Reviewed by Stephen Hawley
Detroit, 1928. Amongst the bootleggers crowding the headlines of the city’s newspapers is the charismatic Jack Dance, a flamboyant young hoodlum whose exploits are nailed to the front page by tabloid journalist Connie Minor.
Estleman is best known for his Amos Walker private eye series. Although the same Detroit setting is maintained in Whiskey River, the time period is now Prohibition, the era of speakeasies, flappers and the Chicago piano. William Kennedy’s Legs is the obvious model for the piece, much in the same way that the author’s Billy Gashade is patterned after Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, but it’s to Estleman’s credit that the novel doesn’t suffer in comparison to its inspiration.
The prose is as terse and witty as expected from a pro like Estleman, one of the most underrated of American writers. What makes this special, however, is an added layer of deeply evocative descriptive writing which reflects the author’s feeling for the 1920s, a period which he clearly prefers to the fast food, rock ‘n’ roll wasteland in which Walker is such a self-conscious anachronism:
Dancing the Charleston and Detroit’s own Black Bottom at the Arcadia Ballroom on Woodward, checking out Gloria Swanson and John Gilbert at the Oriole Terrace on East Grand, lapping up real nigger jazz, down and dirty, on Hastings Street, and drinking – always drinking, from hip flasks and coffee mugs, crystal flutes and clay pots, silver cups and the hollow handles of trick umbrellas. You could pass the pint around at Navil Field while watching Ty Cobb hit and Dutch Leonard pitch, or you could put on the dog and sip champagne at the Polar Bear Café in Ecorse and hear Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke hotting up the band to cover the noise of Piejacki’s navy unloading Ontario’s finest on the dock below the dining room.
The novel was Estleman’s first attempt at using the crime genre to chronicle the history of his home city and the author’s obvious knowledge of, and fondness for, the Prohibition era makes Whiskey River the highlight of the Detroit series.*
Estleman seems to have been somewhat overshadowed in the public eye by his local compatriot Elmore Leonard, but Detroit, both past and present, plays as much a part in Estleman’s work as it does in the novels of his fellow motor city scribe. The feeling for time and place is deepened by Estleman’s inclusion of such real life events as the recall of Mayor Bowles, the assassination of radio commentator Jerry Buckley and the Ferguson – O’Hara grand jury probe of the Detroit Police Department, the novel climaxing in the author’s recreation of the 1931 Collingwood Massacre. Similarly, such real life criminal entities as the Purple Gang, the Unione Siciliana and the Little Jewish Navy float through the action, whilst Dance and his gangland enemy Joey Machine appear to be based on real life underworld rivals Mad Dog Coll and Dutch Schultz respectively.
Dance himself remains an enigma. Although a ‘Rosebud’ style piece of motivation is lifted from Citizen Kane in an attempt to underpin his character, the bootlegger emerges as an opaque bundle of reflex energy rather than a fully rounded individual, a man whose actions appear as unpredictable to himself as they do to the figures who surround him. More successful is the characterisation of tabloid hack Connie Minor, whose fascination with the mercurial young hood leads him over the line from observer to participant in Dance’s criminal career. Minor is brought vividly to life by former journalist Estleman and it is the Prohibition era newspaperman’s hardboiled narration that lifts Whiskey River above the usual run of crime novels to the level of contemporary classic.
For connoisseurs of Cagney, Cadillacs and Old Log Cabin. Recommended.
*
Thunder City (pre World War One)
Whiskey River (Prohibition)
Jitterbug (World War Two)
Edsel (1950’s)
Motown (1960’s)
Stress (1970’s)
King of the Corner (1990’s)# # #
Copyright© 2007 Stephen Hawley
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