Burning Midnight by Loren D. Estleman

This is the third of the Amos Walker books I've read this year [1] - I ran through a big clump of them eighteen years ago, under a tag with a silly title, and then let them accumulate on the shelf mostly annually since then - and, like the last clump, I seem to be finding patterns in the books that slowly make me enjoy them less and less.

Well, the 2007 batch was a slow process, even though I read ten books in less than a month. This batch seems to be running more quickly, which is unfortunate. There are six more on the shelf, and maybe two or three others I missed, and it would be nice to read them, and even nicer to want to read them.

I see that I noted, during the 2007 batch, that this was a solidly old-fashioned series, that series hero Amos Walker sometimes tends to the random hard-boiled comment mostly out of context, that women are people rather than plot tokens only intermittently, and that the plots tend to devolve into action sequences rather than detecting more often than I liked. All of that is still true. The thing about women, maybe even more so.

I might need to be bit elliptical here, since giving away the solution to a mystery is Not Done. But there's a major Misguided Liberal Lady in Left-Handed Dollar, and then the underlying villain of Infernal Angels was an EEEvil Dragon Lady who I don't really remember but had been a character in earlier books.

Burning Midnight, which was the new book back in 2012, features not only the surprising return (very late in the book) of that EEEvil Dragon Lady, but also another major Misguided Liberal Lady.

I had been worried that the series would have descended into some kind of racism in these Obama-era books - PI novels are inherently conservative in the small-c sense, and often in the big-C sense, too - but I didn't expect that much...I don't want to bluntly call it misogyny, but don't have a better word...on my bingo card so quickly. I don't know if author Loren D. Estleman did that on purpose, or if he or his editor even noticed it, but three books in a row with very similar shocking surprise endings - and the next book also seems, in its description, to strongly hint the EEEvil Dragon Lady will be the Big Bad - is a bit much.

And I'm deeply aware than, if I'm seeing some creping Tea Party influence now, in books written around 2010, that things could get much worse as I reach the books written in the later teens and afterward. I have a mostly positive opinion of Estleman that I would like to keep if at all possible, even as I keep repeating the mantra "the book is not the author."

(I was worried about racism, but, oddly, these three books feature very few Black people - other than one top-level cop friend of Walker's who's in every book - for a city like Detroit that is 78% Black. This one does have a bunch of Mexicans, though, he said brightly.)

Anyway, this book sees Walker hired by Inspector John Alderdyce - the aforementioned Black cop buddy - to investigate his estranged son's brother-in-law. The son, Jerry, changed his last name - I'm not sure we ever get what he changed it to - and married a Mexican-American woman, Conchata "Chata." Chata has a sixteen-year-old brother, Ernesto "Nesto" Pasada, who lives with them in a close-in Detroit suburb, but has been spending a lot of time recently in what I gather Detroiters actually call "Mexicantown."

So much time, that he's gotten a tattoo on his hand indicating he's joined the Maldado gang. And so much that he's not coming home as regularly as his sister would like.

Nesto has not quite disappeared as Walker takes the case, but he's in the middle of a slow fade. Alderdyce wants Walker to talk to Chata, find Nesto, and convince him to give up the gang stuff and go back to a relatively normal teen life.

This is a Walker novel, so it's not that simple. As Walker pokes around the barrio, he finds there are two feuding gangs in the neighborhood, the Maldados and Zapatistas - both new, and tentative, and offshoots of much more dangerous and violent Mexican border gangs, but possibly rapidly getting more serious and dangerous.

Walker talks with two major community figures there, the reformed gangbanger-turned-businessman Zorborón and the gringa who runs the local non-profit, Sister Delia, both of whom say they've had minor violence recently, seemingly to warn them away from Maldado affairs. And then, of course, the murders and arson starts.

Walker does solve it all - I hinted at the solution above, and won't do more than hint - and eventually finds Nesto and drags him home. In the very last chapter, the EEEvil Dragon Lady from previous books calls him and basically says "if I ever run into you again, I'm going to have you killed," with the usual "of course, I can't have you killed now, even though I really want to and know plenty of people who would do it, because this novel is over and I'm actually just setting up a plot hook for another novel" caveat.

