What A Gas

If Elmore Leonard had decided to stick with writing Westerns, as he did in the early years of his career, there can be no doubt that the most lauded crime writer who sets the majority of his novels in the essentially dead city of Detroit would be Loren D. Estleman.

Like Mr. Leonard, this underrated author of more than 60 books has produced powerful Western fiction that is as hardboiled as his mystery novels, earning him five Golden Spur Awards and three Western Heritage Awards.

Best known for his series about private eye Amos Walker, who Mr. Leonard describes as "the gumshoe with an attitude," Mr. Estleman does not lose a step when writing stand-alone novels such as his latest, "Gas City" (Forge, 299 pages, $24.95), set in a fictional good-sized Rust Belt city, not Detroit, that is slowly dying because of lost jobs in an outdated economy. Although the novel is set in the present day, it has the atmosphere and tone of one set three or four decades ago — or six or eight, for that matter — as certain kinds of corruption never seem to go out of style.

And, may praise be heaped upon this excellent writer, the city he has created and the people who populate it seem to have virtually no involvement with cell phones or the Internet, allowing the action (of which there is plenty) to proceed at its own pace, and permitting people to see each other face to face and, you know, talk, rather than interface.

There are archetypes on these pages — a corrupt police chief, an aging crook whose young wife despises him, dirty politicians, reporters out to get the story and whip their competitors, a tired priest, a hooker with a heart (if not quite of gold), an ex-cop-turned-hotel-dick who drinks and smokes too much, a serial killer with a nickname (the Black Bag Killer, for how he disposes of his victims, aka Beaver Cleaver, for his method) — but they are not stereotypes.

The death of his wife of 55 years galvanizes police chief Francis X. Russell to suddenly do his job, a change of heart that shocks the mob he has allowed to flourish for so many years. His oldest friend, a priest, suspects that the old cop wants to die but, as a Catholic, cannot commit suicide, and so is setting the stage for the gangsters to do it for him.

As behind-the-scenes political maneuvering heats up, a smaller struggle takes place as Palmer, the hotel detective, falls for Clare, the hooker for whom he's been pimping. Love, as well as the suicide of a man in his hotel, induces him to try to clean up his act. "Being a busted cop," he muses, "was as bad as being a defrocked priest. It took practice to keep your lies straight."

Although "Gas City" is a dark book, with no character pure of heart, the violence and noir elements are mitigated by some of the snappiest, sharpest dialogue you will read this side of Robert B. Parker.

Speaking of the streetwalkers in the neighborhood, Clare says, "They'd do anything for twenty bucks except diagram a sentence." When Palmer attempts to do some investigating of a mysterious stranger who'd disappeared from one of the hotel rooms, he finds the room clean except for a sliver of paper in the toilet. He fishes it out and watches it dry at the edge of the sink. "He'd had an inkling then," Mr. Estleman writes, "that the detective business was not all it was made out to be on television."

If you want to know where Palmer lives and works, here's a hotel room:

The sweat of residents who could afford to rent only the unrentable rooms soaked the walls to the studs and gave off a clammy feel when the room wasn't broiling. Faith alone kept the wallpaper in place, and guests discovered the chronic damp patch in the carpet when they stepped on it in stocking feet. The room itself seemed to be perspiring.

"Gas City" is an utterly believable portrait of people in a city so comfortable with corruption that they would rather not have it cleaned up lest they find themselves adrift in a world they no longer understand. They are mostly not wonderful people, but Mr. Estleman makes them believable and sympathetic. It is as if Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser had written a contemporary crime novel while suddenly developing a sense of humor.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, and the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories. He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.