It’s struck me, in the course of writing about it, that crime is the most durable small business we have.
The rule of supply and demand applies to illegitimate enterprise just as it does to legal commerce, albeit without interference from government regulations and lip service about Giving Back; the characters in these stories never gave back anything, because they put their lives on the line acquiring it. No one can adequately explain algebra, the butterfly effect, or why Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons sounded so much like a loose fan belt, but everyone can grasp the significance of a suitcase full of cash. Nowhere else is desperation more obvious to the eye and touch.
Alfred Hitchcock once explained the difference between mystery and suspense in the context of a stage play: When the cast is aware that a bomb is about to go off and the audience isn’t, it’s a mystery. When the audience is aware that a bomb is about to go off and the cast isn’t, it’s suspense.
For going on four decades I’ve written stories about desperate men and women trying to find their way back to the lives they’d sought to escape from in the beginning; Dorothies groping their way along the Yellow Brick Road back to the bleak Kansas they’d hoped to leave behind. That formula doesn’t apply to all the protagonists in the stories that follow, but at the core, all are underdogs: cold-blooded killers who are somehow better than their victims, juvenile delinquents denied a second chance when it counted, clerks caught in the middle, psychotic killers who knew no alternative, survivors in a foreign world, losers who long to be winners, ordinary people with dark secrets, fanatics drawn into darkness by their fixations, someone putting his life on the line for something of greater value to himself than the world knows; people you read about every day in the papers, see on TV, glimpse on the Net (and sometimes in the mirror). Every one of them is a star in his own movie, if the world would just see it.
It would be difficult to select a place to which the term “desperate” applies more appropriately than Detroit.
I was fourteen years old when I tuned in to a local TV station and saw military tanks trundling four abreast up Woodward Avenue, the city’s main street. This was at the height (or depth) of the war in Vietnam, and footage of that tragically unnecessary conflict aired daily; I thought this was what I was witnessing, until I recognized the Fisher Building towering in the distance.
Suddenly, guerrilla warfare had come to my own backyard.
This is what happened: In July 1967, a routine police raid on a “blind pig” (regional parlance for an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling establishment) went very wrong very fast as a mob of residents fell upon the team of officers with rocks and bricks. Decades of unrest fostered by a predominately black population policed and governed by a predominately white establishment burst into rage. By the time the National Guard and then the U.S. military managed to quell the disturbance, 3,800 people had been arrested, 1,700 stores had been looted, 1,383 buildings burned, 347 people were injured, and 43 people had been killed. This led to a sharp hike in the crime statistics, peaking in 1974 with 801 murders. In that year, Coleman A. Young took office as the city’s first black mayor, but after twenty years of his administration Detroit’s image had not improved. It was referred to by the press as Dodge City, and when it was pointed out that the West’s wildest cowtown paled in comparison to the Motor City’s plight, “Murder City” took its place.
Today, the situation has improved considerably, with various civic improvements ongoing and major businesses moving in and brightening the employment picture, but unscrupulous opportunists like former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, currently serving a decades-long sentence in federal prison for corruption and racketeering, periodically underscore Detroit’s lingering reputation as a desperate place.
All this is useful to a crime writer, offering no end of inspiration, but as someone whose global outlook has always come filtered through the metropolis to the east, I continue to root for its renaissance. I like the place. Whine though its leaders and media personalities will about the cheap shots taken by outsiders, the residents of the neighborhoods are too busy paying bills and trying to improve their lot to behave like petulant children. They make the best of what they have, in the conviction, however faint, that things can only get better; and they take steps to see that they do.
It’s unlikely that Detroit will ever be what it was in the 1920s and late 1940s, when it was expected to take its place as the fourth most populous city in the nation. There are too many variables, and its status as a great manufacturing center is ill-equipped to challenge the rapid-fire progress of technology. But I hold faith in its basic strength of character. From its founding to the present, its history has been a history of violence, but it has also been a history of hope.
The culprits in the stories that follow, whether they ply their dark trade in Detroit or other places similarly suited to their methods, believe that in desperate times the very structure of civilization has collapsed and nothing is forbidden. As J.R. Ewing put it on Dallas, “Once you set aside integrity, the rest is easy.” Similarly, once you choose the forbidden path, assault and homicide are no longer off the table.
Crime is free enterprise in the purest definition of the term. It’s pass/fail, with reward to the first and punishment to the second. And any place is desperate where desperate people congregate.
—Loren D. Estleman, November 2015