I've said many times I prefer mysteries to thrillers. I don't know if mysteries, as I mean them, actually still exist - I read the NYTimes Top 100 books of the year list today, by chance, which had a section for Thrillers and even one for Horror but no Mysteries (or SF) - but this series has solidly moved towards thrillerdom in ways that annoy me, even aside from the lazy EEEvil Dragon Lady-isms and the "whiteys should keep out of Mexicantown and let the locals do whatever the hell they want - except cops, of course, who are pure and honest and wonderful" mindset here.

I still like Walker as a character, especially after his voice settled down from the early books. I like having PI novels in the hardboiled style to read, even if they're more thriller-y than mystery-esque. I don't think Estleman is actually grinding any specific ideological axes in this series; I think it's more the natural flow of hardboiled fiction and the pull of the renormative ending. But my patience for the same thing over and over again is getting thinner. I may read another one or two of these, but I'm beginning to wonder if I will be able to get through the six more on the shelf.

[1] "This year" being 2025; I wrote this in November.

Infernal Angels by Loren D. Estleman

Amos Walker is an old-school PI, with all the baggage that comes with that. The first novel about him came out in 1980, and his creator Loren D. Estleman is still writing Walker novels; I think the most recent book is 2023's City Walls.

I read a lot of hard-boiled PI books in the '90s and somewhat into the Aughts; I started with the old guys but gradually shifted tastes (partially guided by Maryann Eckles, then the Editor-in-Chief of Mystery Guild and a great colleague, who got me to do some first-reading for her) towards women like Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller. And then I tapered off the mystery reading after I left fiction publishing and was no longer reading on an industrial level to begin with.

So there are things I think of as favorites even though I haven't touched them much in two decades; that's the peril of living. I read a big bunch of Walker novels back in 2007, right after leaving that editorial job, and have quietly accumulated most of the novels since then on a shelf without reading any of them between '08 and '24.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years. So I read the 2010 Walker novel The Left-Handed Dollar about six weeks ago, and now I'm back again. No promises, but maybe I'll clean out that shelf, one book at a time, as I rotate through my to-be-read shelves.

Infernal Angels was the 2011 Walker novel; it's a bit more thriller-y than I prefer in my mysteries - I was grumping about this twenty years ago here about Lawrence Block novels, so it's not a new complaint; at least I am consistent.

Walker is a middle-aged man and deeply old-fashioned: by the point of this book he's using a cell phone (dragged kicking and screaming, mostly) but resolutely refuses to understand computers or anything else modern. He's a Vietnam vet whose age hasn't quite advanced as quickly as the thirty years since his first novel, but it's starting to tick up noticeably; he's not quite fifty but it's not far away.

And this novel kicks off when a police contact connects him with a vintage-merchandise dealer - that merchandise seems to be largely big-ticket items; furniture and TVs and large-scale home décor - who just had a burglary. Crossgrain, the dealer, had a shipment of TV converter boxes stolen, and asks Walker to try to track them down.

Walker promises three days from his retainer, and goes off to talk to his contacts. He gets the names of three potential fences for material like this. One is a white rapper (Bud Light) who mostly runs a music store now while he works through a murder charge in Guam from the death of his ex-manager. (Bud claims to be completely innocent; Walker believes him.) The other two are, first, another, more traditional scavenger/fence called Johnny Toledo and, second, Eugenia Pappas, the widow of the scion of a long line of fences and stolen-goods receivers - she claims to have gone aboveboard, but Walker and his contacts never believe anyone goes straight in Detroit.

Things get complicated from there - Crossgrain is murdered the very next night, by someone apparently looking for the last converter box, which he unwisely showed on a TV news story about the break-in. There's another death soon afterward, probably killed by the same person. And the converter boxes turn out to be part of a smuggling operation, with ultra-high-grade heroine hidden inside them.

So Walker is pulled into a cross-agency investigation, with Mary Ann Thaler from the feds and John Alderdyce from the locals. Both were in the previous novel; both are management-level but not tippy-top brass; both are old friends who somewhat bend the rules for him, mostly, I think, because it's that kind of PI novel.

There's a villain behind it - who was in a previous Walker book, though I didn't remember her - and the vaguely racist dragon-lady stuff in the previous book gets a workout here, with her frankly silly (and almost James Bond-ian) rationale for her criminal enterprise. Of course, truth and justice win out in the end, but Walker doesn't have to do a whole lot of serious detecting here: contacting Crossgrain and the three fences set everything in motion, and he just has to survive what happens afterward.

