Anchorman blues: a review of Loren D. Estleman's The Glass Highway.
From Tuesday 20 August to Saturday, 24 August, I read the fourth book in the Amos Walker series by Loren D. Estleman, The Glass Highway (NY: Open Road Integrated Media, 2011 [originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1983; 179 pps.]; ISBN: 978-1-4532-2255-3; 240 pps.); this was an e-book that I borrowed from the library.
The Glass Highway is the fourth book in Loren D. Estleman's long-running series about the Detroit-based PI Amos Walker; readers with even a nodding acquaintance with the private eye or mystery genres will recognize a tip of Estleman's fedora to a Dashiell Hammett book, 1931's The Glass Key (filmed twice under this title, in 1935 and 1942; it also served as the plot template for the 1990 Coen Brothers movie Miller's Crossing).
In The Glass Highway, a hot-shot television news anchor named Sandy Broderick, transplanted from California to Detroit, hires Walker just before Christmas to find his estranged son Bud (that's his legal first name), whom he and his ex-wife fear is involved with a drug-addicted older woman named Paula Royce: the twenty-something's mother fears for his health and virtue; Bud's father, the news anchor, fears a scandal and a career derailment should it become public knowledge that his "own son is humping a junkie -- if that's what she is -- and possibly dropping the stuff himself" (Chapter 2), primarily because he's trying to wangle a syndication deal for his new anti-drug, crime-stopping show. The case is complicated by Bud's statuesque stepsister, Fern Esterhazy, Paula herself, Walker's contretemps with the corrupt police in a fictional Detroit suburb named Iroquois Heights, some federal agents, and a quietly psychotic martial artist named Fletcher Horn. Throw in a subplot about Colombians moving into Detroit's drug trade, along with Estleman's usual snappy patter and hard-boiled dialogue, and you've got another enjoyable, if not stellar, installment in the life and times of Amos Walker.
The Glass Highway was better than the second book, Angel Eyes, but not quite as good as the third installment, The Midnight Man; the first book, Motor City Blue, is still the best in the series so far. (I'd give The Glass Highway a rating of 3.25 out of 5 stars, with 5 being the highest rating.) Estleman evokes Hammett in more than just his title: he invents a Detroit suburb named Iroquois Heights to serve the same role that "Poisonville" did in Hammett's 1929 Continental Op novel, Red Harvest. As a lifelong metro Detroiter, I'm naturally curious as to whether Estleman was slagging off an existent suburb and merely coined an alias to protect said city's officials' tender feelings, and himself from a libel suit. (Based on his jeremiad against Iroquois Heights, I suspect either Dearborn Heights or Ferndale as being the real-life models for it; given the fact that he locates Iroquois Heights in a different county than Detroit, Ferndale might be the more likely candidate, unless the different county business was a bit of misdirection.) It's worth quoting Walker's editorial paragraph on Iroquois Heights, at the beginning of Chapter 6:
"Iroquois Heights was the kind of place you wanted to live in if you were in the forty percent bracket and you didn't care which pies your local public servants had their fingers in so long as they kept their campaign volunteers off your doorstep and the neighbor's junkie kid away from your stereo. It was one of those jut-jawed little communities that advertised on television warning lawbreakers to steer clear of the city, and at election time they put teeth in it by raiding some giggle parlor or other that was casting too big a shadow. There was a newspaper, but it was part of a chain belonging to a sometime political hopeful and its editors had stiff necks from looking the other way. The streets were clean, the homes were kept up, and every block had a young oak growing out of a box on the sidewalk. From the mayor to the cop on the corner you could buy the whole place for pocket change."
It later develops that the constabulary and city officials of Iroquois Heights are notably racist, which is the reason that I suspect that Estleman's slagging off either Dearborn Heights or Ferndale; however, the bit about "warning lawbreakers to steer clear of the city" is a bit disingenuous, given that Detroit's first black mayor, former Tuskegee Airman Coleman A. Young, told Detroit's criminal population to "hit Eight Mile Road" in his first inaugural address. The urge to wish one's own misfortunes upon one's neighbors knows no class, color, or religious lines.
