Loren D. Estleman

• Born: September 15, 1952
• Place of Birth: Ann Arbor, Michigan

TYPES OF PLOT: Private investigator; hard-boiled; historical; inverted

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Amos Walker, 1980-; Peter Macklin, 1984-; Detroit, 1990-

Contribution

Loren D. Estleman is one of the most stylish followers of the hard-boiled detective tradition invented by , refined by , and imitated by hundreds of others. Although many hard-boiled detective-fiction writers strain for effect or lapse into parodies of the genre, Estleman is rarely self-conscious, allowing the colorful descriptions and humorous quips to emerge from the characters and situations rather than being clumsily imposed on his material.

Detroit and its environs are even more central to Estleman’s fiction than to that of fellow Michigan native , to whom he is often compared. In all three of his series, Estleman portrays the city as an urban playground for decay and violence. Amos Walker’s nostalgia for the past is in part a reaction to what has happened to a once-great city. Estleman treats Detroit inhabitants more sympathetically than he does the spoiled, even more dangerous folks who have fled to the affluent suburbs. Just as it is difficult to imagine Hammett without San Francisco and Chandler without Los Angeles, Estleman owns the Motor City.

Estleman’s many awards include American Mystery Awards from Mystery Scene Magazine for Downriver (1988) and Whiskey River (1990) and four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America for Sugartown (1984) and the short stories “Eight Mile and Dequindre” (1984), “The Crooked Way” (1988), and “Lady on Ice” (2003), and he was twice named Outstanding Mystery Writer of the Year by Popular Fiction Monthly. He was honored by the Michigan Foundation of the Arts in 1987 and received the Michigan Author Award from the Michigan Library Association in 1997. He earned several other honors for his western fiction. Estleman received an honorary doctorate from Eastern Michigan University in 2002.

Biography

Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on September 15, 1952, to Leauvett Charles Estleman, a truck driver, and Louise Milankovich Estleman, a postal clerk. He grew up in an 1867 farmhouse whose upper floor, including his bedroom, was unheated. He began submitting short stories to publications when he was fifteen and received 160 rejections over the next eight years. After his father became disabled, Estleman’s mother went to work to support the family. To reduce expenses, Estleman commuted to Eastern Michigan University, majoring in English and journalism. After graduating in 1974, he worked as a police-beat reporter and editor for the Ypsilanti Press; Community Foto-News in Pinckney, Michigan; Ann Arbor News; and Dexter Leader until becoming a full-time fiction writer in 1980.

Estleman’s early novels include two Sherlock Holmes pastiches, but he found his true voice when he began the Amos Walker series. As a reporter, he spent considerable time with police officers, absorbing their jargon and learning the rhythms of their speech, which he puts to excellent use in his fiction. Estleman had long been fascinated by the criminal world. His Austrian-born grandmother was an acquaintance of Al Capone through frequenting gambling casinos.

Estleman eventually settled in Whitmore Lake, Michigan. He married Carole Ann Ashley, a marketing and public relations specialist, on September 5, 1987, was divorced in 1990, and married mystery and Western writer Deborah Morgan, a descendant of an outlaw in the famous Dalton gang, in 1993.

Estleman has reviewed books for several newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. He has said that his favorite writers are , , , , , and Raymond Chandler. The influences of Chandler, Hemingway, Poe, and London are apparent throughout his work.

Analysis

Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker is a fish out of water, someone who might have been much more comfortable practicing his trade in the 1940s and 1950s, when morality was less ambiguous, than in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He smokes, drinks, winds down by listening to jazz singer Anita O’Day, and watches George Sanders as the Falcon on television. Walker is bemused when he encounters a twenty-five-year-old receptionist who does not recognize the name Al Capone.

The city where Walker lives is central to his life; Estleman has said that the detective would be only half a character without Detroit. The Walker series gives a complex view of Detroit and its suburbs, presenting drug dealers, prostitutes, pornographers, automotive executives, television personalities, bounty hunters, killers of police officers, reporters, politicians, and jazz singers.