As I said, I tend to like mysteries better than thrillers, and particularly mysteries where cops act like real cops and don't just let a random civilian run around causing trouble because his name's on the book cover. This is much more like the latter; I enjoyed it, and Walker's voice is still a fine classic-PI mixture of grumpy and world-weary, but I might not make it through all of the remaining Walker books if they keep being full of eeevil Chinese masterminds and cops who always bail Walker out.

The Left-Handed Dollar by Loren D. Estleman

Way back in the early days of this blog, I caught up on Loren D. Estleman's private-eye novels - his main character is Amos Walker, of Detroit - in a big batch of posts in August of 2007.

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. 

HELP 10: American Detective

Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, that very quixotic enterprise, ends with this book, the most recent in the "Amos Walker" series. American Detective was published in hardcover by Forge in April, so it's probably still in your local book store if you run out right now to grab it.

First of all, I have to mention that Walker has a cell phone for at least part of this book (though Estleman does the usual old-fart gag of having Walker struggle with the manual, and not really understand how to use the phone), and realizes he needs access to a computer at another point. So Walker is, slowly, finding his way into the 21st century (and Estleman is reacting to my thoughts about the last book before I had them, too).

That title worried me a bit, I have to admit. Naming an entry in a long mystery series "American Detective" could mean several things, few of them good:

• no one associated with the book could think of a decent title
• the author and publisher nearly came to blows about title suggestions, and this is the compromise candidate
• someone expects this to be the last book in the series
• someone hopes that '70s staple, the generic book, is about to make a comeback

Now, American Detective isn't a bad title. It does sound more like a magazine than a book title, and it certainly has a whiff of the generic, but that can work. In this case, it doesn't have much to do with the plot. One character makes the common observation that Walker is a throwback, and mentions that there once was an "American Detective" magazine, but that's it. (On similar grounds, nearly every PI novel in this country could have been titled American Detective for the past forty years.)

But the plot in this particular book starts when ex-Detroit Tigers pitching great Darius Fuller hires Walker to scare off his only daughter Dierdre's ne'er-do-well boyfriend Hilary Bairn, before Deirdre turns twenty-five and gets her trust fund. As usual for Walker, things do not go as planned, and he hasn't even spoken with Bairn before the first body falls at his feet. Bairn was involved somehow with gambling and organized crime -- presumably starting in the old familiar way of losing too much money in an unlicensed casino -- so Walker tracks down Madame Sing, a Dragon Lady-type who runs much of the gambling (and people smuggling, and so on) in the Detroit area. And things just get more complicated from there, of course. This one again has an over-the-top ending in the vein of Sinister Heights -- an airplane is the setting, this time -- but it all does come together pretty well by the time it's all over.

And I just read ten mysteries from the same series in a row, and still like the series -- so, if you have any interest at all in hardboiled American PI stories, give one of these books a try.

HELP 9: Nicotine Kiss

I dawdled through Estleman's 2006 novel Nicotine Kiss over the long weekend, but finally finished it this morning. (I note that this book was published in hardcover in March of 2006, that the next book in the series has now been published, and that a paperback is not out nor obviously in the works, which is a bad sign.)

It opens with a bang: Amos Walker, our protagonist and a Michigan PI, is searching for a dead-beat husband on the first day of deer season, and finds him on the wrong end of a rifle. The deadbeat drops Walker with one shot, then eats the rifle himself, and Walker's leg -- and maybe his life -- is saved by an old acquaintance, cigarette smuggler Jeff Starzek.

Two months later,Walker is recuperating when he hears Starzek's name again: the smuggler's brother-in-law wants to hire Walker to find him. Walker soon discovers that he was the last one to see Starzek -- and that an agent from Homeland Security with a bottomless wallet of John Doe warrants is also very eager to see Starzek.

It goes on from there, with investigations into Starzek's past that (happily!) don't turn up any fifty-year-old murders in Canada for once, and what is essentially a monster truck-snowmobile race across a frozen lake. I found parts of this a bit implausible, and it seemed to wrap up more quickly than I expected, but it's another good entry in a fine hardboiled series.

But it's hard to miss that Walker is getting increasingly out of touch with the modern world, and I'd like to see that affect his cases more -- he doesn't use a computer or cellphone, and I'd expect many of his contacts for running license plates and Social Security numbers would have been retired or downsized by now. He's also getting older -- by my count, he should be solidly over 50, since he's a Vietnam vet and went there after four years of college -- and he sustains a major injury at the beginning of this book, so the physical stuff should become increasingly more difficult. (Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter mysteries did a good job of realistically aging a hero, though Brandstetter wasn't usually physical in the old-fashioned way Walker is.) I'm not saying Walker can't be a tough guy in his 50s -- there are plenty of tough guys in their 50s -- but that a now-gimpy tough guy in his 50s might want to work on other methods if we wants to go on as he began...

