HELP 1: Downriver

Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project (hereinafter HELP) kicks off with Estleman's 1988 "Amos Walker" mystery Downriver. Amos Walker is a Detroit PI who first appeared in 1980's Motor City Blue; this was the eighth book in the series. I read it just over a week ago, and have read two-and-a-half more Walker mysteries since then, so let's see if I can untangle them in my head...

This is very much a mid-80s mystery; it's pretty short (just over two hundred pages) and concerns a very DeLorean-esque upstart car-maker. (Down to the gull-wing doors on his first model, in case we don't get the reference.) Walker is hired by a black man named DeVries -- just out of prison after a twenty-year stretch for arson during the '67 riots -- to track down the people who used him as distraction for an armored-car robbery. (Walker somewhat demurs on the second half of the job, which would be to retrieve the money and give it to DeVries -- but he does take the case.)

The white guy that DeVries insists incited his firebombing now works as a top executive for the DeLorean figure, and skulduggery ensues. Estleman is very readable, but he's pretty derivative at this point -- the dialogue is intensely hard-boiled, even when that keeps it from making much sense. Walker in particular is trying to live up to his own (or Estleman's) idea of what a real PI should be, and that's straight out of Raymond Chandler.

But the Chandleresque poses don't always fit the plot -- Chandler's Philip Marlowe dealt with intensely crooked cops; Walker with smart and mostly honest ones. But Walker still cracks wise in the same ways, and hides evidence as Marlowe would. Even for 1988, Walker was exceptionally old-fashioned; Downriver reads like a 1970s mystery. The role of women here make it feel even earlier than that -- I won't say all of the women in the early Walker novels were femmes fatale, but the archetype crops up a lot, and decent human beings who happen to be women are rare.

Still, I really like PI stories -- they've been my favorite kind of mystery since I was a teenager -- and Estleman has a detective who is Chandleresque without being a slavish copy of Marlowe, inhabits a real city with depth and nuance, and navigates his way through interesting, well-crafted plots. The male characters are all pretty well-drawn, and the women are each individually believeable -- it's just in aggregate that you start to wonder if Detroit really is inhabited only by hard-bitten, gold-digging dames. Surely there must be some women, too?

(I read Downriver in the original hardcover from my local library, as seen above. Byron Preiss's ibooks operation republished all of the Walker novels through Downriver before Preiss's fatal accident in 2005, and those editions are probably easier to find -- though ibooks itself is no more. There's not a whole lot of book-to-book continuity in this part of the series, so an interested reader could start anywhere in the first eight, and fill in as he finds the missing ones.)