MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  I was right about its being worse in town. It hit me when I came out of the pawnshop on Warren with Iris’ tiny gold heart in my pocket and fifty dollars less in my wallet because I had to bribe the proprietor to sell it to me without the ticket. I stood there and sniffed and thought while the sidewalk traffic flowed around me, and then I went into a stationer’s shop a couple of doors down and purchased a mailer and dropped the trinket and the card of my ex-doctor friend in Hazel Park inside and scribbled Iris’ name–I’d never found our her last–and the address of Beryl Garnet’s place on John R on the envelope and stamped it and consigned it to the first mailbox I came to.

  It didn’t remove the taint, but it made me feel a little better.

  28

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON. I was fresh from four hours’ sleep, a bath, a shave, and a meal, and sitting in my car parked illegally on Watson near the Woodward crossing with my Nikon on the seat beside me, watching the front of the grindhouse opposite.

  I had begun to wonder if George Gibson was an honest man. For three weeks I’d been watching his movements and had yet to catch him without his canes or doing anything that a man with partial paralysis shouldn’t be able to do. If he was playing it straight on this one, it was just possible that everyone had him pegged as a crook when all he was was accident prone. If that was the case I had some celebrating to do, because I’d succeeded where Diogenes had failed.

  I had both evening papers with me. The solution of the Freeman Shanks murder made Page One in both. The Free Press carried mug shots of Jerry and Hubert Darling taken in 1972 when they were sent up for six years after the Feds broke up an auto theft ring they were running in Georgia, and said that a service station attendant in Kentucky had identified them when they bought gas just below the Ohio border this morning. They were believed to be in possession of a couple of hundred thousand dollars that was never recovered when they were arrested on the theft charge. The News ran a picture of Alderdyce and Proust scowling at a gray metal canister said to contain the incriminating film in the Shanks case. It was probably a prop brought along by the photographer while the real article was in the lab. There was a late bulletin in that paper claiming that the Darlings had been picked up in Tennessee, but the radio news said that the pair turned out to be Toronto business partners motoring to Florida on vacation who were released after their stories had been verified. Kramer’s killing got three paragraphs on Page Six of the News but missed the first section entirely in the Free Press, rating only a caption beneath a picture of the abandoned Nova on page Two of the second. Neither story made any connection between him and Shanks, and although both mentioned that two suspects were in custody no names were given. Lee Q. Story was identified in the News as the “proprietor of an East Side novelty shop” and in the Free Press, without the Q, as a “reputed dealer in underground literature.” In each case he got a paragraph buried so far down in the Shanks piece it was jumped to another page. The trailer park manager got zilch.

  The rush hour had passed its peak when Gibson came out the front door supported on his canes and started pulling himself south on Woodward. I yawned and waited for him to get out of sight so I could go home.

  He had started across Watson with the light when one of his canes slipped on a ridge of ice at the curb and he fell hard on his hip. I started to get out, then forced myself back into the seat and pulled the door shut. My instincts were tingling.

  No one came forward to help him. He rolled over slowly, got one cane under him and used it to support himself as he climbed painfully to his feet. He didn’t appear to have suffered any serious damage. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.

  The other cane had scooted out of his reach down the gutter. He got up, looked around, thrust its mate under his left arm, walked over, and stooped to pick up its errant mate. I used up a roll of film on him and went home to fill out my report and get drunk.

  M O T O R C I T Y B L U E:

  A WORD AFTER

  by

  L o r e n D. E s t l e m a n

  MOTOR CITY BLUE HAS everything.

  I say that truthfully and in all modesty; but first I must digress.

  When I was a boy, one of the first generation to grow up with television, I formed a lifetime attachment to the old movies that appeared in the afternoons, evenings, and–interspersed among commercial spots for storm doors, used cars, and vegetable slicers–late at night. Creaky old horror movies and Three Stooges two-reelers caught my attention early–I was no prodigy–but soon I became attracted to crime films and detective stories of a certain type, filled with harsh male faces scowling in the shadow of wide-brimmed fedoras, feral female faces with cigarette holders protruding from between painted lips, big square automatics in fists that seemed to be made to grip their checked handles, and long cars with bug-eye headlamps squealing their tires down medieval alleys wet with rain, depositing bodies rolling into gutters like kids getting rid of their empties before returning to the parental home. Sigmund Freud may contend that these claustrophobic images represent a yearning to reverse directions up the birth canal, but if so the womb seems a pretty scary place, particularly for a youngster who was afraid of the dark.

  Whatever the reasons, whatever it says about me, I liked film noir then and I like it even more now. At the time, that Frenchified term was new, and had spread no more widely from the site of its coinage than the white wines of Bordeaux; indeed, I would not become familiar with it until college, long after my preference had become as much a part of me as the cowboy boots I still wear with everything. Around that same time I discovered the sources of those films and of their inspiration: the hardboiled American detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and their savage illegitimate children: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Mickey Spillane.

