CLASSICIST:

Think Fast, Mr. Motown: Interview with Loren D. Estleman (J. Kingston Pierce, January Magazine)

As a boy growing up in rural Whitmore Lake, Michigan, outside of Detroit, [Loren D. Estleman] habitually sneaked downstairs in his family home to watch The Untouchables on television, when he should have been sleeping. More than four decades later, Estleman still has a fond eye for mobsters and molls and other low-grade malefactors, only now he's calling the shots, writing such characters into private-eye tales that can be as engrossing as Eliot Ness' adventures, but boast a punchier line of patter.

It's impossible not to recognize the cadences of America's hard-boiled detective traditions in this author's novels -- 17 of them so far, including the new Retro -- that feature cynical, computer-illiterate and lone-wolf Detroit P.I. Amos Walker. Here, for instance, is Walker preparing for his workday, in Sinister Heights (2002):

I got out of the robe and into the shower, scraped off the Cro-Magnon growth of the night, put on a fresh suit from the cleaners, and drove to the office, where I sat around making a good impression on the walls until the telephone rang at ten.

Or consider the gumshoe's description, in Poison Blonde (2003), of his car -- which suggests at least as much about Walker's resilience amid the steady passage of time as it tells you about vintage Detroit rolling stock:

I climbed under the wheel of the venerable Cutlass and tickled the big plant into bubbling life. I'd replaced the carburetor recently, steam-cleaned the engine, and yanked the antipollution equipment I'd had installed to clear my last inspection. The body was battered, the blue finish broken down to powder, and thirty blistering Michigan summers and marrow-freezing lake effect winters had cracked the vinyl top, but I could hose Japan off the road in a head wind.

Although some critics might dismiss this first-person, wisecracking narrative style as old-fashioned ("not especially original," Mike Ashley writes of the Walker outings in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction), the three-time Shamus Award-winning Estleman is no slavish imitator of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and their fellow Black Mask alumni. Sure, Amos Walker drinks and smokes with scant concern for his health, and he regularly makes the mistake of standing too close to goons with knuckles bigger than their brains -- all of which are staples of American P.I. fiction, along with the protagonist's luckless love life (Walker has an ex-wife and too few girlfriends). But at least he acknowledges being a politically incorrect anachronism in the 21st century, which allows for some colorful introspection in these books. And over the last 24 years, since the roll-out of his first Walker novel, Motor City Blue, Estleman has not only been honing this series' prose, but infusing it with a melancholy appreciation for Detroit that almost makes the reader look back nostalgically on the belching smokestacks and clattering assembly lines that once made the city of Henry Ford and Joe Lewis great.

Mr. Estleman's Amos Walker series is quite the best modern series of private eye novels, precisely because they are true to the conventions of the genre. Think of him as the anti-Parker.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 17, 2004 10:38 AM