Never Street

Starred review from March 3, 1997
By rigidly sticking to the form, Estleman has become the reigning king of the traditional, tough-yet-tender style of crime novel. Amos Walker, his Detroit gumshoe who returns in fine style after a seven-year absence (Sweet Women Lie), is a welcome shot of retrograde private-eye cool. The narrative pieces add up to a film-noir nightmare; the missing guy, the silky mistress, the worried wife, the slick business partner, the scheming brother-in-law. It all ought to be so many black-and-white images on celluloid. And it is, as Estleman divides his book into "reels" instead of chapters and makes Neil Catalin, the missing man, obsessed with the dark side of cinema. Neil, who watched death and treachery on film for long hours before he vanished, cracked up once before and spent time in a sanitarium in the north of Michigan, where a doctor videotapes his sessions with wealthy clients. Amos is hired by Gay Catalin to find her missing husband; Neil's brother-in-law, Brian, steals film equipment from Neil; Neil's former lover, Vesta, is an ambitious actress and just the kind of good/bad girl Amos finds it hard to say no to. Estleman expertly manipulates a complex plot, boobytrapping his tale with movie lore and arty imagery. It's an ambitious conceit that he pulls off admirably. Two revelations near the end aren't especially tough to anticipate, but by then readers will have grown to love for its own sake the monochromatic world in which they've been immersed, shot through with cigarette smoke, slick patter, strong liquor, icy betrayal and no shortage of hard irony.

March 1, 1997
Detroit p.i. Amos Walker returns after a lengthy hiatus. As he investigates the disappearance of a businessman obsessed with gangster movies, Amos finds movie-type suspects: a cold wife, a luscious mistress, and a deceitful business partner. Classic work.

March 15, 1997
What a wonderful premise: Neil Catalin is obsessed with film noir and imagines himself a character like Dick Powell in "Pitfall," lured from his suburban cocoon by a sultry femme fatale. Inevitably, he twists life to imitate art and turns up missing, disappeared into the VCR, as his wife speculates. She's right, at least metaphorically. Hired to find Catalin, Detroit private eye Amos Walker, himself something of a hard-boiled anachronism, follows the trail into a disorienting world of noir characters wandering the '90s in search of 1952: the femme fatale, slightly miscast by Catalin but trouble nonetheless; the frustrated wife; even the crooked psychiatrist (a Raymond Chandler staple). Estleman ingeniously interweaves the real-life noir imitations with scenes from the movies themselves, producing a novel that is part parody, part tribute. Noir aficionados will love it, as will Walker fans, who have been waiting for the detective's next case since 1990. ((Reviewed March 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)