The True Detective

“A harrowing psychological study of the effects of kidnapping and child molestation on the victim, the abductor, their families, and the investigating detective.”

—American Library Association, (ALA) 1987 Notable Book List

“The True Detective
is tough-minded, but subtly done. The language, the details, the progress of the POV sections—everything serves Weesner’s total effect brilliantly. And while it deals with a sensational, even loaded subject, ultimately I’d say the novel is that rare achievement, a wise book, and maybe the saddest book I’ve read. That it’s also a page-turner is a marvel.”

—Stewart O’Nan, acclaimed author of
Emily Alone
and
Last Night at the Lobster

“The True Detective is a wrenching novel to read. It is a crime novel that more than any other I have read that takes in the whole situation of the crime. There are no obvious villains here, or easy answers. This is not a genre novel. It belongs on the literature shelf.”

—David Guy,
USA Today

“Weesner seems to have a pipeline into the minds of young people when they are confused and in trouble . . .”
(The True Detective is)
“. . . a compulsively readable thriller that is to the nuclear family what Hiroshima was to the nuclear bomb, and the best account yet of its detonation.”

—Joseph Coates,
Chicago Tribune

“Theodore Weesner, author of the much praised
The Car Thief
uses his moving story of the abduction, rape and murder of a 12-year-old boy to raise the kind of moral questions that no caring person can ignore today.”

—Marilyn Stasio,
Fort Worth Morning Star Telegram

“When it first appeared in 1972
, The Car Thief
took its place as one of the great coming of age novels of the twentieth century. Forty-five years later, it brings back a lost moment in America’s past, the brash young auto industry on an exhilarating joyride, Michigan’s Motor Cities roaring with life. Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart.”

—Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Bestselling Author of:
Broken Towers, Faith, Mrs. Kimble and The Condition

“A remarkable, gripping first novel.”

—Joyce Carol Oates

“The Car Thief
is a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”

—Margaret Manning,
The Boston Globe

“Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows.
Beneath its quiet surface
, The Car Thief
—like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.”

—S. K. Oberbeck,
Newsweek

“What
The Car Thief
is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled . . . and then some.”

—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
The New York Times

“A simply marvelous novel. Alex emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”

—
Kansas City Star

“Winning the City is a fine novel, a crisply written story about a young boy’s struggle to define himself.”

—James Carroll,
Ploughshares

“A courageous author . . . No one better has a handle on heartbreak— he reminds me of a latter-day Dreiser who writes better, stylistically . . . What is so special about Weesner is the emotional precision.”

—Joseph Coates,
Chicago Tribune

“. . . a knockout! . . . Dale’s struggles to win in a world whose odds are stacked against outsiders . . . leads to a heartbreaking kind of disillusionment and courageous maturity.”

—Dan Wakefield,
Boston Globe

“Winning the City tells of a young athlete ‘nearly driven out of mind with all he knew,’ but Mr. Weesner’s own mind is superbly clear on every page. He is an extraordinary writer.”

—Richard Yates, New York Times Bestselling Author of
Revolutionary Road

Theodore Weesner

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Places are named, but only to suggest reality. None of the persons who appear in these pages is intended to represent anyone, living or dead.

THE TRUE DETECTIVE—e-pub edition

Astor + Blue Editions LLC

Introduction, Copyright © 2012 by Theodore Weesner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by:

Astor + Blue Editions, LLC

New York, NY 10003

www.astorblue.com

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Weesner, Theodore. THE TRUE DETECTIVE—epub edition.

ISBN: 978-1-938231-11-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-938231-10-1 (epdf)

ISBN: 978-1-938231-09-4 (epub)

Originally published by Avon Books
© 1987 an imprint of HarperCollins USA.