  I had by this time decided to become a writer. Since just what kind of writer I wanted to be was still up in the air, I was willing to give everything a try. Accordingly, I wrote and sent out rip-roaring gangster yarns, science-fiction stories filled with gelatinous purple creatures and stainlesssteel spaceships, cowboy potboilers, even confession stories. Had all this youthful activity taken place during the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, when the pulp magazines that published these types of fiction flourished, I might have known a brilliant early success. As it was, I began and ended most of my submissions with Argosy magazine, which as the last of the pulps was still wheezing its geriatric way to dusty death through the late 1960s and early 1970s, but was by no means desperate enough to accept the purple fulminations of a teenage Michigan farm boy.

  I persisted, convinced of my genius; which is the best argument in favor of starting very young. Finally, at the age of twenty-three, I placed my first novel (actually my third, but you don’t count unpublished work), a rather stylish 60,000-worder based on the scarlet career of Wilbur Underhill, one of our first Public Enemies No. 1, who died in a bloody shootout with federal agents in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1933. Major Books, a small California paperback publisher, brought it out in April 1976, under the execrable title The Oklahoma Punk. I still hate that title (mine was Twister; and look how much money the motion picture that stole that title made), but I remain fond of the book, which launched me on my incarnadine career.

  Although I tried my hand at the puzzle-type mystery of the Agatha Christie school, I had not the right-brain development necessary to keep track of such things as alibis, timetables, red herrings, and all the rest of the equipment writers require to stay ahead of the kind of reader who tracks a plot with notes and diagrams. (To this day, I’m a complete bust at figuring out the mysteries of even the second rank of artists in this school; which may be why I enjoy reading them so much.) It fell, therefore, that I should concentrate on the kind of mystery that succeeds as a story, quite apart from whodunit and what is revealed in the final chapter.

  In 1974–the year I graduated college–Chinatown appeared in theaters. Directed by Roman Polanski, written by Robert Towne, and starring Jack Nicholson, th
is period detective film singlehandedly revived the noir tradition that had died with the 1950s, establishing the neo-noir school of filmmaking that is still with us after a quarter-century, and reviving interest in the works of Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and all the other hardboiled writers who did as much as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to create a modern American literature independent of Europe’s. A raft of similar films followed Chinatown, some worthy, some shabby ripoffs by the same kind of hack who had ridden the leaders’ coattails when the pulps were popular. One of the former, in 1975, was Farewell, My Lovely.

  This picture, written by David Zelag Goodman, was based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, set in the period of the 1940s in which it was written, and starred Robert Mitchum as the world-weary private detective Philip Marlowe. Director Dick Richards accurately and painstakingly reconstructed wartime L.A. to tell a haunting story of love, betrayal, blackmail, and murder, abetted by David Shire’s bluesy, sax-heavy score. Theatergoing was a financial impossibility then, when I was struggling to make ends meet as a freelance writer, and so I did not see the film until several years later when it appeared on network television. Despite the inevitable p.c. editing and commercial interruptions (this, after all, was the format in which all the great classic films had been introduced to me), I was hooked, and determined to draw the same reaction from my readers.

  Motor City Blue was the result. At the time, I was anything but certain that this first adventure for Amos Walker would not also be the last. The Eighties were beginning. Ross Macdonald was still alive, but had not published a Lew Archer private detective novel since The Blue Hammer in 1976. John D. MacDonald was still writing Travis McGee, but that character, who referred to himself as a “salvage consultant,” had devolved from his origins as a hardboiled dick of the old school into a cartoony toxic avenger, more reminiscent of Batman than Sam Spade. True, Arthur Lyons was beginning his Marlovian series featuring Jacob Asch, and Robert B. Parker had launched Spenser, but neither writer had yet found a broad audience. The private eye of fiction appeared to be moribund. Since I had no idea whether Motor City Blue would have a sequel, much less find a publisher, I put everything that I liked from the movie and its literary and cinematic inspirations into the book, from the anachronistic fedora to the bottle in the desk (Scotch appeared to be the depressant of choice, from my research) to the ubiquitous cigarette to the femme fatale whose greed and deviant behavior put the worst in men to shame. The story is part affectionate genre send-up, part social commentary, part serious mystery; and I suppose it’s my own fault, given the low-key mood lighting of its scenes and the down-and-dirty melancholy theme, that so many critics and readers continue to refer to the title as Motor City Blues.

  From the outset it looked as if I was right to put in so much and thus get the thing out of my system, because the manuscript was met with a collective yawn on the part of the first two publishers who saw it. Cathleen Jordan, my editor at Doubleday for Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes, asked me to set the book aside and think about doing another mystery set against the backdrop of Victorian London. (In her present incarnation as editor-in-chief of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, she has cheerfully made up for this decision by publishing several Amos Walker short stories.) An editor at another house returned the script with an apologetic note that the book would find the marketplace too tough.

