GENERAL MURDERS

Ten stand-up tales drenched in urban ironies and featuring Estleman's popular Detroit shamus, Amos Walker. Walker's a gumshoe who carries the freight of P.I.'s past in his trenchcoat pocket--but he carries it with high panache. Thus, as with the novel-length cases (Every Brilliant Eye, Lady Yesterday, Downriver, etc.), these stories offer no gimmicks, no new perspective on the P.I.'s world--no Parker-ish self-doubt or Chesbro-ian dwarfism--but only sterling impressions cast right from the classic mold. Never mind that most of the problems are less than fresh--a Greek immigrant looking to clear his halt-brother of murder; a husband anxious about a missing wife; an old man wanting to solve a 30-year-old gang-slaying; a second old man looking to retrieve his stolen gun collection; a third old man dying to save his skin from a hired gun; etc.--the characters glimmer photo-sharp, and the workings-out usually surprise and often wrench, tinged with tragedy (the missing wife turns up a suicide; the third old man drops dead in Walker's office). Moreover, in these tales--reprinted from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery, Magazine and several original anthologies--it's the shamus' jaunty yet knowing worldview, filtered through Estleman's patina-prose, that richly satisfies. Few writing in the P.I. field can turn a phrase as well as Estleman, whose eye at its clearest matches Ross MacDonald's: ""He was crowding 80 if it wasn't stuck to his heels already, with heavy black-rimmed glasses and a few white hairs combed diagonally across his scalp and white teeth that flashed too much in his beard to be his."" Familiar mean streets, then, but today no one walks down them with more affection and spirit than Estleman.