Many of Loren D. Estleman's readers know him best as a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of Western nonfiction and novels; others admire what the reviewer in The New York Times of 19 March 1995 termed his "nifty series about the Motor City in its hot-wheels heyday." A legion of readers in yet another area--the hard-boiled mystery--revere him as a novelist in the true Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler tradition. To date, he has written or cowritten a total of fifty books. The thirty-one mystery and crime titles among them prove him an intricate plotter, an adept with the English language, and a man with a soft spot for his adopted hometown--for, in this author's world, the city of Detroit is as important as any of his human characters.

Estleman, who jokes that his middle initial stands for "Danger, or possibly Dagwood," was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1952, the son of a truck...