Books Read in August

The end of the summer was mostly taken up with Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, and here's the whole month's worth:

• Andi Watson & John Howard, Clubbing (8/1)
  
• Lat, Kampung Boy (8/3)
  
• Lat, Town Boy (8/3)
  
• Shannon Wheeler, Screw Heaven, When I Die I'm Going to Mars (8/4)
  
• Nick Abadzis, Laika (8/5)
  
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (8/6)
  
• Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy: LoserPalooza (8/6)
  
• Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 7: Forever (8/7)
  
• Gipi, Notes for a War Story (8/8)
  
• Ian Shaughnessy & Mike Holmes, "Shenanigans" (8/9)
  
• P.G. Wodehouse, The Heart of a Goof (8/11)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Downriver (8/12)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Sweet Women Lie (8/14)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Never Street (8/19)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, The Hours of the Virgin (8/21)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (8/23)
  
• Jen Van Meter, et.al., Hopeless Savages (8/26)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Sinister Heights (8/27)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Poison Blonde (8/28)
  
• Gilbert Hernandez, Chance in Hell (8/29)
  
• W. Haden Blackman, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Weapons & Technology (8/30)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Retro (8/31)
  
• Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol. 3: Devadatta (8/31)
  

I didn't get as much reading done as I'd hope to this month -- partially because the family and I went on a few trips, and partially for personal reasons. With any luck, I'll bounce back in September. (No, let's be honest: what I hope is that I get a job, and have to cut back severely on pleasure reading -- that would be the best outcome.)

HELP 8: Retro

The HELP has reached Estleman's 2004 novel about Detroit PI Amos Walker, which means I'm almost caught up -- only two more novels to go.

This is another Ross Macdonald-style plot, mixing a 1949 murder with one in the modern day. (And, of course, the two are very closely linked.) Neither of the murders actually take place in Canada, but there is a strong Canadian connection, which is required in the pure Ross Macdonald special.

Walker is hired by a dying whorehouse madam (retired) to deliver her ashes to her adopted son, who disappeared in the late '60s after getting caught up in an anti-government group and briefly appearing on the FBI's Most Wanted list. She dies, Walker gets the ashes, and the son turns out to be in Canada, not too far away and not too hard to find.

But then, of course, things get complicated: that modern murder I alluded to above happens, and both a county cop and a New York mobster get interested in Walker for different reasons. There's even an old-fashioned gangster's moll, who turns to Walker for help. (But, if you look at that title again, you'll see that Estleman is not unaware of what he's doing.)

The Amos Walker novels from Forge so far are not terribly ambitious, as if Estleman has decided that the audience for such "retro" books is minor and so he needs to conserve his energy. They're still pleasant mysteries, but there's now a self-consciousness in their old-fashionedness, as if Walker isn't really in the modern world at all, but is just pretending. I don't think Estleman needs to give him a wisecracking, computer-savvy sidekick (in fact, I'd strongly argue against it), but I do think Walker himself needs to engage in the modern world.

Walker is a PI much in the mold of Macdonald's Lew Archer: he has no apparent hobbies, family, or friends outside of work. It's not simply that we only see him at work; we see that work is all there is of him. I'm not saying that Estleman needs to completely break away from that paradigm, but...Walker has been around for nearly thirty years and twenty books, so it's high time for him to have something in his life besides the latest murder.

HELP 7: Poison Blonde

The 2003 Amos Walker novel was the first from Forge, Estleman's current publisher, and sees the HELP project coming into the homestretch.

There are two problems with Poison Blonde from HELP's point of view: the minor one is that it recycles quite a bit of plot set-up from Sweet Women Lie. In Sweet Women, Walker is hired by a washed-up actress for a job that turns out to be a test to see if he can do the real job. And, in Poison Blonde, a sexy blonde Latina pop singer who is most certainly not Shakira (perish the thought) named Gilla Cristobal does the same thing. The plots diverge pretty quickly after that, so it's only a minor complaint.

The major complaint is, however, a huge plot hole. Gilla tells Walker that she has a Deep Dark Secret in her past, and she would be deported to Unnamed Carribean Island Hell-Hole if it comes out, and she would certainly be judicially murdered there.

