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Les Roberts
Novelist
Les Roberts
spent 24 years in Hollywood, producing and writing television
shows and churning out screenplays for the motion picture
industry. Yet Roberts' most enduring fictional creation may
well be a character whose world is far removed from the entertainment
industry and the glitz of southern California-2,500 miles
removed, to be exact, on the mean streets of Cleveland, Ohio.
Private investigator
Milan Jacovich is the protagonist of a series of mystery novels
that Roberts has been constructing since he moved from the
West Coast to suburban Cleveland Heights in 1989. All of the
Jacovich stories are set in and around Cleveland, and most
portray corners of the community with which even longtime
residents are unfamiliar.
Jacovich
is a former police officer with an ex-wife, two sons that
he would like to see more often, and a personality that could
charitably be described as abrasive. Descended from Slovenian
immigrants, his specialty is industrial espionage, but more
often than not his beat is the old wards of Cleveland's central
city, the same sort of neighborhoods in which he grew up and
in which remnants of Cleveland's variegated ethnic population
still reside.
Middle-aged
and decidedly blue-collar, Jacovich wends his way through
the entire patchwork of multicultural ethnicity that so enlivens
and defines Cleveland. In his work he encounters individuals
whose parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents made
their way to northeastern Ohio in search of jobs in Cleveland's
thriving industries, homes in which to raise their families,
and a safe haven from the deprivations and horrors of the
Old World. (A few representatives of the New World appear
as well; in one story, the mystery revolves around Native
Americans.)
Born in Chicago-itself
a city of multiethnic sensibilities-Roberts was imbued from
childhood with a passion for writing. He counts among his
literary influences Raymond Chandler, whose fictional private
investigator, Philip Marlowe, was as thoroughly identified
with Los Angeles as Jacovich has become with Cleveland. But
while Marlowe's haunts were often swank gambling establishments,
tony nightclubs and the exclusive Malibu colony, Jacovich
knows the taverns, bakeries, and butcher shops of Cleveland's
neighborhoods. He is not afraid to get his hands dirty, as
befits a PI working in a Rust Belt town whose skyline of office
towers is punctuated with factory smokestacks.
Through the
musings of his central character, Roberts does more than merely
portray the surface life of the residents of a major American
city. He also illuminates the commonalities that Clevelanders
share and the differences that divide them. In one story,
for example, the Slovenian-American Jacovich thinks twice
about providing his services to help a woman who is of Serbian
heritage. Frozen in a moment of indecision by residual antipathies
whose origins lie in the distant past, Jacovich reveals just
one of the borders that even today continue to separate the
disparate elements of Cleveland's population. It is in scenes
such as this that Roberts transcends the genre of the private
eye tale. His stories penetrate the unique character of the
particular community in which they are set and open it to
our scrutiny. And in their depictions of the life of Cleveland's
fading ethnic neighborhoods, they also chronicle a time and
place that is fast disappearing.
-Mark
Gottlieb
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People
who haven't been to Cleveland for thirty years would
be surprised by the Flats. Once a barren, weed-choked
riverbank, it became a shipping mecca when the steel
industry was in full throttle, then reverted to a rusty
collection of derelict warehouses. It wasn't until the
early nineteen eighties that someone got the bright
idea to turn it into the fun-and-frolic center of northeast
Ohio. Restaurants, bars and nightclubs sprang up first
on the east bank of the Cuyahoga, later on the west.
Even the venerable Fagan's, which used to be the only
place to eat on the east bank of the Flats, turned trendy,
catering to the young hip crowd. In the old days, if
Fagan's didn't have a seat for you, they'd find one,
even if it was behind the bar or in a telephone booth.
Now the Generation X-ers, the ones who wear the baseball
caps with the bill pointed toward the back, stand in
long summer time lines to get in.
Collision
Bend is about a mile upriver and hasn't been invaded
yet by the hip-slick-and-cool crowd. You can still taste
the river and the rust on your tongue, still feel the
ground vibrate beneath you with the pulse of the nearby
steel mills, still hear the raucous caw of the gulls
and experience in your viscera the ponderous passage
of the great ore boats on the river outside your window.
Rudy
Dolsak and another pal, Ed Stahl, the Cleveland Plain
Dealer's gadfly columnist, had prevailed upon me
to take a quantum leap into the late twentieth century
and purchase and install a complicated computer I can
barely operate. I have not, however, gone on line so
I can meet people and make new friends on the Internet,
get e-mail, and get myself hooked on the electronic
bulletin boards that have proved so addictive to so
many people. I do, after all, have a life.
-
Collision Bend (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1996)
There's
no way to prepare for something crashing across the
back of your head with sickening force. A hot red pain
spread across my shoulders and down my spine, like someone
had just electrified my nervous system, and a vivid
light engulfed me behind the eyes, turning the whole
world bright red. Suddenly I was ten years old and on
the Thriller again, high above Euclid Beach Park. The
car was hurtling downward, the wind roaring in my ears,
the rest of the world a blur on the periphery of my
vision so that there was nothing but the downward plunge,
dizzying and terrifying, as the earth sprang up to meet
me with a rush that closed my throat and took away my
breath.
I
don't even remember hitting the floor.
- Deep Shaker (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1991)
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