Although racial tensions are important in Estleman’s fiction, the author is equally concerned with the class differences between the wealthy who have abandoned the city and those left behind who simply want to live what passes for normal lives. Anyone who exploits these people, from dirty police officers to corrupt politicians, is a target of the writer’s ire. Though Estleman uses crime as a metaphor for the ills of society, he keeps sociology simmering in the background, never letting it overshadow his plots and characters.

Although the roughhewn Walker could easily be on the other side of the law, hitman Peter Macklin is successful at his work because he seems so ordinary. Macklin finds himself encountering terrorists in Kill Zone (1984), guards a television evangelist in Any Man’s Death (1986), and becomes the target of another killer in Roses Are Dead (1986).

Originally planned as a trilogy, the Detroit series looks at the city’s flamboyant history during the early twentieth century in Thunder City (1999), the 1920s and 1930s in Whiskey River (1990), the 1940s in Jitterbug (1998), the 1950s in Edsel (1995), the 1960s in Motown (1991), the 1970s in Stress (1996), and the 1990’s in King of the Corner (1993). The topics range from labor unions to organized crime to racism in the police department to the origins of the automobile industry, with a few characters appearing in more than one novel. Estleman uses the city to embody the promise of the American Dream and those who find the quest unattainable.

Estleman’s fiction is crammed with popular culture references, particularly to films. Everyone from Willie Best, the black character actor of the 1930s and 1940s, to Fred Astaire, is mentioned. A house in Birmingham, Michigan, is said to resemble the Mount Rushmore residence of James Mason in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), a hint that danger lurks there. The framed, original Casablanca (1942) poster in Walker’s office lets readers know he is a tough guy with a romantic, even sentimental streak.

King of the Corner features a former relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, and Estleman’s books frequently have references to the baseball team representing the best of the city’s achievements. Hall of Fame outfielder Al Kaline, who played for the Tigers from 1953 to 1974, is an important touchstone for Estleman.

Estleman has written almost as much about the West as about crime and is equally acclaimed in that genre. Historical figures such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Will Bill Hickok, and Pat Garrett appear frequently in his Westerns. His U.S. Marshal Page Murdock series resembles his mysteries with its colorful characters and snappy dialogue.

Downriver

Considered one of the best in the Walker series, Downriver finds the detective hired by former convict Richard DeVries, who has just completed a twenty-year sentence. During the 1967 Detroit riot, DeVries threw a firebomb while an armored-car robbery was taking place nearby. Framed for the robbery, he wants Walker to locate the $200,000 stolen during the heist, which he feels he deserves.

The trail leads Walker to an unlikely suspect, Alfred Hendriks, an executive with Marianne Motors. Hendriks, Walker discovers, is far from the only person involved in the case who is not exactly what he seems.

Downriver is one of the surprisingly few Estleman novels to involve the automotive industry for which Detroit is most famous. Estleman is sympathetic toward Timothy Marianne, who simply wants to put out a good product but finds himself surrounded by greedy manipulators. The climactic shoot-out inside Marianne’s plant is one of Estleman’s best action scenes.

Whiskey River

Whiskey River, the first title in the historical Detroit series, focuses on importing and selling liquor during the final years of Prohibition. Newspaperman Connie Minor, who appears in several Detroit titles and is an intimate of gangster Jack Dance, narrates the events from the perspective of 1939.

Minor uses this friendship and his inside knowledge to propel himself to prominence as a syndicated crime reporter. Minor even acts as Dance’s go-between with the police, with whom he has an uneasy relationship. Dance emerges as a vivid, likable character because of the reporter’s fondness for him. Minor may represent Estleman’s ambivalent attitude toward the way reporters, police, and criminals intermingle.

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

Many of Walker's books involve the detective’s investigations of events in the past. In A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (2000), Walker is hired to find Eugene Booth, who long ago published Paradise Valley, a fictional account of a 1943 riot that left several African Americans dead. Booth agrees that Louise Starr can republish the book, changes his mind, and disappears. Walker tracks down Booth to discover the writer plans to create a new version of Paradise Valley, revealing the truth about the role of the Detroit police in the riot. Booth is murdered, however, before he can complete his revision.