I'll need to underline these next few points, and their connections:

• She tells him this in Detroit.
• Detroit, which is in sight of, and easy driving distance of, Canada.
• Canada, the nation that would no more give up a beautiful fugitive to a brutal totalitarian regime than it would fail to say "Thanks, eh" to compliments about Tim Horton's donuts.

(And that all assumes that the US government would be eager to ship a rich, popular, successful, gorgeous singer off to a third-world hell-hole to her near-certain death, and that the public wouldn't be outraged. This book is set in February of 2002, so I'll grant Estleman that...but forgetting about Canada is unforgivable.)

Anyway, Poison Blonde (which should have been titled The Lincoln Question, but never mind that) gets tangled up with a new murder and a murder many years ago in a foreign country (Ross Macdonald Disease popping up again), and an old enemy of Walker's turns up as well. I kept expecting spies to pop out of the woodwork (as they did in Sweet Women Lie; another parallel), and I think I shouldn't say whether they do or not.

Other than that one unforgivable hole at the very center of the plot, Poison Blonde is a solid, twisty mystery novel, another strong entry in a consistent series. I've got three more of these to read, and I'm not tired of them yet.

HELP 6: Sinister Heights

And Sinister Heights was the last "Amos Walker" novel from Mysterious Press; I hope he moved on because he got a better offer from the new publisher (Forge), not because Mysterious dumped him. This was the new book for 2002.

The family of Commodore Leland Stutch, the fictional auto and petrochemical magnate whom Walker met (at the age of a hundred-and-something, soon before his death) in Downriver, makes a reappearance here. This time, Stutch's much younger widow hires Walker to find a bastard child of the old Commodore -- from long before her time -- and cut the bastard girl in for a small share of the family fortune. (The widow is doing this, she says, to forestall a potential suit for a large share of the fortune, as that side of the family keeps increasing -- the child has grown up, and has had a daughter who in turn grew up, married, and had a young son.)

Walker finds the bastard daughter without much trouble, but the next generation is a bit trickier to uncover -- and digging them up leads to car crashes, murders, accidental deaths, kidnappings, and a final exciting but unlikely confrontation on the site of an auto plant fortified like a castle.

This is one of the best of the Walker novels, even if the ending gets a bit large-scale for a private-detective story. If anyone out there is looking to try this series, I'd recommend this novel. Walker doesn't insult anyone for no good reason that I can remember, and there are interesting and varied female characters. It's got a great atmospheric cover, and one of the better plots of the series. If this book did get him dumped by Mysterious, that was a damn shame.

HELP 5: A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

2001's Amos Walker mystery was the fourth from Mysterious Press, and the first this century. It also marks the halfway point in HELP; I have five more novels after this one.

Downriver had a backstory involving the 1967 Detroit race riots, but Smile goes further back to the 1943 race riots, and a (I presume fictional) hero cop who emerged then. Walker is hired by a devastatingly sexy female book editor from New York (I fear he's indulging in the most obvious stereotypes here) to find a missing author. Eugene Booth wrote a bunch of pulpy paperback originals in the '40s and '50s, the best of which, Paradise Valley, was a fictionalization of the '43 race riots and which the sexy editor had a contract to republish. Booth apparently changed his mind, and then disappeared.

There's also a reformed Mafia hitman in the book; he turned state's evidence, ratted on his bosses, and is on tour with a book about his life and murders. Walker searches for Booth, finds the hitman, and then things get complicated.

This turns into another Ross Macdonald-esque novel, with a murder from twenty years ago in Canada fifty years back becoming entangled in new deaths. As always, Walker solves the various cases.

I don't know how many different ways I can say it: Estleman is old-fashioned, but in the best ways, like a big 'ol muscle car, all solid steel and gleaming chrome. He doesn't take the hardboiled idiom to the point of parody (like Spillane and his ilk), and doesn't exactly update it to the modern day, but he does set his stories in the real world, among real people committing real crimes, and uses that structure to probe the limits of what people are capable of under pressure. And A Smile on the Face of the Tiger is another darn good Amos Walker novel.

HELP 4: The Hours of the Virgin

For the second time, I have a scratch: The Witchfinder, Estleman's 1997 book in this series (the second from Mysterious Press), wasn't easily available. So HELP 4 is instead the 1998 novel The Hours of the Virgin.

