We have a good little group on The Dutch Forum.  Visitors to the site are up 100% since last year at this time.  Membership is up too.

Of course, web statistics are always subject to close scrutiny, but interest in Elmore continues to grow and so does the site, because of him but also because the DF features qualiity discussion by posters who have a perspective on Elmore’s work.

So, for each other, and folks new to The Dutch Forum, let’s start a thread about favorite characters, scenes or locations, real sixth grade style.  Use big words if you got ‘em.

Class, who wants to start?

Sportree and his lounge. Was it a real place?

Dutch called a bar, “Sportree’s” and located it on 8 Mile.  The actual “Sportree’s” was called The Music Bar and was located in Paradise Valley (Detroit’s Black Neighborhood, long gone) at 2030 Hastings St.”  Raymond “Sportree” Jackson was the proprietor.  He also owned The Aquarium Seafood on Adams and the Tropicana Bar, north of The Music Bar on Hastings.

raymond cruz and 1300 buebain (sp) the police station across from the ren center…and all those cops wendell robinson, bryl, jerry hunter (also from FD) 

i walk into an oldtime style bar and i look for them….

What about Randy in Pagan Babies. His restaurant - and how he became a gangster - was a lot of fun. The set-up there with the payment for the hookers going on the restaurant bill sounds like something real.

Any character who likes to smoke weed.  Is that 6th grade enough?  ;-D

But to narrow it down a bit, how about Stick and his pals having a party at the mansion before really sticking it to Chuckie?  I wonder who does Elmore’s research for those kinds of scenes?   

And Robert Taylor in Tishimingo Blues knows his weed. You can get all that stuff online, though, can’t you Gregg?

I always liked the scene in Pagan Babies where Fr. Terry walks up to the Hutu murderers and blows them away while they’re drinking banana beer.  Classic, old-school style hit.

OK I hate to say it but the scene at Betty’s Hair Studio with Gary Hammond in the chair and Betty working on him, everybody doing their own thing when Elvin Crowe comes in wearing the same electric blue suit his brother Roland wore, thinking about the scene in a western story read to him by his jailhouse bunky, folding this, almost the very first scene in an EL novel from 38 years earlier, into motivation for what to me felt like the worst murder ever committed. What a cruel cruel inside joke, I loved it.

That was a great scene.  Only one other story comes to mind where the ‘good guy’ gets it. 

Most of the violent scenes i’ve read sneak up on you and are over as quickly as they begin.  Yet some are described in painstaking detail, not unlike something out of Kill Bill.  It’s like reading in slow motion.  These somewhat rarer episodes are just as chilling and satisfying as all the rest.

Stick getting stuck for child support and Stick going to jail are classic endings to classic books.

I was thinking, Detroit as a location is cool. In Mr. Paradise, it’s almost explained, one of the women says she likes Detroit because she can drive there and she likes driving. She hates New York because you’re always sitting in traffic.

And quite a few books have big, old Detroit houses. Old money meets new. Mr. Paradise’s house and the house they break into in Out of Sight and Booker’s house where he gets blown up, and where the cops make fun of his decorating.

Over these books the whole character of Detroit comes across, the way it’s changed from the early 70’s to now.

JohnMcFetridge - 23 January 2007 11:58 AM

the house they break into in Out of Sight

One of my favorite scenes, mostly because my college roommate lived on Vaughn Road.  I remember a late night trip over from Ann Arbor where we resolved a cash flow problem by picking up his coin collection.  Could have been a scene in a book somwhere.

Killshot filming in Toronto
Driving along Queen’s Quay East this A.M. saw big dayglow yellow sign
“Killshot” Base Camp” out in front of the Studio 54 complex

Can you get me a photo for the site?

I took a number of shots at great risk to fingers in -15C
Will try to attach one here now…... but they are larger than the 75kb specified here
What’s the best way to get them to you?