A nice old fashioned mystery. I have always wanted to read this series and glad I have finally started it. It was fun being transported back a few decades. I also loved the setting of Detroit. I haven't read any books I can remember set there. ( )

Written in the style of the hard-boiled detectives, Estleman tells a satisfactory tale. I'm not sure if I will read many more though. The style and attitudes are a bit dated and not always pleasant to read. The mystery itself was not that much of a challenge. ( )

Motor City Blue is the first of Loren Estleman's Amos Walker mysteries. Amos Walker is a private detective in Detroit. I didn't think I was going to like this book for the first 50 or so pages but then I decided I did like it. Liked it enough to probably read the next one. Full of violence, drugs and drinking and seedy characters. In Motor City Blue Walker is hired to find a missing woman and leads to a bunch of other events. The young woman left a finishing school and ended up in a brothel. ( )

Amos Walker is private detective, hired by a retired Detroit mobster to find his missing ward, Marla Bernstein. She disappeared from her finishing school with a unknown man and there is s photo showing that she may be involved in prostitution and/or adult films. Walker has been trying to see if an insurer was being scammed with a faked injury, when he witnesses his CO from Vietnam grabbed by two thugs, and ending up dead in a car trunk. The CO was working for military intelligence looking into the killing of a rising labor organizer. The two stories become integrated in more ways than one as Amos pulls at the few threads to find the truth. ( )

For the most part it's a bad imitation of Hammett or Chandler. ( )

Motor City Blue is a fun introduction to Amos Walker, an ex-MP and Vietnam veteran in his early 30s who adopts a deliberately retro style as an insurance investigator and private eye; aside from the Chandleresque similes, an office with an always-unlocked waiting room, a fifth of Hiram Walker (no relation, except perhaps via infusion) nestled securely in his desk drawer, an unapologetically old fashioned taste in movies and music, and unabashedly retrograde opinions on feminism and various races, creeds and sexual orientations, Walker is constantly adorned with a trench coat and fedora (indeed, numerous characters make pointed references to his fedora, the kinder comments being along the lines that he's the first person under fifty they've seen wearing one in a dog's age). Estleman's assured writing style is really able to sell this homage / remake of The Big Sleep, with a gleefully twisted plot involving pornographers, prostitutes, a runaway ward of a dying Kosher Nostra gang lord (who has the deceptively Amerindian-sounding name of Ben Morningstar; however, one should recall that "morning star" was one of the names for Lucifer, both of whom were identified with the planet Venus), a resurgent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion (and yes, film fans, reference is made to the 1937 Humphrey Bogart movie about them), and the unsolved murder of a firebrand union organizer named Freeman Shanks. Oh, and a possible case of accident insurance fraud.

I first read Motor City Blue over twenty-five years ago, and, while I enjoyed it, I didn't enjoy it enough to seek out others in the series at the time (although I did go on to read other Loren D. Estleman books, such as the second book in his series about the hitman Peter Macklin, Roses Are Dead -- in many ways still my favorite book by Estleman -- and six of the seven books in his loosely-connected Detroit crime series); I'm not sure why I liked it so much more upon re-reading it: maybe it's because I'm older and a little more appreciative of a well-written story firmly rooted in my (rapidly diminishing) native metropolis; maybe it's because I've come to realize that there's only so many times that I can re-read Raymond Chandler without becoming a dreary cliché; maybe it's because I've read a lot more mediocre or out-and-out lousy books since then, and therefore am not nearly as dismissive of writing that is "merely" solid, entertaining, and craftsmanlike as I used to be. I suspect that people who aren't already enamored of Detroit and its history, warts -- hell, suppurating buboes -- and all, may not be quite as impressed with Motor City Blue as I am. (As another lifelong resident tells Walker, in Chapter 12, "'Call it River Rouge or Ecorse or Hamtramck or Farmington or Dearborn, it's all Detroit and it stinks.'")

Of course, how much you dig Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and the tropes of the hardboiled private eye genre, will also determine how well you like Motor City Blue. While Estleman is far from being as misanthropically provocative as, say, James Ellroy, his Amos Walker isn't exactly politically correct either; if you can't get past Marlowe's ethnic slurs and pejorative references to gays, well, Walker's use of same will likely also piss you off, especially given the fact that Motor City Blue was written some forty-odd years after Marlowe's heyday (The Long Goodbye excepted). Given that some of the main bad guys here are a pair of Georgia crackers relaunching a KKK splinter cell, Walker's prejudicial remarks call to mind the old joke about an alcoholic being someone who drinks more than his doctor: apparently Walker is meant to be just aces with his references to "wops," "sheenies" and "fags," just so long as he doesn't drop the "n-bomb" (or target people for murder based on their ethnicity).

While there are a number of wonderful, often grin-inducing, lines to be found in Motor City Blue, lines that beg to be shared, I'll content myself with citing only one more passage: it's when Walker (who cops to having been named after one half of an old radio show) schools a smart-mouthed ex-cabbie in the employ of Ben Morningstar, in Chapter 13:

"'I'm down at the heels because I'm honest. Some of us are in this business. We're the guys the slick ops in the sharp tailormades hire at the professional courtesy rate of fifty or a hundred a day to do the work their clients engage them at for three hundred. Your boss may can me and throw his green into office bars and computers and flashy receptionists with nothing to do all day but answer the telephone and ball the department head, but he'll still be hiring me or someone like me. He'll just be shelling out more to the middleman. I may charge whiskey to expenses, but when I do I write it out clear and firm on the accounting sheet. He won't get that from anyone in a higher tax bracket.'"

One likes to think that Chandler would have nodded in approval as he read this. ( )

Excellent writing with enjoyable use of language. Just not my style of story. Read 5 chapters and quit. ( )

Fantastic for what it is - a hardboiled, detective story, straight out of Detroit. If you like a good, pulpy, detective story with noir influences (and more than a few great lines), pick up this book - the first in the Amos Walker mysteries. ( )

http://scooterchronicles.com/2005/04/17/motor-city-blue-by-loren-d-estleman/ ( )