Review

CRIME FICTION

NEVER STREET

By Loren D. Estleman

Mysterious Press

352 pages, $23 Hardback

By Jamie Agnew

Owner of Aunt Agatha's

Amos Walker is back! Although that statement may be cryptic to some, to fans of the private eye novel, it's electrifying news. Loren D. Estleman's Amos Walker series (now eleven strong) is one of the finest ongoing efforts in the genre, but due to publisher obtuseness and legal bullshit, it's been seven years since the last installment, 1990' s "Sweet Women Lie." Finally, however, there's new manna tor we who have been wandering in the desert - it's called "Never Street," and let me tell you, it's sweet.

Estleman is an unapologetic master of genre fiction (he also has a new western historical novel out called "Billy Gashade") and he serves it up straight, with just enough post-modem garnish to make things fresh. This Walker adventure, set mostly in Detroit (as usual), begins with a classic situation - the Private Eye whose business is not exactly booming is visited by an attractive woman with a potentially lucrative assignment - she wants Amos to find her missing husband. There's an intriguing twist though - her vanished husband is a film noir fanatic who she fears has pierced the thin membrane of his rear projection television screen and somehow deluded himself that he's living in the grim, deadly noir world. This leads Walker to another classic hard-boiled scene of menace at a sinister sanitarium in a bucolic setting (in this case Mackinac Island) overseen by a scheming shrink up to no good. There' s also a beautiful femme fatale, freewheeling psycho-gangsters and a shady business partner. As Amos learns more about both film noir and the missing man's life, the black and white elements of the Although other, more self-consciously "literary" local academic writers get twice the praise and media coverage, they sell a t e nth of the books and write half as well as the underrated area treasure Estleman ... old movies clash violently with the hues of our much more ambiguously colorized modern video "reality."

The intriguing noir ingredients and echoes continue throughout the book, integrated into the mix of the seamless plot and its expertly handled denouement, first at the top of the Renaissance Center, and then a truly original and clever finis in the aisles of the Fox Theater.

"Never Street" is an almost aggressively counter-trendy book with no tougher-than cheap-steak heroines, no soap-opera spice, and no exotic foreign flavors. It's not nouvelle cuisine, but more like mom's old-fashioned meatloaf recipe, reliable and satisfying. Just like in the classic P.I. days, you know that it's more of an episode than a chapter in Amos Walker' s life, that the central character will be the least developed, that any changes in his life will be temporary and that all romantic liaisons will be over by the book's end.

You have to pay your compliments to the chef though - Estleman, no slouch before, is definitely at the peak of his writing powers. Although other, more self-consciously "literary" local academic writers get twice that praise and media coverage, they sell a tenth of the books and write half as well as the underrated area treasure Estleman, their slack, self indulgent and soporific efforts curdling beside his far meatier fare. The plot of "Never Street" is eventful, clever but not too clever, the scenes set with deft clarity and sure, swift strokes, the secondary characters vivid and vital, the dialogue appropriately snappy and epigrammatic.

The protagonist Walker is mostly defined by his hard-boiled attitude, and his off-hand observations about Detroit and the modern world are worth the prix fixee alone, as he calls McDonald' s "the shrine of the clown," and describes a baseball broadcast as the "soporifïc voices of a pair of announcers discussing a recent play in aTiger' s game as if it were a shard of pottery discovered in Ethiopia." Yes, Amos Walker is back, and he' s the main ingredient in this long overdue treat. My advice to the reader? Dig in!