Cleveland, Ohio, the most populous city on Lake Erie and the second-most populous city in the state (after Columbus) with over two million residents in the Greater Cleveland area. Looking right across the border to Ontario, Canada. There’s a lot of factors conducive to crime in Cleveland – it’s close to a border, it’s a port, there’s plenty to smuggle in, out and over… so what’s the crime writing about the city like?
Perhaps the first person to ask is Les Roberts, author of nearly 20 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich. Actually a native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio. Slovenian-American Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) is a Cleveland PI, an ex-Cleveland cop, Vietnam veteran, and former pro football player. In the first book in the series, Pepper Pike (1988) Milan gets a cryptic late-night phone call from high-powered advertising executive Richard Amber, who wants to pay him a thousand dollars for twelve hours of bodyguard service. But when Milan gets to the Amber house in the elegant Cleveland suburb of Pepper Pike, no one is home. The next morning, Amber’s beautiful, but brittle, wife hires Milan to find her husband, who, it seems, has disappeared without a trace.
Roberts is often somewhat tongue in cheek about Cleveland. In Full Cleveland (1989) Milan has been hired to find the perpetrator of a low-level scam who is selling local businessmen ads in a magazine that doesn’t exist. And that leads him to the wonderfully named Buddy Bustamente who, we learn, favours a polyester leisure suit, white patent leather shoes, and matching white belt – apparently a 1970s fashion statement once unkindly dubbed the “Full Cleveland.”…