The Oldfangled Author in Residence

Eons ago I worked for a slick periodical called Monthly Detroit (later Detroit Monthly), which—until it vanished as a standalone publication in the mid-1990s—covered Michigan’s Motor City as if it were a grittier San Francisco, making everything look just a bit more stable and stylish than it really was. Since then, that same burg has sprouted a substitute features mag called Hour Detroit, which recently visited with 71-year-old local area author Loren D. Estleman.

I’ve had the chance on at least one occasion to interview Estleman, who has become a prolific writer since his first crime novel, Motor City Blue, appeared in 1980. Yet, as Hour Detroit’s Jenn McKee explains, he remains wedded to his fiction-producing ways of old:

Long ago, Estleman, the Whitmore Lake-based author of more than 90 books, rejected the shift to email, and he’s never once been online. He does have a computer, an “antediluvian” model pieced together from spare parts, on which he polishes his final manuscripts; his wife, the writer Deborah Morgan, forwards them to his publisher.

While the publishing industry has undergone seismic shifts during his nearly 50-year writing career, Estleman still drafts his manuscripts—detective novels, mysteries, and historical Westerns—on a 1960 Olympia manual typewriter. He uses a 1923 Underwood for correspondence …

Estleman is a consistently engaging writer, and I never fail to pick up his Detroit-set Amos Walker gumshoe tales (mostly recently City Walls) or his lighter adventures of Los Angeles “film detective” Valentino (star of the imminently released Vamp). So the chance Hour Detroit gave me to visit his off-the-beaten-path abode, filled with “more than 50 manual typewriters, 3,000 films on VHS and DVD, shelves upon shelves of old books, hidden baseboard drawers (that house his original manuscripts), [and] a secret bookcase passageway,” was one I just could not pass up. If you’re an Estleman fan, or especially if you’re not one yet, check out McKee’s profile of the man.