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There are no burning cars by the side of the road. No SWAT teams racing past with sirens wailing. No one being ambushed by gun-toting criminals.

Something just doesn't feel right.

I'm driving on the freeway on the outskirts of Detroit – my final destination on a Mid-West road trip that began in Chicago - and yet anarchy and crime are conspicuously absent.

Party town: Detroit has a wonderfully buzzy nightlife

We cruise into the downtown area. But strangely, there are no carjackers and it's not an apocalyptic wasteland.

How odd. I've always perceived Detroit through the prisms of Beverly Hills Cop (the opening sequence), Robocop, and newspaper headlines - so thought it would be a shell of a city intertwined with despair and rife with violent crime. A virtual no-go area for tourists.

And I'd read a passage in a guidebook warning that even Americans, who endure far higher crime rates than us Brits, will raise an eyebrow if you say you're travelling to Detroit and insist that you'll just end up getting murdered.

City of despair? You might be surprised to learn that Detroit has a slick and shiny downtown area

Its homicide rate, they will tell you, is ten times the US average. There were 333 murders last year – or 54.6 per 100,000 - the same number as New York, which has a population 11 times larger.

It is also officially bankrupt and thousands have left the city, with swathes of homes standing vacant in blighted areas. A recent study recommended that 38,000 vacant houses should simply be razed.

The journey to the centre does involve bouncing along some dreadfully potholed roads and down and outs are highly visible – but it's not the war zone I was expecting.

We pull up in our hire car outside our downtown lodgings - the Westin Book Cadillac hotel – note its swankiness, look around at the grand buildings and pristine pavements, and can't help but suspect that, actually, there are good times to be had here.

Hitting the right notes: Detroit's legendary jazz bar Baker's Keyboard Lounge, with its uniquely styled bar, made TravelMail feel very welcome indeed

And the next 48 hours are to prove me right. I've been to several major US cities – New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco – but I will look back and realise that none made me feel as welcome as this Michigan metropolis.

There's the local who holds up traffic to give us directions, a high-fiving barman and a jazz club that treats us like celebrities.

I bring tidings of a Detroit that has some world-class tourist attractions and, in some areas, is bursting with energy and pride.

Okay, to get a real flavour of a city, it's necessary to step outside one's high-spec, luxury crashpad, but the jovial atmosphere of the Westin Cadillac bar, where we head to before exploring, would be repeated many times over.

Very quickly a small group of people, including the barman, chime in with suggestions about which bar serves the best cocktails and which restaurant rustles up the juiciest steak.

Serene: The Loggia Courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Art

One recommendation is Floods Bar & Grille in Bricktown. Pitstop two sorted. Once there we order a drink, get a high-five from the barman and marvel at the equally high-spirited crowd.

A city on its knees? A city having a knees-up, more like.

We line our stomachs at the buzzy Pizza Papalis nearby, which serves up a wonderful sort of rustic pizza pie. Tip – one small serving will satisfy a bison.

Next is the main act, two jazz bars with legendary reputations.

Cliff Bell's, not far from the Detroit Tigers' stadium, is worth visiting for the burnished wood interior alone.

It has swagger and style by the ice-bucket load and the promise of top quality music every night.

I won't lie, we turn up during the bands' break, but it's still intoxicating with just bar banter for a soundtrack.

Nightlife-wise, we save the best till last. The Art Deco Bakers Keyboard Lounge – 'The World's Oldest Jazz Bar' - on Livernois Avenue has hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Nat 'King' Cole, but there's a local regular who deserves a mention, too.

The bar is a few miles north of downtown, and our taxi driver needs some satnav help to find it.

Impressive collection: The Romanesque Hall at the Detroit Institute of Art

But it's truly worth the faff and $35 fare each way.

We pull up stools at the unique piano-style bar and a tall gentleman to our right introduces himself as Henry and buys us both a gin and tonic (the measures aren't for the faint-hearted, by the way).

'You tell everyone in Britain that we're not all crazy people in Detroit,' he says. 'You tell them that we're friendly, yeah?'

With pleasure, I respond.

A short while later Henry introduces us to tonight's performer – vocalist 'Armond'. He looks at me with horror when I tell him I have a taxi waiting outside.

'You've gotta stay for a few numbers,' he insists. My travel companion James is already waiting in the cab at this point and I rush outside to tell him there's a change of plan – jazz beckons.

Driving the tourist trade: A 1952 version of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile at the Henry Ford Museum

Armond gamely gives us a shout-out during his set, making us feel even more VIP – and we've only been there an hour.

It's clear that Detroit has a zesty nightlife - and locals are more than willing to guide you to the liquor.

At one point we are forced to study a street map to aid navigation to a bar and a driver in a convertible stops and gives us directions, unprompted, as cars queue behind him.

Detroit's daytime tourist attractions, meanwhile, also have allure.

You might be surprised to hear, for example, that Detroit's Henry Ford museum is the US's second-most visited, after the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

One and a half million visitors roam the vast halls every year to learn about Detroit's place not just in the narrative of the motor car – it was Henry Ford's Detroit factory that first massed-produced affordable cars in the early 20th century – but about the city's place in US history.

The Henry Ford holds 26 million objects and documents, including such icons as Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory, Henry Ford's Quadricycle, the world's oldest steam engine and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House.

Sobering piece of history: The limo in which JFK was shot at The Henry Ford Museum - it was fitted with a hard roof after his assassination

I can also recommend refuelling at Lamy's Diner – a restaurant that doubles as a fascinating 1940s exhibit…

Hungry for more history? Visit the newly renovated Detroit Historical Museum for fun and interactive education. Art fans, meanwhile, simply must meander around the Detroit Institute of Arts' 100 galleries.

Music Meccas more your thing? Behold The Motown Museum, which is the very house in Detroit where the Motown sound ('Mo' came from 'Motor City') was conceived in the late 1950s.

Take the tour (which involves a toe-tapping singalong by the exhibits with guide Peggy Adams) and you can stand, awestruck, in the very building where the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross & The Supremes recorded their hits.

And don't forget to pop into the United Sound Systems Recording Studios.

Swanky: Detroit's superb Westin Book Cadillac hotel, which features an indoor pool, staff who will give you nightlife tips and is in a handy downtown location

It was America's first major independent recording studio, established in 1933, and still makes records today.

Again, a tour may well leave you dumbfounded as you linger on yet more hallowed ground – the studios where the likes of Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, The Rolling Stones and George Clinton have all laid down their groove.

When I return from Detroit one of my friends asks: 'Why did you go there? Isn't it a ghost town?'

Spookily brilliant, actually, I reply.