“American Detective,” by Loren D. Estleman; Forge; 254 pages, $24.95

Fictional private detectives are a glut on the market.

By the hundreds, they stalk America’s mean streets from Seattle to Miami, doing their best to emulate Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the cool, smart-alecky loners created by the great Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler more than half-a-century ago.

The highest accolade their creators can receive is to be compared to these icons, which is why so many dust jacket blurbs ballyhoo lesser writers as the next Hammett or as the heir to Chandler’s mantle. But few deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.

One who does is Loren D. Estleman, whose superbly realized private eye, Amos Walker, has just appeared in “American Detective,” the 17th novel in a series that began with “Motor City Blue” in 1980.

Estleman pounds out his stories on a mechanical typewriter, just as Chandler did. Like Chandler, he writes in the first person, telling his story from the detective’s perspective. And his creation, Walker, superficially resembles Spade and Marlowe. Like them, he works without a sidekick. Like them, he tilts at windmills, disdains authority and wisecracks in the face of danger – although he carries more scars from getting beaten and shot.

But unlike Spade and Marlowe, who labored in the underbelly of 1930s San Francisco and 1940s Los Angeles, Walker’s turf is the decaying industrial city of Detroit, portrayed so vividly that it emerges as a character in each novel.

Walker, like his creator, is something of a dinosaur – bewildered by computers, proudly politically incorrect and nostalgic for the days when Motown ruled the airwaves, the Ford plant was America’s heartbeat and you could light a cigarette in a bar without getting a dirty look.

In “American Detective,” Walker is hired by Darius Fuller, a retired Detroit Tigers pitcher. Fuller is worried that his daughter, just a few weeks away from gaining access to her $2 million trust fund, is being romanced by a dirtbag who wants her only for her money. Fuller is right, but before Walker can come to the rescue, Fuller’s daughter is murdered. Soon, Walker finds himself up to his fedora in gangsters, crooked cops and an international smuggling ring.

It’s a fine story, but as with any Estleman novel, the real attraction is the writing. Take his description of Detroit police headquarters, known locally as “1300.”

“I found John Alderdyce in his office, glowering at a plastic bucket collecting drips from a reservoir stagnating in the crawl space between his ceiling and the floor above. No rain had fallen for two weeks, but at 1300, it’s always monsoon season. Eighty years of indifferent use, with two decades of corruption at city hall, had turned a proud local landmark into a leaky hut in Thailand. Overhead, the entire seventh story was deserted, evacuated by order of a former chief because of rotten ventilation, sagging plaster, rats, black mold and pigeon filth.

“‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ I said.”

If you’ve just discovered Estleman, you’re in for a treat because there are more than 50 books in all, both Westerns and crime novels, all featuring some of the grittiest American idiom this side of Hammett and Chandler.