1. Murder and suspense crime—Fiction 2. True Crime; child abduction—Fiction 3. Small town detective in desperate manhunt—Fiction 4. Confused Predator and determined cop—Fiction 5. Sexual crimes police procedural—Fiction 6. Portsmouth (New Hampshire)—Fiction 7. American crime story—Fiction I. Title

Book Design: Bookmasters

Jacket Cover Design: Ervin Serrano

T
HE SEXUAL REVOLUTION WENT VIRAL IN THE
70
S
,
LEAVING
countless sexual simpletons in its wake. Due to internet porn, the trend has yet to burn off in the new century and anyone’s guess is as good as mine in estimating the degree of blindered sexual simplicity that has flowed over all like a shallow flood dampening the soles of every pair of shoes.

The True Detective
is an account of several casualties in the revolution, a sexually obsessed twenty-one-year-old college student, a bewildered senior investigator trying to understand, and an innocent twelve-year-old boy who wanders directly into the jaws of the new pathology. In a seaside town in New England a sudden ‘incident’ startles the town in its headlong rush into the restoration of things new on old footings and foundations. Explicit pervasive sex, let out of the closet, is in the process of changing everything everywhere for everyone.

###

A
S A NOVELIST
I found myself exposed to the material of this novel on a visit to Detroit with my twelve-year-old son to watch the University of New Hampshire hockey team compete in the NCAA playoffs. Alas, something was immediately terribly wrong throughout Detroit and nearby Oakland County. The news was blasting from newspaper headlines and TV screens.
Four children, two boys and two girls, ages twelve, thirteen, eleven, and ten had in recent weeks been abducted from the streets, harbored for several days each, sexually violated, and put to death, their bodies left along roadsides to be discovered by passersby. The threat in the air was so palpable I did not allow my son out of my view for our three days of watching tournament hockey games, having lunch at Elias Big Boy, driving north to Flint in a rental car to show my son where I had grown up, how far I had walked to school, and to give him his first driving lesson in the cemetery where my father lay buried under a simple marker.

Returning home to New Hampshire, unable to dislodge from my mind what was one of the most charged atmospheres I had ever known, I conferred with my editor in New York and entered into a contract for the writing of a non-fiction account of the Oakland County child killings. Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
had been one of the most compelling reading experiences I had known and my mission as a fiction writer was to bring similar qualities of artful prose to the powerful drama I had seen unfolding along the Woodward Corridor into Oakland County.

Moving to Rochester, Michigan with my wife and three children, I gained permission to tag along with investigators from a Special State Police Task Force committed to solving the serial crime. While interviewing detectives as well as family members, I mapped out and visited all locations, reconstructing as accurately as possible—in a loose leaf notebook—every moment and detail having to do with the crime spree. Like the State Police detectives, my writing and investigating—my seeking to understand—was meant to culminate in the apprehension, conviction, and punishment of the killer.

Alas, no killer was apprehended and my personal
In Cold Blood
was not meant to be. With hundreds of pages of prose, returning to New Hampshire, I felt informed enough in my analysis of a new sexual pathology having come into existence (one confirmed by Ted Bundy, by the way, on the eve of his execution in Florida), that I used one of the family profiles, together with my imagination, to write a novel dedicated to a single child and a single detective. I called the novel
The True Detective
and saw it published successfully by Summit Books in 1987 and by Avon in 1988 as a mass-market paperback. Given the unfulfilled literary aspirations I brought to the task, always wanting to see the book appear in a quality literary paperback, I’m pleased to see it published here as an ebook, and hope that readers will appreciate not only its literary but its true-crime characteristics.

Theodore Weesner

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2012

T
O
T
ED
,
A
NNA
,
AND
S
TEVEN

Who haunt every night the hallways of my mind

M
URDER STOPPING AT A SMALL TOWN MAY HAVE THE EFFECT
of a nail dropped into the mechanism of town life. In large cities, by contrast, any number of murders may be processed and left behind daily, and only a glut creates a stir. A town or small city, even as it has no choice but to continue on its way, is likely to pause. It will look within, may gaze even harder and longer if the crime seems to have stepped down from a bus coming in from Boston or New York, L.A. or Atlanta. Questions will be asked. Why here? Did we do something? Is this the start of something new?