According to someone, war is God's way of teaching geography to Americans. There's some truth to that: I know, for example, that were it not for the last President Bush I'd be able to name, at most, one city in Iraq. Basra? Mosul? Kirkuk? My brain wouldn't have room for them if Gore's narrow victory had put him in charge. So there's that in the sparsely populated credit column of the accounting sheet for W.'s presidency.
Our geographical ignorance isn't limited to foreign lands, however. In those horror stories about the sorry state of American education, there's typically some tidbit about, say, the percentage of 15-year-olds in a certain public school system who cannot point to their city on a map of our country. But why pick on poor kids? There is the well known view that inhabitants of our northeastern coastal cities cannot tell Oklahoma City from Omaha. A funny tee shirt displays the New Yorker's map of America. One side is a Manhattan street guide, the other, the state of California. Between the Hudson River and California is a narrow strip labeled, in small letters so that it fits, "out there." My dad likes to tell the story of the Ph.D. physicist who was going to pay him a work visit here in Minneapolis. Trying to explain our location, he finally made desperate resort to the phrase "just over 400 miles northwest of Chicago." To which the fellow replied: "How far is it from Boston?"
Well, you know, Boston: he'd probably gone to graduate school near there.
I can sneer, because I think I'm "above average." It's mainly on account of reading, not travel. (My wife says I know about life from having read books about it.) For some reason, the cities of New York and Chicago are like leading characters in the books that got me started as a feverish reader--Native Son, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Sister Carrie, Studs Lonigan. Lately, having checked out of the library Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s (City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, and Freaky Deaky, handsomely packaged in one hard-covered Library of America edition), it's occurred to me that the rendering of the city of Detroit and the humid environs of south Florida is a pretty big part of why the label "crime genre" doesn't do justice to these novels.
And now, zooming in and out on Google maps, you can follow Leonard's characters around. As City Primeval opens, Clement Mansell is leaving the horse track in Hazel Park, just to the north of Detroit, and trying to follow his girlfriend, Sandy Stanton, who's riding in a black Cadillac with an Albanian businessman whom she's been grooming for victimhood. Clement's theory is that rich immigrants distrust the American financial system and therefore tend to use cash, which makes them attractive targets. Tonight's the night for the Albanian. But as they head south from the track on Dequindre Road, across Nine Mile and then to Eight Mile, over to John R, Clement's plan is frustrated by a slow-moving Mark VI whose driver, taking note of Clement's haste, begins messing with him. When the black Cadillac is lost, the occupants of the Mark VI, the "Cuban-looking jig" driver (Clement's consciousness speaking) and his blonde companion, become the new targets. The driver is shot five times through the windshield of his Lincoln in a lit parking lot near the intersection of Woodward and Eight Mile. One murder. A short time later, just past 1 in the morning now, the blonde is shot and killed as she runs down a fairway of the Palmer Park Golf Course near Seven Mile and Woodward. Though Del Weems never appears on stage, much of the subsequent action of the novel occurs in his luxury apartment on the twenty-fifth floor of a high-rise on Lafayette Street that affords a view of the Renaissance Center, the Detroit River, and Windsor, Ontario. Sandy and Clement are staying there while Del is on vacation. Del is another potential victim, but in the end he only loses a sport jacket and a lot of Chivas. When Clement buys beer, it's Miller High Life.
The accumulation of all the concrete geographic details, augmented by the way the people of Detroit, especially the African-Americans, talk--with a casually profane expressive force unknown to the authors of business memos--builds up a satisfyingly convincing backdrop for the action. And there's a lot of enjoyable, outlandish, page-turning, intermittently disturbing action.
I can't help relating one detail that seems to me psychologically true. It turns out that the Cuban-looking guy shot through the windshield of his big sedan is an asshole of a local judge whose character is well known to the cops. The identity of the victim causes the investigation to get off on the wrong foot, because the homicide detectives assume that the murder is a hit, and that whoever is behind it must be one of the million or so people with a score-settling grudge against the judge. That the crime more closely resembles a garden-variety incident of road rage escalated by Clement's possession of a handgun doesn't occur to them.
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