Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection
Read Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection Online
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
AMOS WALKERThe Complete Story Collection
Published by
TYRUS BOOKS
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
4700 East Galbraith Road
Cincinnati, Ohio 45236
Copyright © 2010 by Loren D. Estleman
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction.
Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3100-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3100-2
This work has been previously published in print format under the following ISBN:
978-1-935562-24-5
All stories © Loren D. Estleman
“Greektown” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1983
“Robber’s Roost” was first published in Mystery Magazine, 1982
“Fast Burn” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1983
“Dead Soldier” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1982
“Eight Mile & Dequindre” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1985
“I’m in the Book” was first published in The Mean Streets, Mysterious Press, 1986
“Bodyguards Shoot Second” was first published in A Matter of Crime, 1987
“The Prettiest Dead Girl in Detroit” was first published in The Eyes Have It, Mysterious Press, 1985
“Blond and Blue” was first published in New Black Mask, 1985
“Bloody July” was first published in New Black Mask, 1985
(The above stories were collected in General Murders, Houghton Mifflin, 1988, © Loren D. Estleman)
“The Anniversary Waltz” was first published in The Mysterious Press Anniversary, Mysterious Press, 2001
“Needle” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 2007
“Cigarette Stop” was first published in Justice for Hire, Mysterious Press, 1990
“Deadly Force” was first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, 1992
“People Who Kill” was first published in People Who Kill, Pulphouse, 1986
“Pickups and Shotguns” was first published in Homicide Host Presents, Write Way, 1996
“The Crooked Way” was first published in A Matter of Crime, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988
“Redneck” (as “Double Whammy”) was first published in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, 1998
“Dogs” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1987
“Safe House” was first published in Deadly Allies, Doubleday, 1992
“Kill the Cat” was first published in Detroit Noir, Akashic Books, 2007
“Slipstream” was first published in Deadly Allies II, Doubleday, 1994
“Lady on Ice” was first published in A Dark and Sultry Night for Crime, Berkley, 2003
“Snow Angels” was first published in Invitation to Murder, Dark Harvest, 1991
“Major Crimes” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1986
“Square One” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 2006
“The Man Who Loved Noir” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 1991
“Sunday” was first published in For Crime Out Loud, Durkin Hayes Audio, 1995
“Necessary Evil” was first published in The Shamus Game, Signet, 2000
“Trust Me” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 2006
“The Woodward Plan” was first published in Mystery Street, Signet, 1993
“Rumble Strip” was first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 2009
“Sometimes a Hyena” © 2010
The Prettiest Dead Girl in Detroit
I hesitated over that title.
The machinery falters whenever I refer to him as Amos. After thirty years we’re still not on a first-name basis.
To get close is to intrude. Yes, he tells his stories in first person, probably over a glass of cheap scotch with some new injury keeping pace with the beating of his heart; but he draws the shade just short of the reveal, preferring to test his theory in practice. As he says somewhere, “I hate being wrong in front of witnesses.”
I doubt I could describe Walker physically in the amount of detail you’d need to pick him out of a crowd, although I’d know him at a hundred paces. I never took the time to provide more than a few Impressionistic strokes to keep the reader from supplying his own image. Since Walker’s the one telling the story, it’s unlikely he’ll be confused with any other characters. I bring this up to warn other writers away from describing their protagonists in mirrors, which apart from being a clanking cliché just slows down the action.
But others have written at length about Walker, flaying him open like a medical cadaver and weighing his brain, which lists heavily toward the centers of irony. I’ve held the scalpel a number of times myself, but the more I do that the more I watch myself work later, being careful to make Walker behave as represented instead of letting him
go about his business with me stumbling along behind, the way I’ve done from the beginning. I’d rather write him than write about him. It’s his longevity I want to discuss.
When
Motor City Blue
appeared in 1980, there was no Internet. There were no cell phones, no cordless phones of any kind. There was only one telephone company. The broadcast networks ruled television. Pee Wee Herman was a major star. Videocassette recorders were new on the market, priced far outside the budgets of most Americans: If you missed a movie on its first release, you waited ten years for it to appear on TV, edited to pablum to avoid violating FCC regulations and cut up to sell beer and automobiles, and if two programs you wanted to see aired in the same time slot, you had to pick one and wait for the summer rerun season to see the other instead of recording one to watch at your own convenience. (Reality shows would not crowd out repeat broadcasting for another twenty years.) The Berlin Wall was observing its twentieth anniversary. The USSR had just begun the invasion of Afghanistan that would bring the Soviet empire down in ruins by the end of the decade. DNA was a mystery waiting to be unlocked.
It’s a different world, to be sure, but in many ways little has changed. There is fighting again in Afghanistan, but the USA is leading it, and finding the place as difficult to bring to heel as the Russians did. Iran is still a threat, and peace in the Middle East remains as elusive as when Lawrence of Arabia was campaigning in Egypt. And Amos Walker is still sitting in his third-floor walk-up office on Grand River Avenue in Detroit, contributing to the nicotine smudge on the ceiling above his desk when he isn’t out exposing the back of his head to some handy bludgeon on some troublesome errand.
Private eye fiction—a mainstay of the American mystery since 1920—was all but dead when I wrote
Motor City Blue.
Ross Macdonald
was ailing and would write no more Lew Archers. Mickey Spillane was doing commercials for Michelob. Arthur Lyons and Robert B. Parker were just getting started and were flying well below the radar. The entire suspense genre was considered to be in decline, held above water only by the espionage thrillers of Robert Ludlum and Ken Follett. Romance novels were nudging everything else off the racks. It’s hard to imagine a more inopportune moment to begin a series about a postmodern knight errant slaying his ogres one at a time armed with nothing but a revolver and a laminated license. But I was stubborn; which as we’ll see has always been my most reliable weapon of small destruction. I’d written westerns, I’d leapt aboard the bandwagon of Sherlock Holmes pastiches that proliferated after the success of Nicholas Meyer’s
The Seven-Percent Solution.
I needed a break from horses and gaslight.
I was warned against it. What I’d considered my greatest asset, the Detroit setting so rarely used in detective stories, yet so eminently adapted to that seamy world, was the very reason, fellow Detroiters assured me, that the book would never find an audience. Mayor Coleman A. Young was six years into his rape of the city; it would continue for another fourteen, and sixteen years after it ended, Detroit shows no sign of recovering. The national media took sadistic glee in exposing its blasted neighborhoods, its soaring murder rate, its Devil’s Night arsons, and the administration and the three local television stations concentrated on polishing the city’s image instead of acknowledging the source of all the bad publicity and taking the measures necessary to eliminate it. But to mangle a notorious aphorism uttered by a top General Motors executive, what’s bad for a city is good for a crime novel. Where others saw desolation and despair, I saw color. It’s the worm in the apple that makes the apple interesting. I wrote:
Dry, grainy snow—the kind that usually falls in the city— heaped the sills of unused doorways and lined the gutters in narrow ribbons, where the wind caught and swept it winding like white snakes across the pavement, picking up crumples of muddy newspaper and old election campaign leaflets and empty condom wrappers and broken Styrofoam cups as it went, rattling them against the pitted sides of abandoned cars shunted up to the curb; weathering the corners off ancient buildings with bright-colored signs advertising various hetero- and homosexual entertainments; banging loose boards nailed over the windows of gutted stores defiled with skulls and crossbones and spray-painted graffiti identifying them as street-gang hangouts, Keep Out; buckling a billboard atop a brown-stone two blocks south upon which a gaggle of grinning citizens gathered at the base of the Renaissance Center, near where its first suicide landed, urged me in letters a foot high to Take Another Look at Detroit...