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Motor City Burning: a crime story set in the 1967 Detroit riot

Bill Morris and his book Motor City Burning
User: Meet Bill Morris
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1967 and 1968. Those were some mighty vivid years in Detroit's history.

In 1967, racial tensions boiled over that hot July night on 12th Street.

But the following year saw baseball fans, black and white, coming together at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, rooting the Tigers on to that World Series win over the Cardinals.

That's the setting for the new novel Motor City Burning. Author Bill Morris blends the riot and the World Series into a murder mystery.

Morris says living through those eventful years as a teenage boy in Detroit inspired him to write the novel.

“I thought if I can find a way to weave these two summers together and tell that story, I’ll have a good book. That’s what I tried to do through the eyes of a young black man up from Alabama,” says Morris.

*Listen to our conversation with Bill Morris above.

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