Sun 12 May 2024
A 1001 Midnights Review: LOREN ESTLEMAN – Kill Zone.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
by Robert J. Randisi & Bill Pronzini
LOREN ESTLEMAN – Kill Zone. Peter Macklin #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback, 1986.
In Kill Zone, Loren Estleman, who is best known for his rough-and-tumble. Chandlcrcsque private-eye novels, introduces Peter Macklin, “efficiency expert” — a euphemism for hit man. Macklin is the toughest character-hero or antihero-to arrive in crime fiction since Richard Stark’s Parker; and Estleman’s prose the hardest-boiled since the days of Paul Cain and Cap Shaw’s Black Mask. Macklin and Estleman, in fact, would probably have been too grimly realistic even for the pioneering Shaw and his magazine.
A terrorist group takes control of a Lake Erie excursion boat with 800 passengers, rigging it as a floating bomb. They demand the release of three prisoners within ten days. Michael Boniface, the head of the Detroit mob. offers his assistance from his prison cell in return for parole, but it is not until the FBI discovers that one of the passengers on the boat is a cabinet member’s daughter that they take him up on it. Boniface’s assistance is in the form of his top “efficiency expert,” Peter Macklin.
Macklin tries to concentrate on the business at hand while dealing with an alcoholic wife. the knowledge that someone close to him has betrayed him, and the fact that he is being stalked by a killer working for Charles Maggiore, acting head of the mob, who does not want Boniface to get out of prison.
Estleman takes an expertise previously displayed in PI and western novels (one of his westerns, Aces and Eights, won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for Best Novel of 1982), and in applying it to a different type of novel has once again scored high marks. Fans of hard-boiled fiction won’t want to miss it — or subsequent Peter Macklin titles: Kill Zone is the first of at least three.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
The complete Peter Macklin series —
1. Kill Zone (1984)
2. Roses Are Dead (1985)
3. Any Man’s Death (1986)
4. Something Borrowed, Something Black (2002)
5. Little Black Dress (2005)
May 12th, 2024 at 8:30 am
Estleman is one of the best writing today, as good as the Macklin and Walker books are, his westerns are even better. Probably could have fit in with the best of the pulp writers, as he has several different series characters over the years.
And I believe he still writes with a typewriter, believe it or not.
May 12th, 2024 at 1:10 pm
I don’t know about Estleman still using a typewriter, but neither do I doubt it. A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review of one of his Amos Walker books will appear here on this blog soon, but it’s worth noting now that number 32 in the series is on the schedule for next year: Smoke on the Water (2025). Have I read them all, no, but I’m working on it!
May 13th, 2024 at 12:23 am
While I agree with the accolades this is my least favorite Estleman series, which is still high praise considering where I rank most of his work.