Motown

Detroit #2

by Loren D. Estleman

DETROIT, 1966. Working undercover in order to stop a consumer advocacy agency from putting the auto companies out of business, ex-cop and car lover Rick Amery becomes involved in the conflagration of a black gang war. Reprint.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Crime

292 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1991

About the author

Loren D. Estleman is an American writer of detective and Western fiction. He writes with a manual typewriter.

Estleman is most famous for his novels about P.I. Amos Walker. Other series characters include Old West marshal Page Murdock and hitman Peter Macklin. He has also written a series of novels about the history of crime in Detroit (also the setting of his Walker books.) His non-series works include Bloody Season, a fictional recreation of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and several novels and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Series:
* Amos Walker Mystery
* Valentino Mystery
* Detroit Crime Mystery
* Peter Macklin Mystery
* Page Murdock Mystery

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The setting, Detroit, Michigan, is a plus for me as I grew up in that area. I like the familiar landmarks and the involvement of the auto industry. Motown happens in the sixties when I was in high school and college.

Tiger baseball is a part of the Detroit scene that decorates the set, with the names of pitchers Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich being dropped as well as outfielder Al Kaline. And Norm Cash and Jim Northrup. (You would have to have been a Tiger fan in the 60s to know some of these names and I was.) Other Michigan personalities? How about G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams and Soupy Sales. Have I lost you yet?

Rick Amstey is a former Detroit cop. He is hired by General Motors to infiltrate an auto safety organization headed by a Ralph Nader look-a-like that is trying, among other things, to make seat belts mandatory, something the auto industry vigorously opposes. There is also the Teamsters Union masquerading as the Steelhaulers. Rick is a fan of the muscle cars of the era before the gas shortages of the 1970s pushed consumers temporarily to smaller cars made someplace other than Detroit. As the blood and money flows, Rick has to decide which side he is on.

This book is about organized crime and gangs and power and race relations in Detroit in 1966. A well-written book, the second in the Detroit Crime Mystery series, Motown kept me interested and looking forward to the next book in the series. My Detroit connections made the book fun for me but are not essential for the enjoyment of the book and its lively characters. Four stars.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last year I read Estleman's first book in his Detroit series, Whiskey River, and found it highly entertaining. Motown is the second in the series and was just as exciting. I like to intersperse mysteries and crime thrillers with the more literary and deep stuff I usually read.

Motown is about the automobile industry in Detroit in the 1960s when challenges arose against those famous cars built with horsepower, fins, and meant for speed but death traps in any accident.

Rick Avery is an ex-cop who is at loose ends. His passion is cars and he can fix any of those Detroit cars. The biggest auto manufacturer (unnamed but Ford Motor Company, of course) hires him to go undercover and find some dirt on an increasingly vocal consumer advocate who is crying out for safety regulations.

Today we take for granted seat belts, air-bags, windshields that blow out instead of shatter, and hoods that don't crush on impact. In 1966, the manufacturers didn't want anything to interfere with the flow of cars coming off the assembly line nor the flow of money coming in. The Union didn't want workers laid off while the necessary retooling was done.

Meanwhile, a descendant of one of the gangsters in Whiskey River is trying to take the numbers racket away from Detroit Negroes (as they were called then.) Black Power is on the rise, riots have already blown up in major American cities, and Inspector Lew Canada is doing his best to keep a lid on the racial tensions that will spark the Detroit riots of summer 1967.

Unions, politics, organized crime, big business and consumer advocates come together. Tension builds, people die, while one car lover has to face his conscience.

Great read! High-speed plot, crisp dialogue, humor and tragedy.

[KOMET · Rating 5 out of 5]

"MOTOWN" is one of those gritty & spicy crime novels that engages the reader's interest once he/she takes it up. Once again, Detroit is center stage, a prosperous city on the cusp of a change of cataclysmic proportions. The time is 1966. Rick Amstey, a former police officer in his late 30s dismissed for misconduct, goes out for a ride in his landlady’s candy-apple red GTO sports car. He eats, drinks, and lives cars. He is a rather carefree soul whenever he puts the pedal to the metal. Speed is his drug and in that era with the auto industry as king, Rick is an unabashed worshipper of heavy metal on wheels. But with the return of his landlady’s son from Army service, Rick has to relinquish use of the GTO (which the landlady had reserved for her son).

