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 .