Never Street by
Loren, D. Estleman
hbk out October 98
Published by Hale
at £16.99
Nail Catalin, a video entrepreneur, has gone missing and his wife, Gay, hires Amos Walker to find him. It proves to be one of Walker's most difficult cases. He follows up all possible leads and is often pointed deliberately in the wrong direction. It is one of the hazards in the life of a private eye, particularly when he is getting uncomfortably close to the truth. Another hazard is the tendency to stumble on dead bodies and also to become a target himself. And novels as carefully plotted as the Walker books inevitably throw up strands which complicate the main plot. There are two such strands in this case: the scam operated by the seedy psychiatrist from the sanatorium on idyllic Mackinac Island and the missing $92,000 from a series of video store robberies, But Walker presses on, beset by the crooks on one side and the police on the other. The police are antagonistic and ever ready to intimidate, as when he is arrested and handcuffed, though Walker does have a friend of sorts at police headquarters in Inspector John Alderdyce. Never Streetis the eleventh Amos Walker mystery and is as good as the best of its predecessors. The Detroit Free Press claims that "Amos Walker is the best tough-guy detective in the country". It is an extravagant claim, but not unmerited. I cannot think of a better writer of the genre. Estelman's plots are complex and he writes fluently and well. And in Amos Walker he has a hero who is a true heir to Philip Marlow and Lew Archer. He wisecracks his way through the book in the best tradition of the American private eye and all his quips arise convincingly out of the action. One never feels that Estelman is straining to introduce a wisecrack culled from some notebook of wisecracks, as is the case, I am sure, in many private eye novels. And the Detroit backdrop is convincingly evoked. This is the place, Estelman reminds us, "where the American dream stalled and sat rusting in the rain"
A final word about the book. It is published by Robert Hale and measures 24 x 15.8cm. It bears comparison with the best of books published commercially today and is far removed from the small 19.3 x 12.8cm books which Hale produced in the past. A most attractive book.
Never Street by
Loren, D. Estleman