(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). 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. Targeted by both Congress and the Mob, Jay may end up the victim of his own success – unless he can write his way to a happier ending.Uvula_fr_b4From Saturday, 17 August to Tuesday, 20 August, I read the third book in Loren D. Meanwhile, as Hollywood comes calling, the entire industry also comes under fire from censorious politicians out to tame the paperback jungle in the name of public morality. He prides himself on the authenticity of his work, however, which means picking the brains of some less than reputable characters, including an Irish gangster who wants a cut of the profits – or else. Although scorned by the critics, the tawdry drugstore novels sell like hotcakes – or so Jacob is assured by the enterprising head of Blue Devil Books, a pioneer in paperback publishing, known for its two-fisted heroes and underclad cover girls.Īs “Jack Holly,” Jacob finds success as the author of scandalously bestselling crime novels. The pulp magazines he used to write for are dying, replaced by a revolutionary new publishing racket: paperback novels, offering cheap excitement for the common man and woman. Fresh from the War in Europe, hack writer Jacob Heppleman discovers a changed world back home. Estleman: lurid paperback covers promised sex and danger, but what went on behind the scenes was nearly as spicy as the adventures between the covers.ġ946. Paperback Jack is a brand new historical thriller from Grand Master Loren D.
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