and lawyer of the missing and presumed dead judge, and a blow-dried ex-actor now working for a high-priced and ethically shaky investigative firm out of Michigan's capital, Lansing.
Angel Eyes is another appealingly retro installment in the Amos Walker series that manages to dial down the explicit references to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe that festooned the previous book, Motor City Blue; the title is of course a reference to the Sinatra standard (not the ABBA song), as well as to the oddball client in question: the book could've just as easily been titled "Excuse Me While I Disappear," although that wouldn't be quite as euphonious. If I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did Motor City Blue, it's probably because I missed the more overt riffs on Chandler, which Estleman handled far better than Philip Kerr did in his first Bernie Gunther book, March Violets, and because the big reveal wasn't quite as shocking or hellzapoppin' as that of Motor City Blue.
Make no mistake, Angel Eyes is a worthwhile beach / airplane read: the writing is still solid, we learn a little bit more about the tough, though fair and compassionate, Walker, and there are still a fair number of pithy, quotable lines (a Detroit homicide detective, grilling Walker, tells him, "'It's a short step from accepting money to poke around in other people's lives to accepting money to end them,'" in Chapter 2), salted in with some authorial editorializing (Walker tells his client, Ann Maringer, "'I do promise a day's work for a day's pay, which means I don't belong to a union,'" and "'With today's technology a competent investigator should be able to pick up a trail within a few days in most cases. Unless the FBI or the CIA or some other federal agency is involved in the disappearance, in which case he ought to have something in an hour or two. The more tightly the cloak-and-dagger boys try to pull wraps over something, the easier it is to uncover. It didn't used to be that way, but we only get one J. Edgar Hoover to a century,'" [Chapter 1 for both]); but the energy level and the intricacy of the plotting are a step down from Motor City Blue, and as such, Angel Eyes must be considered a lesser effort.
Still, a lesser effort by Estleman is at least the equal of the best efforts of most of the practitioners of the genre, and even Chandler turned out some clunkers in his time. If you've a liking for classic noir and aren't averse to some relatively contemporary (given that it's set in the late 1970s or very early 1980s) grit and political skulduggery, by all means, give Angel Eyes a try.
The second book in Loren D. Estleman's series about a Detroit-based Vietnam vet / retro PI named Amos Walker, Angel Eyes is a quick potboiler about a dancer at an underground nightclub who hires Walker to find her before she disappears; the case is tied in with the disappearance of a judge en route to a fishing expedition in Canada and the embattled head of the Steelhaulers Union. Along the way Walker confronts detectives who have little use for the Miranda and Escobedo rulings, a shifty nightclub owner, union legbreakers, the wife, stepson and lawyer of the missing and presumed dead judge, and a blow-dried ex-actor now working for a high-priced and ethically shaky investigative firm out of Michigan's capital, Lansing.
Angel Eyes is another appealingly retro installment in the Amos Walker series that manages to dial down the explicit references to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe that festooned the previous book, Motor City Blue; the title is of course a reference to the Sinatra standard (not the ABBA song), as well as to the oddball client in question: the book could've just as easily been titled "Excuse Me While I Disappear," although that wouldn't be quite as euphonious. If I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did Motor City Blue, it's probably because I missed the more overt riffs on Chandler, which Estleman handled far better than Philip Kerr did in his first Bernie Gunther book, March Violets, and because the big reveal wasn't quite as shocking or hellzapoppin' as that of Motor City Blue.
Make no mistake, Angel Eyes is a worthwhile beach / airplane read: the writing is still solid, we learn a little bit more about the tough, though fair and compassionate, Walker, and there are still a fair number of pithy, quotable lines (a Detroit homicide detective, grilling Walker, tells him, "'It's a short step from accepting money to poke around in other people's lives to accepting money to end them,'" in Chapter 2), salted in with some authorial editorializing (Walker tells his client, Ann Maringer, "'I do promise a day's work for a day's pay, which means I don't belong to a union,'" and "'With today's technology a competent investigator should be able to pick up a trail within a few days in most cases. Unless the FBI or the CIA or some other federal agency is involved in the disappearance, in which case he ought to have something in an hour or two. The more tightly the cloak-and-dagger boys try to pull wraps over something, the easier it is to uncover. It didn't used to be that way, but we only get one J. Edgar Hoover to a century,'" [Chapter 1 for both]); but the energy level and the intricacy of the plotting are a step down from Motor City Blue, and as such, Angel Eyes must be considered a lesser effort.
Still, a lesser effort by Estleman is at least the equal of the best efforts of most of the practitioners of the genre, and even Chandler turned out some clunkers in his time. If you've a liking for classic noir and aren't averse to some relatively contemporary (given that it's set in the late 1970s or very early 1980s) grit and political skulduggery, by all means, give Angel Eyes a try.