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger is notable for its colorful characters. The son of the artist who illustrated the covers of Booth’s books, Lowell Birdsall, Jr., lives in an apartment full of 1950s memorabilia. Though she resides in a nursing home, Fleta Skirrett, a former model for the artist Birdsall, remains larger than life. Glad Eddie Cypress is a retired hitman on a bloody book tour for his autobiography. Through these characters, Estleman explores how the sins of the past live on in the present.

Retro

Retro (2004) resembles A Smile on the Face of the Tiger in that Walker investigates an old crime involving racial issues. A dying madam hires Walker to find Delwayne, the illegitimate result of a 1949 affair between a black boxer and a white Hollywood starlet. Delwayne, a fugitive from an antiwar bombing case in the 1960s, is then murdered, just as his father was a half-century earlier.

While evading the Mafia, Walker must sort through clues from three decades to piece together the truth. Walker learns that the same gun killed both father and son. Estleman excels at exploring the complicated ways in which racism continues to haunt the United States.

Little Black Dress

In Something Borrowed, Something Black (2002), Laurie Macklin thinks she has married a nice, quiet older man only to discover on their honeymoon that he is a retired assassin. In Little Black Dress (2005), she takes Peter Macklin to meet her mother, Pamela Ziegenthaler, who manages a chain bookstore in Toledo, Ohio.

Pamela’s store is targeted by a gang of thieves intending to branch out from robbing video stores. Ironically, Pamela’s new boyfriend, Ben Grinnell, whom she takes to be as dull as Laurie initially thought her husband, is the gang point man. Grinnell and Macklin quickly spot each other as outlaws, almost mirror images, and move warily through a slowly evolving predicament.

Such Macklin books are a departure for Estleman not only because they focus on a criminal but also because they show domestic life and criminal activity coexisting uneasily. Macklin does not like his obnoxious, bossy mother-in-law, but neither does he want to see her hurt. He has nothing against Grinnell, a fellow professional, but will stop him if necessary.

Little Black Dress, whose title refers to Laurie’s sophisticated attire for a book signing at her mother’s store, features more overt humor than in the Walker novels. There are colorful, though dangerous, crooks named Wild Bill and to show that the Wild West still lives on in the twenty-first century, and best-selling author Francis Spain is Estleman’s satirical attack on those writers who manage to be successful without actually knowing how to write.

Additional Works

Estleman published over thirty books in the Amos Walker series, including Infernal Angels (2011), You Know Who Killed Me (2014), Cutthroat Dogs (2021), City Walls (2023), and Iron Star (2024). In addition to this series, Estleman published many Western novels, like The Ballad of Black Bart (2017), the Valentino series, and various other works, like Paperback Jack (2022).

Principal Series Characters:

• Amos Walker is a rugged, rumpled Detroit private investigator. The divorced loner is a tough guy amused by his toughness. He cannot resist a witty comeback, no matter what the circumstances. Walker is also a Vietnam War veteran, though his memories of the war and military metaphors play a less significant role as the series progresses. He hates hypocrisy but is less cynical than he pretends to be. His creator has said that Walker has an instinct for survival rivaling Bugs Bunny's. As the series progresses, he becomes less cocky and more world-weary.
• Peter Macklin is a freelance professional assassin operating out of Detroit. He tries to retire and ease into domestic life but cannot seem to separate himself from violence. Macklin is a vaguer character than Walker because blandness is an excellent cover for his work.

Bibliography

Estleman, Loren D. “Golden Blonde.” Interview by Mary Anna Tennenhouse. Publishers Weekly, vol. 250, no. 16, 21 Apr. 2003, p. 42.

Estleman, Loren D. “The Man from Motor City.” Interview with Keith Kroll. The Armchair Detective, vol. 24, no. 1, 1991, pp. 4-11.

Estleman, Loren D. “Not Enough to Be a Good Man.” Interview by Leonard Picker. Publishers Weekly, vol. 254, no. 7, 13 Feb. 2006, p. 65.

Hynes, Joseph. “Looking for Endings: The Fiction of Loren D. Estleman.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 29, no. 3, 1995, pp. 121-27.

"Loren D. Estleman." 3 June 2024, lorenestleman.com. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Walker, Dale L. “Loren Estleman.” Mystery Scene, vol. 58, 1997, pp. 56-59, 65.