“Local to where, across the river?”: Detroit, Borderlands, and Cycles of Dispossession in Elmore Leonard’s <i>Killshot</i>

This article considers American crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s Killshot (1989) as an “urban western” on the Windsor/Detroit international border. Drawing on Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s work on the borderlands, Greg Grandin’s work on frontiers in the US imagination, and Holly Karibo’s research on illicit exchange at the US/Canada borderline, the author theorizes Leonard’s Detroit—once capital of the Michigan Territory, home to the Anishinaabe, settled variously by the French and British, today one of the largest majority-Black cities in the United States—as a kind of frontier and, in so doing, interrogates both the persistence and the problems of the border. While nominally reproducing the fantasies and violence of the West in its depiction of contemporary Detroit as a lawless outpost, the author argues the novel’s spatial movements—from Toronto through Detroit, north to Marine City, Michigan, south to Cape Girardeau, Missouri—in fact undercut the same, tying together crucial strands of geography and history. By returning, repeatedly, to Bkejwanong, the First Nation Reserve on Walpole Island located in the St. Clair River, which divides Canada and the United States, the novel calls us to consider the persistent and ongoing shadow of dispossession in American (and indeed Canadian) identity.