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.”
And on and on Milan goes getting into more trouble all over Cleveland till book 19 (Les Roberts is, if nothing else, prolific!), Speaking of Murder (2016) where a celebrity-packed motivational event turns deadly. The Milan Jacovich series is a lot of fun and really quite informative about Cleveland. I now need to know if anyone still struts down the city’s famous Euclid Avenue in the Full Cleveland?
Before she started writing thriller Lisa Black was a forensic scientist for the Cleveland coroner’s office. Black writes the Gardiner and Renner series, set in Cleveland and featuring forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner and detective Jack Renner. In Unpunished (2017) The Cleveland Herald is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. A dead body found hanging above the newspaper’s assembly line is a surefire way to stop the presses. Forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner rules out suicide. Over the course of six investigations (books) Gardiner and Renner the Erie Street Cemetery, Cleveland University, the city’s murky politics, Firebird, as secure facility for juvenile offenders.
Black also writes the Theresa Maclean seven-book series featuring forensic scientist Theresa MacLean. In Takeover (2009) MacLean is called to the scene of a gruesome murder. A powerful executive was beaten to death in front of his own house in suburban Cleveland. In book three, Trail of Blood (2010), Maclean hits a Cleveland cold case. In 1930s Cleveland, a serial killer nicknamed the Torso Killer went on a horrific spree that resulted in more than a dozen murders. And he was never caught. Now there’s a copycat killer out there recreating the Torso Killer’s crimes in modern day Cleveland. Other investigations take Maclean to the woods around the city, to trendy apartments in downtown Cleveland seems and then finally, in Close to the Bone (2014), right into the Cleveland ME’s office where a colleague is brutally murdered.
Richard Montanari is from Cleveland though over the years has written a series of mysteries set in Philadelphia. But with his homicide detective Jack Paris series he’s writing about Cleveland. Don’t Look Now (1995) features a serial killer stalking his victims in the singles bars of Cleveland while the second book in the series Kiss of Evil (2001) tracks the connection between the assassination of a dirty Cleveland cop and several other suspicious deaths.
On the cosier side is Vivien Chien’s Cleveland set Noodle Shop Mysteries – all 13 of them. Despite her hopes and dreams Lana Lee end up is back at her family’s restaurant in Cleveland, the at Ho-Lee Noodle House. And murders just keep happening but luckily Lana’s boyfriend is Detective Adam Trudeau. All 13 are fun and mostly Cleveland set with a few side trips to Taiwan.
A few more Cleveland-set crime novels:
- DM Pulley spent many years living in Tremont, a neighborhood on the West Side of Cleveland, that inspired her Cleveland Noir short story Tremonster. It’s on kindle and also in Akashic Noir’s Cleveland Noir (2023), edited by Michael Ruhlman and Miesha Wilson Headen.
- Whiskey Island (2000) by Emilie Richards is set on an island on Lake Erie, a struggling community of Irish immigrants with a haunting mystery. Richards moved to Cleveland in the late 1980s and was instantly fascinated by the place, its history and various communities. And, yes, Whiskey Island, really is a peninsula on Lake Erie, where Cleveland’s Irish first settled after the potato famine.
- James Renner’s The Man from Primrose Lane (2013). Bestselling author David Neff is a broken man, lonely, desolate and lost ever since his wife’s suicide. But something about the man from Primrose Lane, an old murder that happened on the street he happens to live on in Cleveland, grabs his attention and he decides to investigate the mystery – only to be dragged back into a world he thought he had left behind forever.
And finally a great historical true crime, David Stashower’s American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (2022). In 1934 a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso, neatly severed at the waist. The victim, dubbed “The Lady of the Lake,” was only the first of another dozen deaths. Over the next four years, twelve more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies were dismembered with surgical precision and drained of blood. Some were beheaded while still alive. Cleveland’s besieged mayor turned to his newly-appointed director of public safety: Eliot Ness – fresh from his career defining work in Chicago with the “Untouchables.” American Demon reconstructs this ultimate battle of wits between a hero and a madman.
So, plenty of murder in Cleveland and around Lake Erie – some of it real and thankfully most of it imaginary!