Other things about The Glass Highway that will ring false to a Detroiter are the other fictional suburb, Rawsonville (where a Ford plant is located); Walker's assertion, in Chapter 6, that Detroit had a sizable Puerto Rican and Cuban population, when Mexicans were and are far more common in the Motor City (there was and is a Detroit neighborhood, near the Ambassador Bridge, called Mexicantown; while the neighborhood was extant from the 1940s, it wasn't formally christened Mexicantown until the late 1980s); and Estleman's conflation of the five communities that comprise the Grosse Pointes with the titular city Grosse Pointe, which is adjacent to where Walker hangs his hat (as opposed to his shingle; and yes, fans of the styles of the 1920s - 1950s have reason to be pleased with The Glass Highway, as Walker's fedora, missing in the previous book, reappears here), Hamtramck. His constant references to Grosse Pointe's ritziness and cross-water views of Canada are apt to make a Detroiter smirk; Grosse Pointe proper isn't all that swellegant, but Grosse Pointe Shores, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Grosse Pointe Park sure are. (For the record, Grosse Pointe Woods is pretty chi-chi too.)
What really drags down The Glass Highway is the been-there-done-that sense of Colombian drug traffickers muscling into a declining Rust Belt city; the premise wasn't exactly daisy-fresh in 1983, but in 2013, it's nearly antediluvian. The other false note is in the character of the muscle-for-hire Fletcher Horn; he comes off too much like the main enforcer of a James Bond villain, and while the final confrontation with him is suitably exciting, it doesn't feel of a piece with Walker's milieu. Estleman moves to firmer ground with his usual downbeat ending, but one can't escape the notion that the emotional stakes for Walker weren't as high here as they were in Motor City Blue or The Midnight Man, even if he arguably gets put through the wringer more vigorously here than in any of the preceding books.
Still, for PI and noir fans who are interested in Detroit or who are already fans of Estleman's tough-guy prose, The Glass Highway is far from a waste of time. Those on the lookout for hints of authorial asides may be amused to read, in Chapter 3, a character's dismissive reference to the work of Robert Ludlum; as this is the second reference to Ludlum thus far (the first was in The Midnight Man), one suspects that the Ludlum oeuvre is a particular thorn in Estleman's side.
The Glass Highway is the fourth book in Loren D. Estleman's long-running series about the Detroit-based PI Amos Walker; readers with even a nodding acquaintance with the private eye or mystery genres will recognize a tip of Estleman's fedora to a Dashiell Hammett book, 1931's The Glass Key (filmed twice under this title, in 1935 and 1942; it also served as the plot template for the 1990 Coen Brothers movie Miller's Crossing).
In The Glass Highway, a hot-shot television news anchor named Sandy Broderick, transplanted from California to Detroit, hires Walker just before Christmas to find his estranged son Bud (that's his legal first name), whom he and his ex-wife fear is involved with a drug-addicted older woman named Paula Royce: the twenty-something's mother fears for his health and virtue; Bud's father, the news anchor, fears a scandal and a career derailment should it become public knowledge that his "own son is humping a junkie -- if that's what she is -- and possibly dropping the stuff himself" (Chapter 2), primarily because he's trying to wangle a syndication deal for his new anti-drug, crime-stopping show. The case is complicated by Bud's statuesque stepsister, Fern Esterhazy, Paula herself, Walker's contretemps with the corrupt police in a fictional Detroit suburb named Iroquois Heights, some federal agents, and a quietly psychotic martial artist named Fletcher Horn. Throw in a subplot about Colombians moving into Detroit's drug trade, along with Estleman's usual snappy patter and hard-boiled dialogue, and you've got another enjoyable, if not stellar, installment in the life and times of Amos Walker.
