A Novel of Detroit

Note: The greatest TV courtroom drama series in the history of creation (Perry Mason) had deals with car-makers to provide vehicles for the show. Ford was hot to promote the Edsel whose sales were hurting from bad press, doubts about its workmanship, and baffled public derision due to its oddly beautiful or beautifully odd appearance. In The Case of the Buried Clock (1958) a beautiful top-of-the-line Edsel Citation appears all too briefly. And The Case of the Bedeviled Doctor (1959) features a 1959 Edsel convertible, white interior, with its top down. In The Case of the Spurious Sister is seen a white 1959 Edsel Corsair four-door hard top. The Case of the Watery Witness (1959) has two Edsels: a convertible and perhaps the same Edsel Corsair as in the previous episode Spurious Sister.

Edsel: A Novel of Detroit – Loren D. Estleman

Our narrator-protagonist is Connie Minor. His glory days as a crime reporter for the Prohibition-era Detroit Banner are but a dim memory by the time his story opens in 1954. Connie is working where old writers go to curl up and die: an advertising agency.

But Connie is adept at creating advertising copy and campaigns. Because of his marketing prowess, he is hired by Ford executive Israel Zed to plan strategy on the campaign to sell the still secret E-car, later known as the Edsel. To get a feeling for the auto business in terms of manufacturing, Connie interviews the guys on the line in the plant at River Rouge*

Nothing happens in the plants that UAW leader Walter Reuther doesn’t know about. Resenting Connie’s “spying” activities, Reuther pressures Connie to use his underworld connections to find out the who and why behind the attempted murder of Reuther and his brother in 1948.

To get an in with mobsters, Connie approaches pro wrestler Anthony Battle, who hangs out with people dear to the hearts of people from SE Michigan who were Born in the Fifties: Leaping Larry Shane, Bobo Brazil, Haystack Calhoun and The Shiek. Anthony, however, says he will approach the mobsters with Connie’s request for an interview only if Connie intervenes with Stuart Leadbeater, an ambitious politician who is threating to paint Anthony as a pinko, which is the kiss of death in the commie-nervous USA of 1954.

Connie cuts a deal with Stuart Leadbeater to save Anthony by promising the goods on Albert Brock, tough head of Steelhaulers' Union who may have ordered the shotgun blast through the Reuthers’ kitchen window. Connie also talks to twin mobsters, the Ballista brothers, to little avail in his cause, but some very fine set pieces for the reader. Estleman’s evocation of hospitals, especially cancer wards, will stir readers who remember visiting patients in old Harper Hospital, demolished in 1977.

And remember gold shag carpeting, license plate keychains, jelly glasses, and the “table lamp with a revolving shade that simulated a forest fire when it was switched on” that grandmother used to have. Readers that know what a Kelvinator is will indeed get a kick or two. Besides nostalgia that isn’t sick-making, bonus points for mentioning places like Port Huron and Melvindale. Estleman’s tone is caustic but never dark and cynical. Interesting is his claim that the failure of the Edsel was both cause and symptom of cultural malaise that would be exacerbated by Vietnam and Watergate.

*Rouge Steel was a five-minute walk from the house I grew up in. Nothing says home to me like the smell of industrial pollution.