Customer Reviews

Jitterbug (Detroit Crime Series #6)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's the 1940's, the country's at war, most of the young healthy men of Detroit have left to fight, and there is a serial killer loose in the city. Enter four jaw busting, foul mouthed middle aged cops, teamed to find the killer. (These guys are definitely not the Untouchables)

The serial killer is not the main character and the reader knows who he is from the beginning so there is little mystery. The investigation is a vehicle for meeting the characters and presenting 1940's Detroit, a city of corruption and bigotry. The book is populated with sarcastic and cynical characters and description is usually sarcastic and cynical. Historical characters, such as Henry Ford and FDR, are portrayed unsympathetically. In contrast to the rough characterizations, though, are the compassionate portrayal of the two young black men, Dwight and Earl.

I found this a book that held my attention all the way through. The characters seemed real, although, for the most part, unlikable and the story successfully casts a rather somber mood.

During World War II, Detroit becomes a Mecca for manufacturing weapons and aircraft for the war. Many southern blacks flock to the city as employment is readily available. However, the number of inductees for the war leaves the city's police force in jeopardy. Experience is lacking and the number of cops are at a critical low. Lieutenant Maximillian "Zag" Zagreb and his three experienced detectives lead a law enforcement team made up of 4-F rejects sprinkled with reemployed annuitant officers, who had previously retired.

The cops are already overworked when a patriotic serial killer emerges. The "Kilroy Killer" is slaying anyone who allegedly is hoarding ration stamps. As the police struggle to retain order and uncover the identity of a dangerous mass murderer, race riots rock the city in the summer of 43. Even as the police cope with the rioting, they continue to seek out the identity of a demented patriot before more lives are lost.

JITTERBUG is one of the best historical police procedurals this reviewer has ever read. The story line is gritty as it combines fact with fiction to paint a rarely seen picture of the home front during the big war. The characters are all brilliantly developed and their motives, even that of the deranged killer, is understandable. Loren D. Estleman demonstrates why he is an award winning author, who deserves new accolades for a fantastic novel that will leave readers dancing in the streets.

Harriet Klausner

Having grown up in Detroit during the fifties I can vouch for all written in the Novel. Dad worked in the Auto Shops and many of his stories were repeated by the Author. I remember as a teenager the next generation of the Detectives in this story. They were the Big Four. A black unmarked Buick with two giant Detectives and two a little smaller uniformed officers that never smiled. We still respected the law in those days. They made sure of it. The novel was teriffic with plenty of known landmarks and memories including streetcars. I highly recommend reading it.

i liked this book a lot for the atmosphere and the serial killer, but unfortunately his capture is sewed up too soon and simply for me. Contrary to what one reviewer has said, I think the cops were portrayed rather well. I was pleased to discover yet another very competent and creative detective novelist.

I only gave this book three stars because it is not really the type of story that turns me on, but I do recommend it for fans of historically accurate, gritty police and action novels. Estleman really knows how to capture the mood and feeling of a time period. His war-time Detroit seems dead-on, and as a resident I enjoyed the references to streets and places in the city. The novel was also informative - I hadn't known that there was a race riot during the war years, and the information about the war effort at the auto plants was fascinating.

My main criticism would be the characters of the cops. They didn't stand out as individual personalities, and I didn't get involved with them as I do with Elmore Leonard's novels. However, fans of Leonard could do worse than reading "Jitterbug" and other Estleman novels.

Chapter One puts us in the head of a unnamed serial killer. Opening line:
"When he stood outside himself - as he did most of the time, being an authentic objective - he compared himself to a housecat: ordinary, invisible, the most efficient hunter in civilization."

It's 1943 and World War II is in full swing. The "hunter" is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by an army psychiatrist who stamps his file 4-F. The rejected young man promptly makes up his own war service story and wears an Army Air Corps uniform "left in the closet of his last furnished room by the former tenant."

We follow the hunter as he stalks his victim after seeing her in the butcher shop with a fistful of ration coupons. To get inside her house, he convinces her he's selling magazines, with half of the $2 subscription price going to the war effort. So far, so good.

In Chapter Two, we meet Sgt. Canal and Lt. Zagreb who are in a festering part of town to roust a pimp. Part of a cop force made up of 4-Fs and near-retirees, Canal and Zagreb are half of Detroit's Racket Squad. Zagreb's mother is from Bulgaria. Canal is Ukrainian. Estleman writes: "He could lift a good-size man six inches off the floor by the throat one-handed and turn an experienced defense attorney into a sputtering maniac during cross-examination."

