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Summary
Author Notes
Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 15, 1952. He received a B.A. in English literature and journalism from Eastern Michigan University in 1974. He spent several years as a reporter on the police beat before leaving to write full time in 1980. He wrote book reviews for such newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post and contributed articles to such periodicals as TV Guide.
He is a writer of mysteries and westerns. His first novel was published in 1976 and since then he has published more than 70 books including the Amos Walker series, Writing the Popular Novel, Roy and Lillie: A Love Story, The Confessions of Al Capone, and a The Branch and the Scaffold. He received four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Golden Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from Western Writers of America, and the Michigan Author's Award in 1997.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Prohibition Detroit--served up with plenty of color and flash, if not drama or suspense, in this first volume of a projected Detroit crime trilogy by the author who's mapped today's Motor City so sharply in his Amos Walker, p.i., series. Estleman frames his story with a 1939 grand jury inquiry into Detroit police misconduct. The witness on the stand is hard-talking former tabloid newspaperman Connie Minor, whose flashbacking testimony covers the waning years of Prohibition, 1929-1931. Yet while Connie is the lens for Estleman's vivid take on flapper days--a midnight whiskey run across a frozen Detroit River; shootouts between Old World mafiosi and slick young bandits; drunken nights in red-lit saloons; backroom deals between bribe-happy cops and money-flush cons--the focus is strongly on Jack Dance (nÉ Danzig), a bootlegger whose meteoric rise and fall is meant to encapsulate the Roman candle spirit of the era. When Connie first meets him, Jack's just a young Jewish hood about to join the crooked army of leading mobster Joey Machine, while Connie's an underpaid reporter with the Chicago Sun. Times; two years later, Connie's a top syndicated columnist with the Banner, a sleazy tabloid, while Jack's breaking from Machine to form his own gang. Connie's narration wanders into several subplots, romantic (troubles with sometime paramour Hattie, a saloon-keeping madam) and journalistic (the tricks and rigors of writing daily copy), but it always returns to Jack and his bloody war with Machine--a war put on hold when Jack is tried for the accidental shooting of a little girl, then concluded, inevitably, with the young gangster's ignominious death in a dingy apartment. A superb re-creation, but lacking drive as Estleman packs his pages with Michneresque plotting and detail that hem his characters into stereotypes with predictable destinies. In short: an impeccably restored Duesenberg with a bum engine. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Book one in crime writer Estleman's projected Detroit trilogy. The narrative starts at the tail end of the thirties, with wise-guy reporter and mob-guy confidant Connie Minor hauled up before a grand jury to tell his side of the past ten years' illegal booze action across the Canadian Border. Connie lets rip, and there isn't a line that doesn't simmer with period authenticity. The author's prose has always had something retro about it, so perhaps this isn't surprising. The trouble is, by working backwards, Estleman gives away some of the best stuff early: there is no tension in the story of Jack Dance's rise and fall as he cavalierly takes on the might of major-league bootlegger Joey Machine (Estleman appears to have no shortage of evocative hoodlum names). So, too, everyone knows that Connie will stray a little too close to the crime figures he is supposedly getting the lowdown on. Nevertheless, certain scenes crackle (gunfire on the ice-bound river in the pitch blackness, as a secret tip-off has the bulls closing in), and while this is not prime Estleman, it's not half bad either. --Peter Robertson
