| Michigan in Books

Post #103 February 26, 2025

Quote for the day; "Harper Woods is strictly for local residents who don't want a Detroit address. ... It has no history and no business section to speak of, just rows and rows of houses and a school or two and some trees to justify its name and more churches than you can shake a prayer book at." Loren Estleman. Every Brilliant Eye. 1986.

Reviews

Smoke in the Water by Loren Estleman

This is Estleman's 32nd mystery featuring Detroit's famous, fictional hard-boiled private eye Amos Walker. His first Amos Walker mystery, "Motor City Blue" was published 55 years ago. That's how long I and thousands more have been fans. In the past half century Estleman has won four Shamus Awards for Best Private Eye novel or story, and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. And lastly, the Private Eye Writers of America has honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Frankly he is a Michigan literary treasure.

What first-time readers need to know is that Amos Walker mysteries may have been around since the 1980s but each new novel is fresh, timely, and thoroughly enjoyable. Amos's latest case is set in the summer when smoke from Canadian forest fires left a haze over Detroit and its citizens with a hacking cough. As of this writing future Canadien smoke is free from import taxes. Walker has been hired by a lay firm to find and return a highly sensitive file taken home by an employee who has failed to return it. Probably because he is residing in the morgue after being caught in the path of a hit-and-run driver. The file is so sensitive the firm will not tell Walker what's in it, which of course makes it harder to track down. Walker quickly discovers more bodies are connected to the missing file.

Estleman writes as if he polishes each sentence with a shammy cloth and a dab of Minwax. Every Amos Walker novel delivers dialog sharp enough to shave with. And it wouldn't be an Amos Walker book without the author's satirical, humorous and, cutting observations of Detroit and its environs' contemporary social, political, and architectural world. In this novel he describes the terminals at Detroit Metro Airport as, "the least imaginative architecture this side of a Dollar General." Faithful readers over the course of 32 books have been treated to sharp, short, and funny digressions on an ever-changing Detroit from the Renaissance Towers to Casinos. All of this is wrapped around mystery novels that are as much a product of Detroit as Ford Motors.

Smoke on the Water by Loren D. Estleman. Tore Publishing Group, 2025,221p., $28.99.

The Caving Grounds by Kathleen M. Heideman

The history of Negaunee, Michigan, is a striking story of Michigan and the history of iron mining. Iron was discovered in the Negaunee area in 1844 and by the 1860s the town founded on iron ore was enjoying a mining boom. As many as 50 mines tunneled around and under the city. By 1927 when mining ceased the ground under the town was honeycombed by mines, some only 100 feet below the surface. The town even moved cemeteries to make room for additional shafts. As the mining came to an end the city began to literally sink into the earth. Homes, stores, neighborhoods and even cattle disappeared into ever expanding sinkholes. Cemeteries again were moved so the deceased didn't end up shafted and resting more than six feet deep. In the 1960s the earth had stopped swallowing the town of which half of it had been moved.

As a Michigan history buff, I had never run across this amazing story. It struck me as both strange and noteworthy that, to my knowledge and research, this is the first book devoted to the Negaunee story, and it is a book of poetry. But I'm quick to add this book is filled with poetry likes of which I've never read whether in form, format, gut reaction, or collective emotional impact. I don't know if it's poetry but there it is on page 4 a work entitled "PREFACTORY QUIZ TO HELP READERS TO GAUGE THE DEPTHS OF THEIR OWN UNDERSTANDING." What follows are 22 sentences about Negaunee with blank spaces that readers are asked to "Kindly fill each void with an answer:" The answers are upside down at the bottom of the page.

The book ends with two simply incredible pieces. I'm seriously tempted to quote the entire "CERTIFICATE OF CAVING GROUND & MINE RESCUE" but it's just too long. And then there's "AN EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM CONCERNING MINING." that describes how members of an audience are picked to represent and experience being a mine shaft. The piece ends with "The leader tells the children to join hands now, teaches them to sing, "There's a Treasure in the Ground, Dig it Out, Dig it Out! There's a Treasure in the Ground -- Dig it Out! They repeat it, jumping up and down in their seats, coughing and stomping their feet while we, a mining machine made of fathers and mothers and children --- Dig it Out, Dig it Out -- go on shoveling and grinding and sweating, shuddering and blasting and suffering. Dig it Out! -- not sure how we got into this or how we make it stop."

In between these two pieces are a hundred pages of unique, incredible, brilliant, harrowing, sad, funny, informative, and powerfully moving poems.

The Caving Grounds by Kathleen M. Heideman. Modern History Press, 2025, 109p., $19.95.

Lake Superior in the Moonlight: Yooper Tales by Sharon Brunner

This always entertaining book is an introduction to the everyday life of Native Yoopers whether it's gathering chock cherries, wild onions, and bear garlic to compliment a couple of fresh caught fish, or the local Christmas tradition "Da Shooting of the Tree." And just to be sure the reader knows exactly who she's writing about the author explains how Honorary Yoopers, Yooper wanna-bees, and Part-time Yoopers are distinctly different from Native Yoopers.

These short stories are full of U.P charm like the time Gertrude walked up to a man, took his hand and as she led him on to the dance floor said," I've been pining for you since I saw you take first place during dat outhouse race last fall." The reader discovers that Old Milwaukee is the Yoopers' beer of choice and that a souped-up engine is not a guarantee for winning the rototiller race. The most startling news is there may be an FBI Post hidden in back of the Mystery Spot in St. Ignace tasked with stopping illegal pasties being smuggled into the U.P. from the lower peninsula.

This book is as much fun as the U.P. Spring Fling which the scheduled events one finds "Wood Chopping/ Hauling/ Stacking, Building your Dream Outhouse, and Sucker Fishorama." Each chapter begins with a wise, funny, quote and do not overlook the four appendices at the back of the book. They range from the "Yooper Creation Story" to the not to be missed "Bread is it Safe?" of which the first of a dozen hard cold facts is, "More than 98percent of convicted felons are bread eaters." Have a handkerchief handy when reading this book because you are likely going to laugh so hard you'll cry.