At that point, Rick opts to move out and moves into an apartment in Highland Park, an autonomous city set in the midst of the City of Detroit. He has now reached a crossroads in his life, and just when it seems to him that everything is tied up in knots, Rick is sought out by one of his ex-police buddies (now employed by General Motors) to take on a special security job for him. In recent years, a crusading lawyer (Wendell Porter) has been making himself a thorn in the flesh of the auto industry through his investigative work into auto safety issues. The auto industry had long been used to having things its own way, both in Detroit and across the nation. Porter’s reports have already caused some ruffles in Washington, where he has caught the interest of some members of Congress. (Automobiles of that era DID NOT HAVE SAFETY BELTS. So for anyone involved in an auto accident, there was no protection. Injuries were horrific, and at almost any speed, drivers and passenger(s) alike caught up in a collision would find themselves in what had become a steel prison.) Rick goes undercover as a volunteer worker in Porter’s Detroit office, where he ingratiates himself with the staff and eventually gets the attention of Wendell Porter himself.

Besides Rick’s story, Estleman offers up for the reader a colorful cast of characters:

1) Quincy Bridgefield, a Black gang leader who also figures prominently in the city’s numbers racket and runs a blind pig establishment offering off-hours liquor and entertainment.

2) Lydell Lafayette, Quincy’s buddy and partner in crime.
3) Krystal, Quincy’s petite and fiery girlfriend, a onetime prostitute
4) “Mahoumet” a local college educated Black man who assumes a quasi-Malcolm X influence as an advocate for Black empowerment.

5) Inspector Lew Canada, the head of the police’s special investigations unit; Sergeant Esther, who is Canada’s assistant; and

6) “Patsy” Orr, a local Mafioso set on tightening his hold on Detroit’s criminal networks).


There are also, for those readers already familiar with Estleman’s other crime novels in this series (“The Detroit Crime Mystery Series”) a few familiar characters from the past: Connie Minor; Frankie Orr (Patsy’s father, a former Mafia overlord in Detroit now exiled to Sicily); and Beatrice Blackwood, a Jamaican in her early 50s who has quietly run a massage parlor in the city for years. Furthermore, there are brief appearances made by real people who figured prominently in Detroit in the 1960s: Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh and Police Commissioner Ray Girardin.

“MOTOWN” is a novel of Dickensian scope which offers a view of a city, whose layers --- spread out like an onion on a chopping board --- reveal a rich and compelling drama. It left me wanting more.

[Aran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. Quite a few places it's listed under mysteries, but there isn't any mystery in this story at all, it's all crime story. I liked all the location call outs and tie-ins with events that were current to the time, but in the audiobook it was obvious that the reader, Stephen Thorne, isn't from Detroit: Cadieux is pronounced KAD-joo, not ka-DOO! There were a couple other mispronunciations but this one was repeated enough that it got to me.

[Zara · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was good ... eventually

There is as backstory to this novel of the drug/mob ring and civil rights movement of the time (1930s-1960s) . Notwithstanding, it took a while to understand the relationship between various characters until the very end (some of whom I'm still wondering about). Intermediate read - requires some thinking and recollection of details of the previous chapters to see how everything comes together.

[Darcy Cudmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as the first book in this series - 'Whiskey River' - which I LOVED.

In fact, I really struggled with the multiple characters in this one, along with some other stuff in these pages that didn't draw me in. It did have enough good parts and engaged me enough to get 3-Stars, but it wasn't a page turner for me.

I'll definitely keep reading the series as I enjoy anything that references or is located in Detroit & Windsor, like these two novels have been!

[Charles Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the 1960s, Detroit was in transition. The auto industry was raking in big bucks, but was threatened by a consumer advocate who was calling GM cars ‘death traps,’ and the city’s black population was chafing at the discrimination they suffered, reflecting the mood throughout the United States at the time. To add fuel to the flame, organized crime was moving to displace the black criminals from their traditional turf. Into all of this was thrust Rick Amery, a former cop who had been forced off the force by trumped-up corruption charges. Rick is hired by another former cop, now working as security chief for GM to find dirt on the consumer activist, while Quincy, a boss in the black numbers racket, is facing off against the son of the former Italian mob boss who was deported back to Italy. In the background of this swirling storm of chaos is Lew Canada, head of a special police task force that reports directly to Motown’s mayor who has national political ambitions.
Motown is the second book in the Detroit Novels series by Loren D. Estleman. While the main human characters carry the story well, the true main character in this drama is the city itself, and how it fares in a time of tumultuous change. The roles played by the recalcitrant auto industry, and its blind adherence to an outmoded business model, politicians reluctant to embrace the changes that are inevitable, and the dying social mores of a society that kept certain people on the lower rungs because of race chronicle the death and partial rebirth of one of America’s most vibrant cities.
This story moves with the pace of a super-charged engine running on high-octane fuel, and will keep your interest from beginning to end.

