A cop named Van Sturtevant saves PI Amos Walker's life. When he is crippled in a shootout with a group of crooks where two other cops are killed, Van's wife Karen asks Amos to bring him to justice, rather than seem as his accomplices are being killed by the Detroit PD. Amos is almost beaten to death during this investigation, but is saved by a publicity-seeking bounty hunter. These two keep crossing paths as Amos tries valiantly to bring the guilty party in alive. Lots of treachery.
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The Midnight Man is the third book in Loren D. Estleman's long-running series about the Detroit-based PI named Amos Walker (and it's of no relation to the somewhat obscure 1974 movie of the same name, co-directed by and starring Burt Lancaster) that takes place in some unspecified year, five-and-a-half months after the events in the first book, Motor City Blue (Chapter 8, p. 74 of the April 1987 Fawcett Crest / Ballantine Books mass market paperback edition). This time out, Walker's working gratis for a Detroit cop who saved his hash and cut him a break when a stake-out on a light-fingered trucker almost cut off his string; at the request of the cop and his wife, Walker's trying to bring in alive the last of the shooters that killed two other cops and left Walker's good samaritan paralyzed. The problem is, the shooter is part of a group of warmed-over black militants who still very much want to "Kill the pigs," and worse, spark an all-out race war in these United States. That cops nationwide would love to blast daylight through the sole remaining shooter -- and anyone who seeks to "coddle" him, "coddling" here also meaning "bring the suspect into police custody alive for interrogation and prosecution" -- only complicates matters, while the wild card is a John Wayne-sized, cheerfully racist, red-bearded bounty hunter from Oklahoma named "Bum" Bassett who has an amazing facility for popping up in all the places that Walker does.

The Midnight Man is an improvement over the second installment in the 22-book (and counting) series, Angel Eyes, but it's not quite up to par with Motor City Blue, which I enjoyed so much because I liked the relatively low-key riffing on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe that Estleman pulled off in it. Estleman tries to gussy up The Midnight Man with an epigraph from Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (out of which he tweezes this book's title), but he still reliably delivers snappy one-liners (one of my favorites: "The whole world was under thirty and I was Genghis Khan's saddle," from Chapter 10 [p. 94 in the mass market paperback edition]), acidulous exchanges, shocking and believable violence, and a final twist in the tale that is somewhat elevated by Estleman's "Midnight Man" leitmotif. I honestly don't remember if Amos Walker's fedora makes even a cameo appearance here.

Walker is a retro-leaning guy without managing to be a walking advertisement for Nostalgia Illustrated; as the first three books are set in the very late 1970s or very early 1980s, in them he was merely an oddball, a man out of step with his times, as opposed to an aficionado or, worse, a hipster. (Walker would've likely had a few choice Anglo-Saxon words for anyone who dared call him a "hipster.") Reading these books thirty years on, they are of course doubly historic: the Renaissance Center, current world headquarters of General Motors, was newly built, and losing money, while the City of Detroit's "Renaissance" campaign, intended to signal a renewal of a city that was still punch-drunk from the aftermath of the 1967 riots, was spinning its wheels: Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s was rather akin to New York City in the 1970s, albeit without the cachet of cool that has since attached itself to the "Fun City" of those years. (I can remember, as a child, seeing the Renaissance Center as an undistinguished construction site, back when the Detroit Pistons still played at Cobo Hall.) Detroit's unnamed mayor in The Midnight Man is of course Detroit's first black mayor, the "MFIC" himself, Coleman A. Young, the man who famously told Detroit's criminals, in his first inaugural speech in 1973, to hit Eight Mile Road (Detroit's northern boundary) -- which many saw as a race-baiting wish to inflict Detroit's criminal population on its largely white suburbs -- and who had some of his money invested in gold Krugerrands -- before Mandela was set free. (Estleman would deal with Hizzoner more directly in King of the Corner, the third book published in his series of historical crime novels about Detroit.)

If the racial epithets come a little too thick and fast, and if Walker doesn't distance himself enough from them (as in, when recounting his first meeting with Bum Bassett in Chapter 7, he remarks, "He'd maligned about four different racial and social groups in that snatch of conversation, but I didn't belong to any of them so I let it dangle"; p. 67), or comes close to uttering one himself (as when he refers to a singer at the Afro-American Ethnic Festival in Hart Plaza as a "dark canary" in Chapter 28 [p. 242; at least he didn't say "blackbird" or "meadowlark"...]), he's downright PC next to his attitudes towards gays. Walker is very like Chandler's Marlowe in this regard: an ambivalent figure of undeniable capability, integrity and wit who many readers may find themselves unable to make up their minds about. Would they actually want to let him into their inner circle? Would Walker permit them into his inner circle?

One of the standout exchanges of dialogue falls late in the book, in Chapter 28, between Detective Sergeant Hornet and Walker, which underscores the tensions between private investigators and the police; the first one to speak is Hornet:

"'That's another thing, your bright patter. You don't hear that from cops. It cooks out early. John [Alderdyce, a Detective Lieutenant, and the closest thing that Walker has to a friend in the Detroit PD] and I do this because we got to. It's our job, and if we wind up in a bag like Maxson and Flynn or in a wheelchair like Sturtevant, that's just the way milk turns. With you, it's like slumming. If things get hairy you can walk away, tell your client you came up dry and still get paid. We don't have that option. So excuse me if I don't find your sense of humor ingratiating.'

"'Sometimes a sense of humor is what's left after everything else is gone,' I told him. 'Sometimes it's the only thing keeping you from spraying your brains all over the ceiling.'

"'That's something else,' he snarled. 'You got this picture of yourself nobody else sees. Tragic hero, fighting the good fight all alone. One of these mornings you're going to wake up married to yourself.'

"'I guess that means I'm living in sin now.'

"'I like brains on the ceiling better.'"

-- p. 243

The e-book version of The Midnight Man is a good illustration of the perils of relying too heavily on a spellcheck program while preparing a manuscript for publication: while most of the errors in the Open Road Media version of The Midnight Man are incidental errors of punctuation, there is one narrative-breaking bit of whimsy early in Chapter 25, when one reads that Walker "upholstered the Smith & Wesson just the same"; the mass market paperback edition thankfully reads that he "unholstered the Smith & Wesson" (p. 209). But maybe handguns would be more popular if they came with padding..? ( )

http://scooterchronicles.com/2005/07/10/the-midnight-man-by-loren-d-estleman/ ( )