The Glass Highway was better than the second book, Angel Eyes, but not quite as good as the third installment, The Midnight Man; the first book, Motor City Blue, is still the best in the series so far. (I'd give The Glass Highway a rating of 3.25 out of 5 stars, with 5 being the highest rating.) Estleman evokes Hammett in more than just his title: he invents a Detroit suburb named Iroquois Heights to serve the same role that "Poisonville" did in Hammett's 1929 Continental Op novel, Red Harvest. As a lifelong metro Detroiter, I'm naturally curious as to whether Estleman was slagging off an existent suburb and merely coined an alias to protect said city's officials' tender feelings, and himself from a libel suit. (Based on his jeremiad against Iroquois Heights, I suspect either Dearborn Heights or Ferndale as being the real-life models for it; given the fact that he locates Iroquois Heights in a different county than Detroit, Ferndale might be the more likely candidate, unless the different county business was a bit of misdirection.) It's worth quoting Walker's editorial paragraph on Iroquois Heights, at the beginning of Chapter 6:
"Iroquois Heights was the kind of place you wanted to live in if you were in the forty percent bracket and you didn't care which pies your local public servants had their fingers in so long as they kept their campaign volunteers off your doorstep and the neighbor's junkie kid away from your stereo. It was one of those jut-jawed little communities that advertised on television warning lawbreakers to steer clear of the city, and at election time they put teeth in it by raiding some giggle parlor or other that was casting too big a shadow. There was a newspaper, but it was part of a chain belonging to a sometime political hopeful and its editors had stiff necks from looking the other way. The streets were clean, the homes were kept up, and every block had a young oak growing out of a box on the sidewalk. From the mayor to the cop on the corner you could buy the whole place for pocket change."
It later develops that the constabulary and city officials of Iroquois Heights are notably racist, which is the reason that I suspect that Estleman's slagging off either Dearborn Heights or Ferndale; however, the bit about "warning lawbreakers to steer clear of the city" is a bit disingenuous, given that Detroit's first black mayor, former Tuskegee Airman Coleman A. Young, told Detroit's criminal population to "hit Eight Mile Road" in his first inaugural address. The urge to wish one's own misfortunes upon one's neighbors knows no class, color, or religious lines.
Other things about The Glass Highway that will ring false to a Detroiter are the other fictional suburb, Rawsonville (where a Ford plant is located); Walker's assertion, in Chapter 6, that Detroit had a sizable Puerto Rican and Cuban population, when Mexicans were and are far more common in the Motor City (there was and is a Detroit neighborhood, near the Ambassador Bridge, called Mexicantown; while the neighborhood was extant from the 1940s, it wasn't formally christened Mexicantown until the late 1980s); and Estleman's conflation of the five communities that comprise the Grosse Pointes with the titular city Grosse Pointe, which is adjacent to where Walker hangs his hat (as opposed to his shingle; and yes, fans of the styles of the 1920s - 1950s have reason to be pleased with The Glass Highway, as Walker's fedora, missing in the previous book, reappears here), Hamtramck. His constant references to Grosse Pointe's ritziness and cross-water views of Canada are apt to make a Detroiter smirk; Grosse Pointe proper isn't all that swellegant, but Grosse Pointe Shores, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Grosse Pointe Park sure are. (For the record, Grosse Pointe Woods is pretty chi-chi too.)
What really drags down The Glass Highway is the been-there-done-that sense of Colombian drug traffickers muscling into a declining Rust Belt city; the premise wasn't exactly daisy-fresh in 1983, but in 2013, it's nearly antediluvian. The other false note is in the character of the muscle-for-hire Fletcher Horn; he comes off too much like the main enforcer of a James Bond villain, and while the final confrontation with him is suitably exciting, it doesn't feel of a piece with Walker's milieu. Estleman moves to firmer ground with his usual downbeat ending, but one can't escape the notion that the emotional stakes for Walker weren't as high here as they were in Motor City Blue or The Midnight Man, even if he arguably gets put through the wringer more vigorously here than in any of the preceding books.
Still, for PI and noir fans who are interested in Detroit or who are already fans of Estleman's tough-guy prose, The Glass Highway is far from a waste of time. Those on the lookout for hints of authorial asides may be amused to read, in Chapter 3, a character's dismissive reference to the work of Robert Ludlum; as this is the second reference to Ludlum thus far (the first was in The Midnight Man), one suspects that the Ludlum oeuvre is a particular thorn in Estleman's side.