[Patti · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Loren Estleman. He is one of my favorite authors. So it really pains me to have to give this 2 stars.

Here are my issues with this book:
1) I kept mixing up Lew and Rick. This is partly my fault, I realize, but I rarely mix up characters and so I have to think that it was partly the book's fault, as well. Nevertheless, I just didn't care that much about either of them to separate them in my head.
2) What was the point of trying to nail the head of the Steelhaulers' Union? Was it just so that Estleman can, once again, give us the history of the Battle of the Overpass? (I already knew this, btw, as I am a huge union fan). Nothing came of it.
3) Likewise, what was the purpose of Rick "infiltrating" the Porter Group? Nothing came of it.
4) After I finished the book and realized that I had mixed up Lew & Rick, I went back to reread some of the beginning of the book. I had totally forgotten about the scene with the cops who were stealing stuff. What the hell was the reason for that scene?
5) Really, what was the purpose of this book? The mob guys get blown away at the end, and so they never take over the numbers racket. Patsy's dad gets killed in Puerto Rico (we think) and even Dijesus gets killed at the end.

Here are things I liked:
1) Exposing how blacks were treated in Detroit (and most other places) in 1966. That is information that is not widely disseminated (except by the people who experienced it) and is important to know.
2) A glimpse of Detroit in 1966, going through the social changes along with the rest of society
3) I had no idea of how unsafe cars were. I mean, I realize that they have some inherent problems, but it never occurred to me that groups had to fight for simple things like safety belts.

When I bought this book at the used bookstore, I also picked up a couple other of his "Detroit" books...I sincerely hope that I find them more entertaining! (But even if I don't, I will always love Estleman!)

[Gbug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Motown by Loren D. Estleman is the second book in the author's series about Detroit. Some of the characters from the first book, Whiskey River, are referred to and make cameo appearances. But not reading the first book will not hinder reading the second.

Motown takes place in the 1960's. The automobile companies are at their pinnacle and the muscle car is king. Race relations are tense with the cops and the Italian mob that is trying to horn in on the black mob. A consumer advocate is trying to call attention to lack of safety in cars while General Motors tries to stop him.

Much of the book is based on real events with some of the names changed and literary license taken. If you lived through the 60's you will remember some the events, and feel you have gone back in time even if you didn't live in Detroit.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Novel of Detroit. This one covers 1966, at the intersection where the children of Civil Rights and the children of Prohibition became the new drug runners, numbers runners, and heros of the streets.

Well done blend of history, mystery, and fiction, weaving in past and future characters of other Estleman Detroit books. He keeps the action moving with minimal description.

This book would make a good movie.

I like Estleman's Detroit novels, but as a group they are not up to par with the Amos Walker novels. Amos Walker is just such a great character, and Estleman is so comfortable with him that he has pared to writing down to minimalist perfection. The Detroit novels take a little more descriptive narrative, not Estleman's strongest suit.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am reading this series because I love books set in Detroit. The first in the series, Whiskey River, takes place during Prohibition, and I enjoyed it a lot more. This one is set in the late 60s so given this coincides with the race riots and the name of the book, I thought it would be about the music and the riots. My mistake. It has to do with battling mob bosses vs each other and the DPD. I listened to the audio book and kept getting characters confused and couldn't keep all of them straight.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Estleman's Detroit Mystery Series is more meaningful because of my experiences and interest in the history of Detroit. The historical context and background make his books come alive.

"Motown"was even more special. It takes place in 1966, the peak of the Detroit Muscle Car era, a hot topic in my life at that time. I graduated from high school in 1966 and what was happening on Detroit's Woodward Avenue, the most notorious drag racing street in America, was today's news.

[Jim Stephenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Third time through this novel (but the first time in about 15 years). I thought it was the best of Estleman's Detroit novels when I first read it, but my enthusiasm has cooled over the years. It falls into the same trap many historical novels also fall into: shoehorning topical references into conversations to add period flavor, frequently coming off as artificial. I still enjoyed the sprawling plot that jumps between various characters, however.

[Michael]

This book sucks! I could not believe how lame the ending was. It's like it ended in the middle, and with a slow start besides. A riot that never happened? That's what you get? The cover is cool, though.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

mystery

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

RATING: 3.25

[trina · Rating 2 out of 5]

The characters are real to life, I fell in love with them all. A super good and realistic insight into the past of Detroit. And CARS. I only wish I could find more books like this.