11/20/2022 0 Comments Review of the hider by loren estleman![]() #Review of the hider by loren estleman series#(Estleman would deal with Hizzoner more directly in King of the Corner, the third book published in his series of historical crime novels about Detroit.) Young, the man who famously told Detroit's criminals, in his first inaugural speech in 1973, to hit Eight Mile Road (Detroit's northern boundary) - which many saw as a race-baiting wish to inflict Detroit's criminal population on its largely white suburbs - and who had some of his money invested in gold Krugerrands - before Mandela was set free. (I can remember, as a child, seeing the Renaissance Center as an undistinguished construction site, back when the Detroit Pistons still played at Cobo Hall.) Detroit's unnamed mayor in The Midnight Man is of course Detroit's first black mayor, the "MFIC" himself, Coleman A. (Walker would've likely had a few choice Anglo-Saxon words for anyone who dared call him a "hipster.") Reading these books thirty years on, they are of course doubly historic: the Renaissance Center, current world headquarters of General Motors, was newly built, and losing money, while the City of Detroit's "Renaissance" campaign, intended to signal a renewal of a city that was still punch-drunk from the aftermath of the 1967 riots, was spinning its wheels: Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s was rather akin to New York City in the 1970s, albeit without the cachet of cool that has since attached itself to the "Fun City" of those years. Walker is a retro-leaning guy without managing to be a walking advertisement for Nostalgia Illustrated as the first three books are set in the very late 1970s or very early 1980s, in them he was merely an oddball, a man out of step with his times, as opposed to an aficionado or, worse, a hipster. I honestly don't remember if Amos Walker's fedora makes even a cameo appearance here. Estleman tries to gussy up The Midnight Man with an epigraph from Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (out of which he tweezes this book's title), but he still reliably delivers snappy one-liners (one of my favorites: "The whole world was under thirty and I was Genghis Khan's saddle," from Chapter 10 ), acidulous exchanges, shocking and believable violence, and a final twist in the tale that is somewhat elevated by Estleman's "Midnight Man" leitmotif. The Midnight Man is an improvement over the second installment in the 22-book (and counting) series, Angel Eyes, but it's not quite up to par with Motor City Blue, which I enjoyed so much because I liked the relatively low-key riffing on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe that Estleman pulled off in it. That cops nationwide would love to blast daylight through the sole remaining shooter - and anyone who seeks to "coddle" him, "coddling" here also meaning "bring the suspect into police custody alive for interrogation and prosecution" - only complicates matters, while the wild card is a John Wayne-sized, cheerfully racist, red-bearded bounty hunter from Oklahoma named "Bum" Bassett who has an amazing facility for popping up in all the places that Walker does. The problem is, the shooter is part of a group of warmed-over black militants who still very much want to "Kill the pigs," and worse, spark an all-out race war in these United States. This time out, Walker's working gratis for a Detroit cop who saved his hash and cut him a break when a stake-out on a light-fingered trucker almost cut off his string at the request of the cop and his wife, Walker's trying to bring in alive the last of the shooters that killed two other cops and left Walker's good samaritan paralyzed. 74 of the April 1987 Fawcett Crest / Ballantine Books mass market paperback edition). #Review of the hider by loren estleman movie#Estleman's long-running series about the Detroit-based PI named Amos Walker (and it's of no relation to the somewhat obscure 1974 movie of the same name, co-directed by and starring Burt Lancaster) that takes place in some unspecified year, five-and-a-half months after the events in the first book, Motor City Blue (Chapter 8, p. The Midnight Man is the third book in Loren D. Estleman's Amos Walker series, The Midnight Man (NY: Open Road Integrated Media, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4532-2254-6 263 pps.), as an e-book borrowed from the library. Uvula_fr_b4From Saturday, 17 August to Tuesday, 20 August, I read the third book in Loren D. ![]()
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