Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
The ultimate quick-flip source, stretching back to ancient times. I only wish the monthly dates were included with the years.
Henrickson, Wilma Wood, editor. Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 199l.
A book completely free of editorial bias, Wood’s effort contains contemporary accounts of the city’s development from Cadillac’s reports upon its founding through its continuing struggle to survive in the last decade of the twentieth century.
* * *
Holli, Melvin G., editor. Detroit. New York: New Viewpoints, 1976.
Another valuable tour of the city’s history, through contemporary essays, retrospectives, maps, and statistics.
Jackson, H.C.L. It Happened in Detroit. Detroit: Conjure House, 1947.
As with Bingay, the date says it all on the subject of fresh memory. Also as with Bingay, the nonexistent index and avuncular and unenlightening chapter headings lead to a lot of time lost paging back and forth in pursuit of a particular reference. It’s worth the time, intermittently; Jackson, a longtime columnist with the Detroit News, certainly knows what he’s writing about, but he spends an inordinate amount of ink on mildly amusing nonentities.
Kavieff, Paul R. The Purple Gang: Organized Crime in Detroit 1910–1945. New York: Barricade Books, 2000.
What it says it is. Michigan went dry a year before the rest of the nation, by which time the Purples had the bootlegging situation nailed down so tight they could afford to outsource hired killers to Al Capone and points east and west. Ostensibly shattered by grand jury proceedings and a newspaper-fed crackdown, they had clout enough still to run the wartime black market and gambling and narcotics traffic into our own time. Kavieff’s local origins gave him unique insight into this homegrown den of thieves and killers.
Kavieff, Paul R. The Violent Years: Prohibition and the Detroit Mobs. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade, 2001.
More sharp reporting from Kavieff. From the Purples through my own Frankie Orr to twenty-first-century drug gangs, organized crime in Detroit owes everything to these Tommy-toting pioneers. To understand them is to combat them.
Langworth, Richard M., and Norbye, Jan P. The Complete History of General Motors 1908–1986. Skokie, Ill.: Publications International, 1986.
In additional to providing a year-by-year history of its automobile output, this massive volume includes four densely printed pages on GM’s involvement in the industrial defense effort.
Lutz, William W. The News of Detroit: How a Newspaper and a City Grew Together. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
You can’t beat this history presented from the perspective of one of the twentieth century’s great newspapers. Here, through a lively text and two substantial pictorial inserts, we get to follow Detroit’s passage from the world’s leading wagon- and stove-maker to grim Murder City. It reads like a novel—a thriller—and offers luscious anecdotes involving Ty Cobb, Henry Ford, the Purple Gang—and the News’s marvelous autogyro, the envy of all its competitors and a star of “Tin Cop.”
Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide. London: Penguin, 2005.
When the proliferating Hollywood product created a space problem in his annual Movie Guide staple, the remarkable Maltin addressed it by sequestering most of the great classics in a separate volume. I don’t always agree with his opinions (I still think The Philadelphia Story is vastly overrated; it isn’t even funny), but I respect them. He and his staff have blessed us with unimpeachably accurate dates and credits of some 9,000 films produced from the silent period through 1959. With this entertaining and absorbing book at hand, I can state with confidence what might be playing in one of Detroit’s motion-picture palaces while the Horsemen are on the prowl.
Mason, Philip P. Rum Running and the Roaring Twenties: Prohibition on the Michigan-Ontario Waterway. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.
This handsome coffee-table book is one of the first to chronicle the importance of Detroit’s proximity to Canada circa 1919–1933. If not for historians of Mason’s stamp, the world might have gone on thinking that the beer wars were contained to Chicago—a piker, when you consider that Capone got his merchandise by way of the Ambassador Bridge, the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, and the naval battleground of Lake St. Clair, and imported his hit men from Detroit. The World War II black market benefited beyond measure from the lessons of its Prohibition forefathers.
Meyer, Katharine Mattingly, editor. Detroit Architecture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971.