The title refers to several pages of medieval illuminated manuscript; as usual, there are no real-world virgins to be found in Amos Walker's world. This is also the novel in which, inevitably, Walker has to solve the murder of his partner, twenty years before. (And I think the late '90s was when my colleague Jane Dentinger started to complain that the plot of every other mystery novel involved a twenty-year-old murder, as if they were all mainlining Ross Macdonald at the same time.)

It's a solid mystery that moves well and features colorful, believeable characters; if I hadn't read another two Walker books since I finished it, I'd probably be able to give a better precis of it. It's just as good as all the others; Estleman writes the American hardboiled mystery as if it never went out of style.

HELP 3: Never Street

Estleman had a big gap between 1990's Sweet Women Lie and 1997's Never Street, so it's appropriate that it took me five days (and a family vacation) to get to the end of Never Street, adding my own gap.

Never Street brought Amos Walker back after Estleman had spent half a decade mostly writing his big Detroit novels, and it began the second stretch of Walker books, of which there have now been nine, at mostly yearly intervals. (Since there were ten novels and a short-story collection in the first burst of Walker books, the series is almost but not quite symmetrical now.)

This is the point in the series where other characters start bluntly pointing out that Walker is an anachronism, and Estleman starts hanging his plots from that assumption. In this book, Walker is hired by the wife of a documentary filmmaker to find her missing husband, who has apparently taken his obsession with '40s film noir way too far, and may have lost his marbles. (Estleman even organizes the novel into four sections, using film terms that don't entirely correspond to the action of the book.)

Never Street is also notably longer than the previous books; it clocks in a bit north of 300 pages. Even given that I read it in mass-market, it's still about 25% longer than the earlier books. (And the narrative shows it; the first plot seemingly peters out at the end of the second section, to be replaced with a second, related case in what might be a homage to The Long Goodbye or might show that Estleman is struggling slightly to get Walker's plots up to the length his publisher wants.)

Walker is still a grumpy bastard, but his dialogue is all conversational at this point; the hardboiled non sequiturs that cropped up occasionally in the earlier books are now gone. (Oh, he's still a fifteen-minute egg -- that hasn't changed -- but he doesn't crack wise for no good reason any more.) And Estleman's plots are still detailed, intricate, and a joy to follow. There even is a strong, relatively positive female character in this one, though it looks like she won't be returning. (And Walker's main contact on the Detroit PD is switching from his old friend John Alderdyce, now an Inspector, to Mary Ann Thaler, his protege and a new Lieutenant -- she doesn't do all that much in this book, but she becomes a more important, and positive, female character in the subsequent books.)

I still would hesitate before recommending this series to female readers, but it's one of the very best traditional hardboiled PI series running in the modern day. And Walker is a real person with a real personality (along certain genre-accepted lives, given) who gets involved in some tricky, well-plotted cases. So I'd better go and keep reading the second half of my stack of Walker novels!

HELP 2: Sweet Women Lie

Both Silent Thunder (the 1989 Amos Walker novel) and General Murders (a 1988 collection of Walker stories, whose existence I hadn't previously suspected) are scratches; I couldn't get copies of them easily and quickly.

So day 2 of HELP is the 1990 novel Sweet Women Lie, tenth and last in the first sequence of Amos Walker novels by Loren D. Estleman. It continues in Downriver's footsteps, since the plot begins when not-Annette Funicello (ex-'60s beach movie star Gail Hope) hires Walker for a job...that turns out to be an audition for another job...which itself isn't what it seems.

The plot quickly gets complicated and runs away from the initial set-up, so I don't want to go into details (even on a seventeen-year-old novel). But I will say that we rapidly get into a Spy vs. Spy in the streets of Detroit, with various CIA guys (some of whom claim others of whom are rogue, and vice versa) engaging in clandestine meetings, shoot-outs, and other exciting stuff.

It's a bit out of the norm for a PI novel, and I wonder if market pressures to be more "thriller-y" pushed Estleman in that direction. (As I said, this was also the last Walker novel for several years.) The dialogue isn't quite as hardboiled as in Downriver, but Walker still persists in hiding evidence from cops, which never ends well. And as to the female characters...well, let me just point you back at the title.

All in all, it's a solid PI novel of its era -- searching around a bit for a new paradigm, but with a good narrative voice and a twisty, entertaining plot.

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.)

Excuses and Explanations

I haven't been blogging much this week; I was in the city (New York, of course) most of the day Monday and today, meeting people and doing the networking thing [1].