Canal and Zagreb show up in the midst of interrogation of a man accused of selling black market tires. He's brutalized for two hours, with a couple of cops wanting to throw him out a window, until Zagreb, a practical man, says: "I've been with the department since I got out of knickers. I haven't killed anyone yet. I'm not going to do it over a ... set of tires." While the suspect is being put into a cab for delivery to his home, Canal and Zagreb get a call from another detail wanting help with the killing of a woman for her ration stamps.

Advisory: Chapter Two gave me pause, even though I grew up during those years. Estleman is true to the time and place, but this chapter is profane, brutal and racist. I was glad to see it end. If you're apt to be bothered by it, you might want to skip this book. However, you'll miss a different kind of war story and a chilling crime story, expertly told.

In 1943 police departments are dealing with a daily call-up of cops. At the murder scene of the woman killed for ration stamps, one cop says to Lt. Zagreb, "All of Stationary Traffic shipped out last week. Uniform's up to it's a** in ugly meter maids." The only sign left by the killer is a wartime cartoon chalked on a driveway, with the words "KILROY WAS HERE." It gives the killer a code name: Kilroy.

Zagreb goes to a racketeer known as the Conductor to ask for help in locating a killer trying to sell stolen ration books. Meanwhile, the killings go on, with novel chapters moving between a killer at work and cops looking for a break. I keep thinking of Ted Bundy, the real life serial killer who was charming and articulate but confessed to 30 murders and was executed in1989. "Kilroy" is like that.

Estleman pulls out all the stops, immersing us in the history, heritage and legends of Detroit, always as it applies to the characters and their stories. Wartime Detroit is a volatile mix of racial and ethnic hatreds and finally a full-blown riot. In Zagreb's words: "Great city, Detroit. We've got so much hate we decided to export it, and that's how we're going to win this war."

Zagreb is a good cop, not above tweaking the law if he has to but usually coming down on the side of common sense. His break comes at a fund-raising dinner to buy gas masks for GIs. He's seated at a table with a former newspaperman who ran out of stories when Prohibition was repealed. With instincts honed through years of experience, the old reporter describes Kilroy to a T.

The hunt is on, going up and down the line from racketeer to cop to Supreme Court Judge to an eyewitness convinced that someone who looks like a movie star couldn't be a killer. Her opinion: "Killers are small and ugly, like Peter Lorre."

It isn't about the murders at all; it's about the ration books, a wartime priority. Stealing them to resell is treason, a hanging offense. The hunter becomes the hunted. The order goes out: "Shoot to kill."

Only one reference puzzled me. On page 223 Zagreb takes a police artist in to talk to an eyewitness and Sgt. Canal says, "Burke and me ain't good enough for Redford?" The only Redford I can think of is Robert Redford and he was 7 years old in 1943.

In the "learn something new every day" category, I had never heard of a "blind pig" until I read this book.

Terrific attention to detail made me feel I'd been set down in Detroit during WW II and riding with the Racket Squad's Four Horsemen to catch a serial killer while racial tensions run high. This is not a book for light reading or reading as you're drifting off. And it's not a book where characters are all good or all bad. I closed it feeling that justice was done, but wanting to know a little more about the state of Zagreb's soul.

Estleman is a versatile writer moving easily -or so it appears -between the Western and the crime novel and between various sub-genres within both styles .Jitterbug is one of a series of historical mysteries centred around the history of Detroit and its focus is on the city during World War Two .
The city is booming due to the demands of wartime production on the engineering industry and plants are operating round the clock .With so many able bodied men and women in the military major demographic and cuiltural change is all around .The police force is down to a small group of relatively eldrly and less physically fit officers not to mention the just plain misfits of the department .In addition large numbers of black people have migrated to detroit and are working -for the first time -alongside whites on the production lines ,earning good money.Rcial tensions are running high

Into this volatile situation is stirred a seriel killer -a movie nut with a Robert Taylor fixation ,who is killing food coupon hoarders and believes he is doing a patriotic service by his actions .In fact he is nothing of the sort-just a basic screw-up who has been rejected by the army on psychiatric grounds and he is a very nasty piece of work indeed.Tracking him down is the job of Lieutenant Zagreb and his understrength squad ;they are also having to cope with a series of large scale race riots in the city .

This fascinating and well written book throws new light on Detroit at a time of change and works admirably as both a piece of well researched historical fiction and as a serial killer novel.The riot scenes are especially vividly described and help give it a sense of time that is often lacking in the genre .The mystery elemnt is not a main plank of the book as we are told the identity of the killer very early -rather ,the focus is on the hunt and the person of Zagreb ,who is a well realised man battling his own demons,as well as on the sociological aspects of the age

Recommended unreservedly

My mother was in high school just outside of Detroit during the war years and I've heard her stories often. I enjoyed Estleman telling me more about what was going on there when she was young.

My mother was in high school just outside of Detroit during the war years and I've heard her stories often. I enjoyed Estleman telling me more about what was going on there when she was young.