W. Hawkins Ferry, author of The Legacy of Albert Kahn, furnished much of the text as well as an introduction. Thanks to this meticulously laid-out guide (divided into handy geographical sections listed building by building in the index), I’m reminded by photographs exactly what the Book-Cadillac Hotel looks like without a time-consuming visit to the scene, and the addresses, architects’ names, and descriptions of the structures are dealt with in pithy captions. The project was sponsored by the American Institute of Architects. I return to it regularly.
McCutcheon, Marc. The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life from Prohibition through World War II. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1995.
The title says it all. This series is somewhat facile, but when I need to know which ration-stamp designation provided unlimited gasoline, or what a “baby vamp” is, it saves hours of pulling books from my ludicrously huge library on the various eras and slogging through thousands of pages.
Peterson, Joyce Shaw. American Automobile Workers: 1900–1933. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
Although it cuts off before the events dramatized in this collection, this concise study of the American labor movement in microcosm has paid back its modest cover price in years of dividends. After all, the Horsemen weren’t born full grown at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Pflieger, Elmer F., Schoen, Frederick Elbert, and John W. Pritchard, editors. Detroit: A Manual for Citizens. Detroit: Board of Education, 1968.
This school textbook lays out all the city’s departments of government, including the police, as they existed at time of publication, and had since before the 1940s. Much has changed in the interval, but it still speaks to those interested in the decades at issue.
Powers, Tom. Michigan in Quotes. Davison, Michigan: Friede Publications, 1994.
An entertaining book to flip through in idle moments, and a bonanza of verbal snapshots of Detroit from its pioneer days into the twentieth century. (I’m embarrassed to say I’m represented throughout; but it’s impossible to write about a place for three decades and not attract local notice.)
Rubenstein, Bruce A., and Ziewacz, Lawrence E. Three Bullets Sealed His Lips. Michigan State University Press, 1987.
This gimlet-eyed scrutiny of the 1943 murder of corrupt Michigan State Senator Warren Hooper on the eve of his testimony before a grand jury probing organized crime is a marvel of investigative journalism; a lost art in today’s world of advocacy reporting. Reporters post-Woodward-and-Bernstein are sycophantic stenographers compared to Rubenstein and Ziewacz.
Theoharis, Athan G., with Tony G. Poveda, Susan Rosenfeld, and Richard Gid Powers. The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Phoenix: Oryx, 1999. An excellent quick-flip reference to the Bureau’s history, methods, and technology.
Time-Life editors. This Fabulous Century: 1940–1950. New York: Time-Life Books, 1969.
Like many such projects assembled by committee, Time-Life has endured criticism regarding some of its sources and facts; but pictures don’t lie (or at least they didn’t when these volumes were produced, before Photoshop), and the 1940s had a look all their own, preserved here. I’d back its version against anything on the Internet (the same source that insisted whales and dolphins migrated regularly thr
ough the Great Lakes; it’s a circus without a ringleader).
Various. The Detroit News. Detroit: 1941–1945.
Various. The Detroit Free Press. Detroit: 1941–1945.
Various. The Detroit Times. Detroit: 1941–1945.
Newspapers were no more accurate then than they are now: “Literature in a hurry” routinely throws truth under the bus of expedience, but at least those old-time reporters didn’t cloak themselves in the mystique of a noble profession; back then, hypocrisy went only so far. When it comes to immersing oneself in an era, there’s nothing like spending a few hours with old editions. Advertisements (What’s playing at the movies? Where do we eat? Who’s in town?), photos, and contemporary editorial policies (William Randolph Hearst’s Times is a period gem, for the best comic strips and a guaranteed puff piece on Marion Davies’ latest film) mark a time and place more vividly than any chronicle written from the distance of years. The microfilm readers in the Detroit Public Library are time machines. You can go backward and forward in history at the turn of a crank.
Various. New York Herald Tribune Front Page History of the Second World War. New York: Tribune, 1946.