Yesterday was a big trip with the whole family to the Liberty Science Center, where I learned two things:

1. Don't drive on Route 78 the day of a major rainstorm that flooded nearly every other through road in the area (it took us nearly three hours to get there).
2. The LSC doesn't require more than three hours or so to see it, and the school groups clear out in the early afternoon...so trying to get there in the morning is severely contra-indicated.

It eventually was fun, but The Wife was getting seriously stressed on the drive over. We did the Skyscraper exhibit (right inside the front door) last, which I would also recommend: it's popular (and excellent), so try to leave it until after a lot of other people have left. Some of the exhibits upstairs are fun, but many of them are more "educational," and we saw them all in a mass of other people.

Oh, and one more tale of my hyper-competitive son Thing 2. In the Skyscraper exhibit, there's a place where museum patrons can put on a harness and walk along some I-beams a story or two above the floor. Thing 2 thought it was cool, and did it easily. (The Wife then lent Thing 2's sneakers to another boy who had inappropriate footwear.) Thing 1 then decided he wanted to do it -- he's much less of a daredevil -- and he very slowly shuffled his feet all the way around. By this time Thing 2 was ready for a second go-round. (My personal theory about his motivation: anything his older brother can do once, he can do twice and faster.) After he had the harness on, he asked the woman running it what the fastest time was. "22 seconds," she said. "Time me," he said, and was off like a shot. His support got stuck on the first corner, so it took him a whole 34 seconds, which made him deeply grumpy...until the woman pointed out that the record-holder was four or five times his age, and that 34 seconds is awfully good for a six-year-old. (I dread the day Thing 2 starts getting letter grades. He'd better turn out to be really smart, or dial down his competitiveness, or we're going to have some serious drama in years to come.)

So those are my excuses for skipping blogging this week. I'm two books behind on things read for here, and three behind on reviews for ComicMix -- I hope to get to at least some of that tomorrow (after I take the boys to see Underdog; sure, it looks deeply cheesy, and it's a new, for-kids live-action remake of an old cartoon, but it has Jason Lee's voice and Peter Dinklage as Simon Bar Sinister, so I have to check it out).

As I visited various editorial folk today and Monday, I glommed a bunch of books, which I'll probably list on Saturday, as is my wont. (And one came in the mail, which I might review on ComicMix if I get to it quickly enough.) But two of them sparked a new reading project, which I will now explain.

Today I finished up the last comic sitting around (for the second time in a month, actually). So I decided to raise the bar. I grabbed the two most recent "Amos Walker" detective novels by Loren D. Estleman today, and that inspired me to drag out the other five novels I have but haven't read in the series. (There are four more that I both don't have and haven't read; I hope to get at least three of them out of libraries in the next day or two.)

Sometime tomorrow, I'll finish the book I'm currently reading (The Heart of a Goof, golfing stories by P.G. Wodehouse), and then embark upon...

Hornswoggler's Estleman, Loren Project (aka HELP)

The plan: to read one Amos Walker novel a day until I get through my backlog. (So that would be between seven and eleven days of Detroit detecting, depending on how many of the missing ones I can score.) I liked this series before, but I'm nearly two decades slow in reading it, so it's time to catch up -- and catch up quickly. (Yes, that time period will include the big family trip to Hershey Park in the middle of next week -- but I think I can cram some reading in then, as well.)

So look for a series of HELP posts -- roughly once a day starting Sunday, I hope -- as I push the pedal to the metal through the works of the Motor City Mystery-Man. (My god, that's a hideous sentence.)

Why HELP? Well, it's a tortured acronym, which is always a good thing in my mind. I thought about other possibilities, such as the Loren Estleman Amos Project (LEAP) or Amos Walker Experience (AWE), or even Land of Amos Walker (LAW), but none of them were sufficiently tortured.

So: this is not a book review, and I'm not linking to any of my book reviews anywhere else. But I'm promising a series of reviews, over the next two weeks, of a series of detective novels I remember fondly. And, with any luck, I'll catch up on my other backlogged posts tomorrow.


[1] The networking thing is supposed to result in a job, but it was described to me as a process not unlike the thinking of the underwear gnomes:

• Step 1: Network with everyone you know.
• Step 2.
• Step 3: Profit!

So we shall see what the actual result is. Still, I'm reconnecting with some great people, which is nice in and of itself.