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Read Whiskey River (1991)

Whiskey River (1991)

Online Book

Genre
Series
Rating
3.91 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0356200396 (ISBN13: 9780356200392)
Language
English
Publisher
scribners

Whiskey River (1991) - Plot & Excerpts

This book and the six others in the series take place in Detroit, Michigan. I grew up near Detroit so that is the draw for me. I enjoy reading books that happen in familiar territory. Each book covers one decade from the 1930s to the 1990s. In this first book the protagonist, a newspaper journalist for a fictitious Detroit tabloid The Banner, tells the stories of the mobsters in the city, gathering information by talking with his sources on the battlefields of the underworld and befriending some of them. He does not become a criminal but is commonly immersed in his stories. It’s 1928, and America is thundering along on wheels made in Detroit, a city growing by leaps and bounds. And while New York and Chicago are just waking up to the bloody hangover of Prohibition, Detroit itself has already been there for a year – filling its bathtubs with bootleg booze and its pockets with cash. This carved-up pirate’s paradise is newspaperman Constance ‘Connie’ Minor’s territory, and he couldn’t have picked one more dangerous. Whiskey River is historical fiction published in 1990. Some of the events and people are a real part of Detroit history but the main characters are fiction. It is reminiscent of The Untouchables TV series broadcast from 1959 to 1963 that chronicled the mob activities in Chicago. There was no Jack Dance, no Joey Machine, no Sal Borneo, or Frankie Orr; saddest of all, there was no Connie Minor. But people like them existed in the city, and the situation in Detroit during the years 1919-1939 was as reported. Thirteen years is a long time. That’s how long prohibition was in force in the United States. But there was no prohibition in Canada, just across the Detroit River.Prohibition in the United States was a national ban on the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol, in place from 1920 to 1933. The ban was mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act set down the rules for enforcing the ban and defined the types of alcoholic beverages that were prohibited. Private ownership and consumption of alcohol was not made illegal. Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, on December 5, 1933.Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibit... Whiskey River is a good story that captures one era in the history of Detroit. The Mob made a comeback with the success of the HBO series The Sopranos that ran from January 1999 through June 2007. To feel what we felt, those of us who were there, you had to have been there too, and to have been like us, when the river that glittered on the border between the United States and Canada seemed to match the honey glow of the liquid gold that flowed across it when we were all too young and stupid and full of piss and rotgut to believe for one second that it would never stop flowing. You get to know a lot of unsavory people through this book, people who kill other people. You will probably find that you like some of them. You see the story through the eyes of Connie Minor, a journalist who sometimes cooperates, sometimes joins and sometimes protects the Detroit mobsters. The life he chooses is a complicated and dangerous one. I enjoyed reading about it. I give Whiskey River four stars and expect to read more books in this Detroit Crime series written by Loren D. Estleman and published in the 1990s. Copies of used books in the series are available online.

What do You think about Whiskey River (1991)?

The first novel in the 'Detroit Crime Series' in which the city is treated as an organic entity through various decades of the 20th century, "WHISKEY RIVER" spans from the Prohibition Era to the late 1930s. Constantine ("Connie") Minor is a Detroit-based journalist who has made a name for himself covering the crime beat in the late 1920s/early 1930s. This was a time in which bootleggers and mobsters carved out Detroit into spheres of influence over which they exerted and established firm control over, not only, the illegal importation of alcohol, but also the numbers rackets, and prostitution. Many of the city's cops often looked the other way, picking and choosing what crimes to solve or ignore (courtesy of a bribe). All the while, Detroit's industrial might (as evidenced by the auto industry) continued to grow, giving the city a dazzling prosperity soon to be tempered by the ravages of the 1929 stock market crash and resulting Depression. Minor has cultivated a variety of contacts with the city's underworld elements (e.g. Jack Dance, a bold and impetuous bootlegger building his own criminal empire in the city and "Joey the Machine" a powerful and ruthless criminal overlord who will tolerate no challenges to his authority). He brings the reader into the frenzied, at times dangerous, chaotic and colorful lives of the crime bosses, syndicates, police and politicians. One of the most exciting scenes in the novel is when Minor accompanies Jack Dance and his associates over to Canada one night to pick up several cases of alcohol and convey them back to Detroit across the stretches of the frozen-over Detroit River during the winter of 1930. Amid a flurry of machine gun fire, they barely evade the Prohibition Squad of the Detroit Police Department. In Minor's own words: "... bullets were still hitting the ice. As we sped away from the Packard, having veered too close to its gun for comfort, I watched the battered black Lincoln following our original path with Lon Camarillo standing on the running board, bracing himself with an arm hooked around the window post and pumping away with what looked like a Browning Automatic Rifle at the center of the network of cracks. His face in the moonlight with the buttstock against his cheek looked like the Grim Reaper's..."... The driver of the Packard was spinning his wheels in a white blur now, frantic to back away onto a better footing. His engine whined, but the car only subsided into a drunken tilt, spoiling the aim of the gunner in back and thrusting its armored prow farther out over the shoal."A wheel broke through, the car stumbled, then went down on both knees as the ice collapsed under the other front wheel. White floes stood up in shards and slid under the black water. The Packard teetered, rear wheels turning in empty air, a scaled-down Titanic suspended on a cloud of exhaust."All in all, a very exciting, well-crafted novel.
—KOMET

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