Actually, any of these retrospectives is valuable; most of the major dailies have issued at least one. The Tribune’s stands out for its chronology at the back. While my Racket Squad was fighting its own war on the streets, the Allies were hammering the Axis in both hemispheres, and almost everyone in the world was desperate to keep abreast of the situation. Television was still in the future, radio reports were colored by the commentators, and theatrical newsreels were outdated upon release—although they have value now, moving pictures of Alexander, Napoleon, and the Crimean War being unavailable. These headlines, dates, and breathlessly hammered-out accounts have helped me tie wartime Detroit to events abroad.
Widick, B.J. Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence, Revised Edition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.
You can’t do better than Wayne State when it comes to understanding this city. Its emphasis on race is an excellent peg upon which to hang any serious study of Detroit’s modern history. That said, Widick’s grim view is tainted by his premise, that everything bad that has happened in America’s racial history is linked inextricably to Detroit.
Woodford, Frank B., and Woodford, Arthur M. All Our Yesterdays: A Brief History of Detroit. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969.
I snagged this prize when I began the Amos Walker series in 1979, and have worn the covers off it. From its earliest period (when Daniel Boone escaped from an Iroquois camp) through the 1968 World Series, the Woodfords, father and son, race through all the highlights in the city’s progress (and regression), with an enormously useful chronology and an exhaustive index at the end. Considering all that’s befallen Detroit since 1969, this one begs for an update; but it’s been my most dependable workhorse from the beginning.
Wrynn, V. Dennis. Detroit Goes to War: The American Automobile Industry in World War II. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1993.
Hardly comprehensive, but a good sketch of an industry in sweeping transition, Wrynn’s coffee-table book is striking for its slick four-color and black-and-white reproductions of propaganda-style advertisements that were actually intended to assure the public that the auto business hadn’t gone away forever. There are useful statistics and quick-search dates, but its greatest contribution is to instill the reader with a feel for the era.
* * *
Although I wouldn’t embarrass their memories with a formal listing, I’m grateful to my parents, Leauvett and Louise Estleman, who lived through two world wars, Prohibition, and the Great Depression, and shared colorful stories of their experiences and observations, repeating them often so my brother and I would be sure to remember them. I’m still reaping the benefits.
Valedictory Note
Elmore “Dutch” Leonard’s crime novels set in Detroit have educated more readers on the city’s character than scores of exhaustive histories. Newsweek christened him, in a rare cover article featuring a novelist, as “The Dickens of Detroit.” Swag, Stick, 52 Pickup, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, Rum Punch, Out of Sight, Get Shorty—to explore them all even briefly would hoist the production values of Detroit Is Our Beat well beyond the budget. (Up in Honey’s Room is a sly tribute to the era of interest to this book.) His westerns alone, including the seminal Hombre, would mark his place in the Yankee canon; then he raised the ante when he redirected his gimlet eye to our own time. American literature—and Detroit—lost a powerful voice when Leonard left us at the age of 87 in 2013. Thanks for the boogie ride, Dutch.
Copyright © 2015 by Loren D. Estleman.
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Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-4405-8845-7
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8845-7
Paperback ISBN 10: 1-4405-8844-9
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eISBN 10: 1-4405-8846-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8846-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Estleman, Loren D.
[Short stories. Selections.]
Detroit is our beat / Loren D. Estleman.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4405-8845-7 (hc) -- ISBN 1-4405-8845-7 (hc) -- ISBN 978-1-4405-8844-0 (pb) -- ISBN 1-4405-8844-9 (pb) -- ISBN 978-1-4405-8846-4 (ebook) -- ISBN 1-4405-8846-5 (ebook)
Police--Michigan--Detroit--Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945--Michigan--Detroit--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.S84A6 2015
813'.54--dc23
2014043510
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.
Cover design by Frank Rivera and Erin Dawson.
Cover images © iStockphoto.com/miljko/lightkey; Gennadiy Kondratyev/123RF.
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