Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

Overview

Willie Bledsoe, only in his twenties, is totally burned out. After leaving behind a snug berth at Tuskegee Institute to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Detroit to try to change the world, Willie quickly grows disenchanted and returns home to Alabama to try to come to grips about his time in the cultural whirlwind. But the surprise return of his Vietnam veteran brother in the spring of 1967 gives him a chance to drive a load of stolen guns back up to the Motor City, which would give him enough money to jump-start his dream of moving to New York. There, on the opening day of the 1968 baseball season—postponed two days in deference to the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.—Willie learns some terrifying news: the Detroit police are still investigating the last unsolved murder from the bloody, apocalyptic race riot of the previous summer, and a Detroit cop named Frank Doyle will not rest until the case is solved. And Willie is his prime suspect. Bill Morris' rich and thrilling new novel sets Doyle's hunt against the tumultuous history of one of America's most fascinating cities, as Doyle and Willie struggle with disillusionment, revenge, and forgiveness—and the realization that justice is rarely attainable, and rarely just.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605985732
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	07/15/2014
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Bill Morris is the author of the novels Motor City and Motor City Burning, along with the family memoir The Age of Astonishment, available from Pegasus Books. He is currently a staff writer with the online literary magazine the Millions, and his writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, LA Weekly, Popular Mechanics, The Daily Beast, and numerous other newspapers and magazines. Bill grew up in Detroit and now lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/19/2014
Having focused on 1954 Detroit in his debut, Motor City (1992), Morris eloquently captures the Detroit of 1968, a city shaped by the auto industry, ravaged by violence, and rejuvenated by Motown, in this outstanding crime novel. Disaffected with the civil rights movement, Willie Bledsoe helped his Vietnam veteran brother smuggle a load of weapons to Detroit shortly before the 1967 race riots. Now, as he buses tables at a white country club and struggles to write his memoir, he’s haunted by the fear that he killed a woman during the riots. Irish cop Frank Doyle has personal reasons for wanting to solve the murder, but develops a grudging respect for Willie, his chief suspect. Meanwhile, the Tigers’ unlikely winning season unites a city searching for optimism amid racial and economic tensions. Morris adeptly evokes time and place, displaying a profound passion for Detroit and astute insight into the era’s fraught climate. Characters represent a cross-section of the city’s population, adding nuance to this tale of a young black man seeking his voice, a cop pursuing justice, and a country searching for a way forward. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A vivid and entertaining expedition.

Loren D. Estleman - The Washington Post

A sharp critique of the contemporary American post-racial narrative. Morris does an especially lovely job of elevating the ordinary.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

A
jarring, challenging book that breaks a lot of rules from a writer already excitingly and powerfully in command of his craft.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Morris sees something heroic in these well-matched adversaries, both representative of a city the author loves and salutes.  And of course, its great ball club.

Marilyn Stasio - The New York Times Book Review

The
'50s were the first American decade that could be caricatured by the brand names of its material goods, and Morris recaptures the clean,
voluptuous pleasure of it all. A skillful first novel.

Frank Rich - The New Republic

A wonderfully atmospheric novel that captures time and place, an illumination of a pivotal point in history. Bill Morris is an exceptionally gifted and savvy writer. The comparison to Graham Greene is fully merited.

Nelson DeMille

A
jarring, challenging book that breaks a lot of rules from a writer already excitingly and powerfully in command of his craft.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Morris' rough and edgy writing brings the city alive. [An] incredible narrative. Motor City Burning does something important—it captures the feeling of being alive in a time and place so well you feel like you were there.”

The Boston Herald

A gripping tale and a meditation on race, class, and justice set during the year the country was rocked by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Motor City Burning is Morris' third novel, and it may be his best. If there's any justice, it should bring him the attention and the audience he deserves.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Morris has the same gift John Updike displayed in his Rabbit novels,
a gift for delineating his characters' inner lives while at the same time making their dilemmas emblematic of impulses in American society at large. He is a vigorous, nimble writer.

Michiko Kakutani (Past Praise for Bill Morris) - The New York Times

2014-06-29
A former Freedom Rider and a determined detective face unfinished business in the aftermath of the Detroit riots.Willie Bledsoe has left Alabama for the Motor City to write a memoir about how he lost faith in the civil rights movement even before the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Although Willie is articulate and educated, the only work Detroit seems to offer a young black man is as a busboy at an all-white country club. But race doesn’t seem to matter at Tiger Stadium, and in watching the battle for the pennant, Willie can forget for a while the part he played in the race riots the previous year. Frank Doyle, a detective with a gift for getting people to talk, is less willing to forget, since he’s handling one of the two remaining homicide cases from the riots. The victim was the wife of a store owner in Frank’s neighborhood. A sexy art student working as a waitress and late-night one-way talks with his father, who died on the job at the Ford complex called the Rouge, offer Frank comfort but don’t bring him answers. Then a new break comes when a witness recalls seeing two men go up to the roof and hearing them fire guns. While Frank’s searching for more clues, Willie’s trying to stay one step ahead of a past that’s catching up with him in a city of flashy cars and Motown music, wealthy suburbs and burned-out neighborhoods, civic pride and despair.As usual, Morris (All Souls’ Day, 1997, etc.) uses historical figures and events, as well as a uniquely American city, as a backdrop for an intense cat-and-mouse game, though it’s not clear who’s the cat and who’s the mouse.

Kirkus Reviews

I really enjoyed Motor City Burning! It’s such a deftly drawn character study that also doesn’t scrimp on plot and big themes, like justice, purity of aims, and loyalty.

Edan Lepucki

The success of the story is the smooth confluence of familiar echoes washing up against the tensions of the time, all reverberating with a street-level sense of pressure.

The News Review

Switching between Bledsoe and Doyle’s perspectives allows for a crackling pace, and Mr. Morris clearly loves the nooks and crannies of his hometown the way George Pelecanos loves Washington.

The New York Times

Morris has the same gift John Updike displayed in his Rabbit novels,
a gift for delineating his characters' inner lives while at the same time making their dilemmas emblematic of impulses in American society at large. He is a vigorous, nimble writer.

Michiko Kakutani - Past Praise for Bill Morris: - The New York Times