Review of Whiskey River by Loren Estleman (Scribners, 1990)

Detroit, the late 1920s/early 1930s. The city is a melting pot of people drawn to its industrial base.  The start of the Great Depression has added a desperate edge and prohibition has led to a thriving underground scene of speakeasies and bootlegging, with gangs bringing liquor across the Detroit River from Canada or setting up their own breweries. Competition is fierce, with regular deadly fights over turf and markets, overseen by a corrupt police force as interested in kickbacks as keeping the peace. Constantine (‘Connie’) Minor is a tabloid columnist who made his name working the crime beat. He’s met and written about the city’s major criminals and has built up a level of trust with them. In particular, he has formed a bond with a young, charismatic hoodlum, Jack Dance, who invites him to take part in a whiskey run across the frozen river. Subsequently, Dance uses Minor as a go-between, swapping the journalist’s supposedly neutral position to deliver messages for an inside track on breaking stories. It’s an odd relationship, with Dance being ruthless and unpredictable, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, and Minor hiding his excesses to protect his source of exclusives. While ‘Joey the Machine’ and the Unione Siciliana seem to be playing a long game, Dance lives in the moment, taking evermore risks to take a larger share of the bootlegging business.

Whiskey River is the first novel in the Estelman’s ‘Detroit’ series, with each novel focusing on a key aspect/event in the city’s history in the twentieth century. In this outing it’s the late 1920s/early 1930s and the focus is on the operation of criminal gangs and their on-going battles with each other and the law. The story is told in the form of a testimony by Connie Minor, a syndicated tabloid columnist, at a grand-jury investigation into police corruption held in 1939. Minor’s recollection focuses mainly on the life and death of Jack Dance. Dance is a young criminal and schemer with a faulty moral compass, high ambitions, an unpredictable nature, and an inner energy that makes things happen. He has no respect for the established criminal or legal order and is prepared to take on both. Minor is drawn into Dance’s world and is trusted by him, allowing the journalist access to the life of a hoodlum. To ground the tale in the history of the city, Estelman mixes in a number of real world events including a couple of murders and political machinations. To create atmosphere, the tale is told in style of an earlier gangster movie or Raymond Chandler novel, with some nice observations, witty one-liners, and at times sparkling prose.  The result is a character-driven story of Detroit’s underbelly during prohibition, of warring criminal gangs, corrupt police, and a society reeling from the Great Depression. The only niggle is use of a narrator, which seems to put a bit of distance between the reader and the unfolding story. Otherwise, Whiskey River is a fascinating and engaging piece of historical crime fiction.

Review of Rough Treatment by John Harvey (1990, Arrow)

Grabianski and Grice meet up a few times a year, each time in a different city, and conduct a series of lucrative burglaries.  When they enter television director Harold Roy’s house to break into his safe they find something they weren’t anticipating, Maria, Roy’s wife.  Unexpectedly for Grabianski and Maria it's lust at first site.  Also of surprise is a kilo of cocaine.  When Maria reports the crime she decides to give a false description of the robbers.  When Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick investigates his instincts are piqued.  So is the real owner of the cocaine.  With patient persistence, Resnick and his team slowly make progress and if they’re lucky they’ll catch more than two professional thieves.

Rough Treatment is the second in the series of twelve police procedurals featuring Charlie Resnick.  What’s nice about this story is its everydayness rather than unusual or spectacular forms of crimes.  The focus is on catching two professional thieves that specialise in house burglaries.  The twist is that when they enter the house of television director Harold Roy they discover his wife, who one of the thieves takes a shine to, and a kilo of cocaine that belongs to someone else.  Rather than disappearing as usual the two thieves hang around, one starting an affair with Maria Roy and both trying to sell the cocaine back to the original owner.  While Harvey centres the story on Detective Inspector Resnick’s investigation and his stuttering, hesitant personal life, he also focuses on the interrelationships and politics of his whole team and wider station, adding context.  Into the mix he also adds the tensions of recording a television series, a fight within a Chinese restaurant dynasty, and a wayward superintendent’s daughter.  The result is an interlocking set of relatively low key, character-driven stories.  While the story lacks punch, it is nonetheless and entertaining slice of social realism.

Review of The Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (Serpent’s Tail, 1990)

Born and raised in Texas and having served in the army, Easy Rawlins knows all about how black men are expected to act in white institutions.  Despite this, after a long shift working in an aircraft plant in Los Angeles he has a falling out with his boss and is laid off.  It’s the summer of 1948 and he doesn’t have a lot of options, but he’s determined meet the mortgage payments and to keep his newly bought house.  When he’s offered a $100 by a white lawyer to find Daphne Monet, despite reservations, he accepts the job.  It seems that Daphne likes the company of black men and Easy works his way round the bars trying to pick up a lead.  What he finds is a trail of bodies and a complicated knot of people either looking for, or seeking to protect, the devil in a blue dress.  Worse, the police have him pegged as the person leaving the trail of bodies.  He needs to find Daphne fast, hand her over and find a safe exit, assuming he can resist her deadly charms once he locates her.

The Devil in the Blue Dress is a noir tale full of racial and sexual tensions set in the post-war Los Angeles.  The strengths of the novel are the characterisation, contextualisation, and sense of place and time.  Easy Rawlins is an interesting lead character: a man who wants to pull himself up into the middle class but finds himself scrabbling around in the underworld to keep that dream from slipping by; he’s familiar with death from his time fighting across Europe, but he has little appetite for the murderous situation he finds himself in.  As such, his moral compass is generally pointed in the right direction, but he’s prepared to let it waver, especially as he lives in a community where right and wrong are various shades of grey and he has to negotiate the racist attentions of powerful white men.  To complement him, Mosley fills the story with a set of colourful, dangerous characters.  The tale is particularly good at portraying the racial geography of the city, its seedy nightlife and petty crime, and dropping in small historical references.  The plot was interesting, but felt a little opaque at times given the number of characters and their shifting allegiances, and some elements didn’t seem to quite sit right.  Nonetheless, it was an entertaining read, told in a style that is all tell and no show, and is full of noirish atmosphere.