BOOK REVIEW : Entertaining Pairing of Mystery and History : EDSEL: A Novel of Detroit, <i> by Loren D. Estleman</i> (Mysterious Press; $21.95, 304 pages)

“America is a mistake,” Sigmund Freud once said, “a giant mistake.”

So was the Edsel, a symbol of the overblown ambitions of America in the ‘50s. Both are invoked by Loren D. Estleman in the fourth of his Detroit-based mystery novels, “Edsel.”

Estleman is not trafficking in cheap nostalgia. Indeed, the Zeitgeist of the ‘50s that he conjures up so expertly includes Joe McCarthy as well as Clarabell the Clown, fall-out shelters as well as “Fantasia,” all of it rendered in the sharp, sarcastic banter of a burnt-out newspaper columnist reduced to hawking automobiles as a flack for Ford Motor Co.

“Cars, like everything else in a nation that once prided itself upon vertical growth, had begun to flatten and lengthen,” muses Connie Minor, who is suffering from a kind of unplanned obsolescence.

What rouses Connie from his middle-aged stupor is an assignment to prepare America for the coming of the Edsel, an automobile intended to represent “the end product of 10,000 years of evolution, conception, invention, revolution, and celebration.”

Soon Connie begins to feel heat on all sides--the testosterone-charged office politics of Ford, the overheated fantasies of a red-baiting politician looking for communist influence in professional wrestling, a scam that looks like industrial espionage and smells like blackmail, even an encounter with real-life union boss Walter Reuther.

The interlocking conspiracies are so dense that Connie can’t quite figure out who is tailing him or why. Everybody from the Ford hierarchy to the Red Squad, the FBI and the Mob, it seems, has a reason.

Connie seems to spend most of his time in pursuit of phantoms, ricocheting from the River Rouge assembly line to Tiger Stadium, from City Hall to the drive-in. Still, he finds time to dally with a beguiling beauty whose withered arm does not dampen his ardor, and an older married woman who seems to exert an even more powerful influence.

“Going to church in the morning?” she asks him, and it takes him a moment to figure out she’s inviting him to spend the night.

Indeed, wordplay is far more crucial than gunplay to “Edsel.” A filet mignon is “as tender as a man’s grip on life.” The architecture of a tract house is “as dull as an Eisenhower speech,” and the hood of a 1946 Studebaker “tapers to a point like the nacelle of a P-38.”

Even as he plays with our expectations, Estleman keeps us wondering. “You spend too much time figuring the angles,” says Agnes, which might be said of the book.

“Edsel” is less a detective story than a smart take on the ‘50s as an era when our national ambition soared, then stalled, crashed and burned. It’s full of fear-ridden and failure-plagued men and women, and the Edsel becomes a glittering but flawed icon of all the meanings of failure in American life.