Detroit Is Our Beat (2015)

Loren D. Estleman's collection of stories about Detroit's wartime Racket Squad, Tales of the Four Horsemen, was published by Tyrus Books in 2015. Lieutenant Max Zagreb, Sergeant Starvo Canal and detectives McReary and Burke keep the lid on a city of defense plants, black marketeers and saboteurs; Estleman's preface says every story but "Kill Fee", written for the book, first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. The squad is the one in his novel Jitterbug. (Open Library)

Watches

Wittnauer watch: Zagreb's Wittnauer, his watch in Jitterbug as well, runs through three of the stories. In "The Latin Beat" he looks at it and asks the latecomers whether they forgot about Daylight Savings Time (p. 22). In "Sob Sister" he checks it several times while the reporter Arabella Lindauer dances with a corporal (p. 59). In "Soft Lights and Sabotage" he checks it through two slow hours of arrest reports, and consults it again when McReary and Burke have not checked in (p. 86). The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Zagreb chain-smoked Chesterfields, correcting the grammar in arrest reports with a green fountain pen and checking the Wittnauer on his wrist from time to time. (Loren D. Estleman, Detroit Is Our Beat, scan cataloged as Tyrus Books, 2015, p. 70, in "Soft Lights and Sabotage", which begins on p. 63 ("The Latin Beat" begins on p. 19, "Sob Sister" on p. 41); Internet Archive scan OCR)