Fri 18 Sep 2020
PI Stories I’m reading: LOREN D. ESTLEMAN “Robber’s Roost.â€
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[5] Comments
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN “Robber’s Roost.†Short story. PI Amos Walker. First published in Mystery, April 1982. Collected in General Murders (Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1988) and Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (Gallery Books, hardcover, 2010).
This was Amos Walker’s first appearance in short story form. While I have both hardcover collections, I read this one in its original magazine form, at the time when, according to the introduction, Estleman had written only two novels about Walker, his long running Detroit-based PI. (I don’t know whether he’s still active. From the information I have, he last appeared in The Lioness Is the Hunter (2017).
This one’s a good one, based on the crime-ridden history of Michigan’s largest city. He takes a job from a long-retired cop in a nursing home who wants to find out what really happened to his adopted brother when he died some 50 years before. His car apparently fell through the ice while making a bootlegging run while crossing the river into the US from Canada. He’s positive that Eddie was killed by his boss, a former racketeer now also still alive, and he wants Walker to put him in prison.
There is, of course, more to the story than that, but finding out what really did happen takes all of Walker’s skills as a detective. The story’s breezily told, maybe just a tad too breezily, but only a curmudgeon would cavil at such a small thing as that. Fans of PI stories who haven’t yet caught up with Amos Walker have a real treat coming.
September 18th, 2020 at 7:07 pm
Estleman is a true professional that would have been comfortable writing back for the pulps. I think he has written almost 88 books with many different series characters. My favorite is a western series featuring Page Murdock.
September 18th, 2020 at 7:55 pm
The Murdock series is one I haven’t sampled yet, but then again I haven’t read any westerns for over a year now. It doesn’t mean that that’s a streak that will last forever, though. What I’m looking forward to is one of his novels about Valentino, the present day film detective for UCLA. So far, I’ve only read a couple of his short stories:
http://www.lorenestleman.com/valentino.html
September 18th, 2020 at 8:21 pm
Estleman in just about any format from Walker to Sherlock Holmes is a favorite. I love the Walker series, but even better the historical mysteries he’s done with Detroit’s past as a background.
Estleman is the rare writer with both the skills of the old pulpsters and the instincts of a modern novelist.
September 20th, 2020 at 12:21 pm
I am very fond of that issue. The magazine’s survival always seemed to be rather precarious. It gave me a chance to share a table of contents with Dorothy Hughes and for a time it was a great place to honor the genre before the world of blogs and its subsequent eruption of info.
September 20th, 2020 at 2:50 pm
I saw a David Wilson on the contents page, but I sure didn’t connect it up with you! For the benefit of everyone else, it’s an interview David did with Jonathan Latimer entitled “The Hard-Boiled Comedians,” and it is (of course) very very interesting.