Monday, October 10, 2016

WHISKEY RIVER









Whiskey River, Loren D Estleman, Bantam Books, 1990, 262 pp


Whiskey River begins in 1928 at the height of Prohibition. Jack Dance is an eighteen-year-old on the cusp of becoming one of the top (fictional) gangsters in Detroit. Connie Minor, a young reporter of Greek descent, has just begun his career as a newspaper reporter when the two meet in a blind pig on the night it gets tipped over by the bulls. (I had to look up all this early 20th century slang, so if you don't know those terms, you can too!)

The story is a case of the strange friendship between these two men. As Jack Dance's career, if you want to call it that, rises in the underworld, Connie Minor's follows in journalism due to his reporting on the activities of rum runners and the accompanying police corruption. Minor writes his pieces with all the insight of an inside story. Though he never commits a crime himself, he is often there when they happen. His fascination with Jack Dance, however, does eventually land him in some hot water.

It is a tale you can't put down. The writing is as good as anything by Raymond Chandler, creating the particular flavor of illegal liquor, speakeasies, crime, and violence over the course of about four years.

Reading this one on the heels of The Turner House was a whole experience in itself. Detroit was a mighty city in 1920, almost comparable to Chicago. The two novels are bookends on the rise and fall of a major American city.

My mom was born on New Year's Day in 1919 in a small Michigan town on Lake Huron. Detroit was the closest city. So the first 14 years of her life were the years of Prohibition. How I wish she were still around and I could ask her if she was aware of it and how it impacted her life. She was a very temperate drinker. My dad was not!

I don't remember how I discovered this author or his book. Estleman was born in 1952 in Ann Arbor, MI. Whiskey River is the first in a series of seven novels in which he set out to tell the story of America in the 20th century through the microcosm of Detroit. As he said, "Detroit is the one city whose history mirrors precisely the history of the United States of America." He also wrote many other books yet, despite winning awards, most of his work is out of print already. The Detroit series is now available in eBook form and I plan to read all of them.

8 comments:

  1. This one sounds interesting too, particularly, as you said, in tandem with the one you read before.

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    1. They made a good pair. I think the histories of cities are so interesting.

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  2. Back to back Detroit books, wow. I'm glad you plan to read & review his other novels. I'd like to hear about the history he plans in his others: the Depression, the Auto years, Motown, Civil Rights ... Prohibition has surely given rise to some good novels. I think the last one I read might have been: The Wettest County in the World about rural Virginia. Whiskey River sounds like a good one too.

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    1. I think Prohibition was one of the stranger interludes our country has had. One of the other novels about it I have read and liked is Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner.

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  3. I've looked all over for these books without any success. I'm glad to hear that they are all in ebook form now; I'll have a better chance of actually getting to read them.

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    1. My library has some of them but this is a case where we can rejoice in ebooks!

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  4. This sounds fascinating. You had me at the Raymond Chandler comparison.

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    1. Yes! The tone is a bit different because Detroit is not LA, but the writing is just as good.

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