Well, time flows on, and Estleman kept writing about Walker, and I put those books on a shelf, perhaps hoping to do the same thing again. But it's now been more than fifteen years, and there were nine books on that shelf - not everything in the series since 2007; I missed a few - so I figured, let's try to read one book; surely I can do that?
The Left-Handed Dollar was the new Amos Walker book for 2010, and the next book in the series after I caught up in 2007; my copy still had a publicity letter in it. (I've already dropped it into the recycling bin, to stop myself from profusely apologizing to whatever publicist sent it to me those fifteen years ago with the vain hope I would publicize the thing at a time when it would have been helpful.)
Walker is a little bit of a clichéd old-fashioned male gumshoe - Estleman doesn't give him a specific age, but the novels started in 1980 and Walker is a veteran of Vietnam, so in 2010 he had to be at least mid-fifties, and possibly a decade older - with an aversion to cellphones and computers, a network of now-aging (and often getting pretty senior) contacts in various law-enforcement forces, and, in best Detroit style, a car that looks battered and old but is actually powerful and responsive.
This time out, he's hired by a lawyer, Lucille Lettermore, a defense attorney often in the news for high-profile cases (as Walker puts it on the first page, she defends "Communists, terrorists, Democrats, and other enemies of the social order"). Her client is an ill, aging mobster, Joseph Michael Ballista aka "Joey Ballistic," who's facing a third-time-unlucky rap - but "Lefty Lucy" thinks she can unravel some of his priors and put the kibosh on the worst of the current prosecution.
(Lucy also complains a lot about RICO, although nothing Walker investigates in this book or that Joey Ballistic is accused of doing seems to fall into things that are only illegal because of RICO. As often happens with detective novels, there's an element of editorializing from the narrative voice about what is Good and Right in society and how to get rid of the Scum that Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. Since most of the characters are white this time out - there's some gratuitous Orientalism around a couple of secondary characters, for spice, but it's quick and easy to skim over - it doesn't get into anything particularly racist, but it does make me wonder what's coming up in later novels.)
Anyway, Joey was convicted, around twenty years before, of planting a bomb that nearly killed Walker's best friend, the investigative reporter Barry Stackpole. Lettermore wants to hire Walker to shake that tree - to find the police informant who fingered Joey, to see if he can poke any holes in the official story. Walker agrees once he has a meeting with Joey himself - Walker has a massive confidence in his ability to tell if people are telling the truth to him - and gets himself punched in the face by his old buddy Stackpole for being involved.
Walker chases down the detective who did the arrest, now retired and running a bait shop out in the sticks. From a chance phrase in that conversation, he thinks the informant was a woman, and so chases after Joey's ex-wife, two mistresses from that era (one of whom is now the receptionist in the ex-wife's interior decorating business), and, somewhat later, a dragon-lady type who ran the Chinese heroin connection in those days.
But, in the middle of that legwork, the bodies start popping up: first one of those old mistresses, then an ex-cop, whose body is discovered by Walker himself. The Detroit cops, in the person of Inspector John Alderdyce, an old acquaintance of Walker's, pull him in for questioning and put him on the usual short leash.
There's more complications and running about, but Walker does solve the case - there's a shootout at the end with the current perp, and Walker also learns the truth about the old case. Walker's voice has a lot of potshots at the then-current Mayor and administration - mostly for being lazy, vain, and useless, not for actual malfeasance; I have no idea if it's related to a real person but it feels like a fairly standard list of complaints from the right to balance Lettermore's even more obvious lefty complaints.
This is a solid mystery, only slightly creaky with the weight of accumulated genre expectations and told well in a distinctive voice. I don't know that I trust Walker quite as much as he trusts himself, and I'd need to read a few more recent books to get a good sense of how much Estleman trusts him, but I still like the way these stories are told, and Estleman keeps it all modern enough and full of telling details.
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