  What they did not recognize–and what I barely understood myself–was that the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era of American disillusionment that was about to greet Motor City Blue was an almost identical match with the epoch of Prohibition and Depression that gave birth to the fictional private eye sixty years before. It’s no great leap from losing faith in the cop-on-the-beat to losing trust in one’s president, and there’s nothing very profound in the observation that a society that has turned away from its corrupt organizations might yearn for a lone hero who represents the best of its revolutionary ideals; myth though he may be.

  Motor City Blue was published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in the fall of 1980. It would be a lie to say the book was an immediate success. Three years would elapse before it found a publisher who would reissue it in paperback, in a typo-filled edition by Pinnacle Books, which was then Poverty Row, and there would be ten books in the series before a publisher agreed to commit to more than one title at a time, with an option on the next. But Amos Walker remains alive and well twenty years after his inception, long after series that made more money and enjoyed wider fame went to the elephant’s graveyard of the “Bestsellers of Yesteryear” bin in used bookstores.

  Why?

  Don’t know.

  But nobody ever got arrested for guessing.

  Walker is a dinosaur, and he knows it. There’s nothing less amusing to an audience, particularly an American one, than a hero who takes himself seriously. This is why old-movie buffs like me sneer at James Cagney’s self-righteous brother in Public Enemy, preferring the smiling bravura of gangster Cagney, and why bad girl figure skater Tonya Harding has a bigger fan club than the saccharine Nancy Kerrigan. History has shown that people who Feel Your Pain are usually less worthy of our regard than those who inflict it upon the right people. Protagonists like Walker make fun of themselves before they ridicule others and before they can be made sport of by them. Notwithstanding this relentless anti-narcissism, they are courageous and honest, and revere these virtues too deeply to parade them around or even acknowledge the fact that they exist. Code heroes who must haul out their code like a hiker consulting his compass every five minutes are suspect. The tenets of behavior should come as second nature, without need of advertisement or reminder. In fact, they perish from overexposure.

  One cannot overestimate the importance of the Detroit setting to Amos Walker’s longevity. The city can certainly survive without him–it’s survived worse, including twenty years of corruption at the highest level–but I am convinced that Walker would not last twenty pages without the RenCen and Ford Rouge and the auto-money palaces of Grosse Pointe and drive-by shootings on Erskine. Critics warmed to the series from the start for its “fresh” exteriors (the city will observe its tricentennial in 2001), and reader mail ran 100 percent positive on the books’ non-dependence on the worn-out streets of New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago. To this day, I enjoy a loyal support group consisting of editors, reviewers, and other industry-related professionals whose own Detroit origins prompted them to recommend the series to others. At the time I was researching Motor City Blue, some acquaintances attempted to discourage me from writing about such an unpopular place, with some justification: Elmore Leonard was then the only major writer using Detroit for his backgrounds, and even he would have to move his characters to Miami and California before he entered the national bestseller lists.

  In the years since, Detroit, with its raw reputation and distinctive blue-collar personality, has become a popular and familiar setting for crime novels and action movies. I have had many opportunities to be thankful that I grew up in its shadow. Concurrently, within two years of Walker’s debut, the landscape of American detective literature was crowded with half a hundred private eye series based in cities across the continent and as far away as Australia; proving out my suspicion that the social climate was ready for the revival of the homegrown phenomenon of the Hero for Hire.

  For that is what Amos Walker is: a reasonably intelligent brain hooked up to a sympathetic nature, with the strength and courage necessary to maintain the right, available for a nominal day rate and modest expenses. I do not pretend he has anything in common with the private detective of reality, a practical professional who is too busy making his living to squeeze a holy crusade onto his timesheet. Would that he could; but then there would be no need for Amos Walker, or for any kind of fiction at all, for that matter. Fiction must be better than life or it has no reason to exist.

  Here, then, once again and for the first time, are Walker, gangster Ben Morningstar, Lieutenant John Alder
dyce, the elusive Marla Bernstein, pornographer Lee Q. Story, Barry Stackpole, Jerry and Hubert Darling, military spooks Vespers and Spain, Beryl Garnet, the huggable madam, and the enigmatic Iris; a disparate group, and only a fraction of Motor City Blue’s Russian novel-like cast. I hope, since you have gotten this far, that you have found that the book has everything. In my ignorance, that’s what I intended.

  AN OPEN LETTER TO OUR VALUED READERS

  What do Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Irving Wallace, Ben Bova, Stuart Kaminsky and over a dozen other authors have in common? They are all part of an exciting new line of ibooks distributed by Simon and Schuster.

  ibooks represent the best of the future and the best of the past…a voyage into the future of books that unites traditional printed books with the excitement of the web.

  Please join us in developing the first new publishing imprint of the 21st century.

  We’re planning terrific offers for ibooks readers…virtual reading groups where you can chat online about ibooks authors…message boards where you can communicate with fellow readers…downloadable free chapters of ibooks for your reading pleasure…free readers services such as a directory of where to find electronic books on the web…special discounts on books and other items of interest to readers…

  The evolution of the book is www.ibooksinc.com.