The only true paradise, thought Proust, is the one we lost. Those twin steeples at Martinville, emblems of childhood, in time liberated the adult novelist to interpret “the colourings of an unsuspected world”.
Little is unsuspected in the work of James Lee Burke. The champion of American crime writing knows the world will never run short of evil. But his books are about far more than goodies and baddies, and his villains are very bad hats indeed. They burn with a sense of loss, which smarts no less painfully in his domain, south-west Louisiana, than the orchards of Normandy. Few writers understand how profoundly the past makes claims upon the present like Burke, now 87, whose tales of Cajun lawman Dave Robicheaux have held readers captive throughout five decades.
In Louisiana, goes an old joke, half the state is under water, the other half under indictment. In Purple Cane Road, the 11th of 24 books in the “Robicheaux” series, a slippery politician reflects on its “carnival” atmosphere “in the way that a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realise that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed”. If that makes you smile, Burke may be your man.
His most recent novel, Clete, is the first to be voiced by Robicheaux’s comrade, Cletus Purcel, a shift of tone which wrong-footed some loyalists. New readers should go back to the beginning, and The Neon Rain, published in 1987, to see what makes this writer irresistible.
First, as with all great crime writers, there is a sense of place. Burke’s Louisiana, corrupt yet beguiling, belongs to him as surely as Paris, the lived-in city of “zincs” and drifters, belongs to Georges Simenon. Secondly, the lyricism. His writing is entrancing, and never indulgent. Thirdly, the knowledge that past and present are contiguous. Finally, the human element: that unbreakable bond between Robicheaux and Purcel, which neither man formally acknowledges.
“I want your word,” Purcel says in Creole Belle. “I was never big on loyalty oaths,” replies Robicheaux.
This alliance, like every great friendship, lies largely in what is unspoken. Together, Burke has said, “they form a third personality that’s quite formidable”.
The watery world supplies another personality. Descriptions of marine life are so plentiful that seasoned readers play “Burke Bingo”, chalking off each reference to swamp maples and flooded cypresses. The Bayou Teche, that great waterway, abounds with blue herons and goggle-eye perch. Burke-Robicheaux accepts as an act of faith that in these parishes (the Pelican State doesn’t have counties), the Almighty created Paradise.
In every Eden, though, there are serpents. Robicheaux inhabits a realm of poverty and ignorance, exploited by rapacious oilmen and crooked politicians. Then there are the mobsters, whose faces, he writes in Pegasus Descending, “didn’t indicate thought patterns or moods so much as incipient cruelty that had no specific target”.
This is the South, where deeds a century old are fresh as the morning’s beignets. In death-haunted dreams Robicheaux sees Acadian fisherfolk and Confederate soldiers. His waking hours are taken up with vagabonds searching for a patch of higher ground.
It is Robicheaux and Purcel contra mundum. “The Bobbsey twins from Homicide”, Purcel calls them, referring to their early days in the New Orleans Police Department. Robicheaux, frustrated by official corruption, slides into a detective’s job in the New Iberia sheriff’s office after that first novel, running a bait shop on the side. Purcel, booted out of the Crescent City when superiors tired of his direct methods, becomes a private investigator and bail bondsman.
They could easily have been crusty bores. Wounded by broken childhoods, blasted by the horrors of Vietnam, they are troubled souls witha thirst for “the full-tilt boogie”. Nothing new there. Yet, from this unpromising clay, Burke has moulded men who achieve an Arthurian nobility.
Evil does not have to triumph, he reminds us, because it shouts louder. Goodness abides in unlikely places, and all souls are susceptible to that “twitch upon the thread” Evelyn Waugh wrote about in Brideshead Revisited. As Purcel frequently says, his words tolling like the Angelus: “noble mon, everything’s copacetic”.
Born in Houston in 1936, from a Catholic family tree with French and Irish branches, James Burke took his summer holidays with relatives over the state line, in New Iberia. Nowadays Burke spends half the year in Montana, but he has always regarded New Iberia as home. In April this year the city elders acknowledged this debt when they unveiled a statue of the writer.
His father, James Lee, a natural-gas engineer, died in a car accident when Burke was 18. Robicheaux’s father, it may be noted, died in an oil well blow-out when his son was the same age. Like Robicheaux, Burke is also a recovering alcoholic.
After reading English literature at the University of South West Louisiana in Lafayette, he drove lorries with the US Forest Service and was a newspaper reporter, a social worker in Los Angeles and a land surveyor in Colorado. Eventually he joined the English faculty at Wichita State University and taught creative writing.
Half of Paradise, Burke’s first novel, came out in 1965, and there were two further books by 1971, when the tap dried up. The Lost Get-Back Boogie, under submission for a decade, and rejected by 111 publishers, was eventually accepted by the Louisiana State University Press. It was then put up for a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1984, on a fishing break in Montana, a writer friend encouraged him to try crime. The following week, outside a café in North Beach, San Francisco, Burke sketched the opening paragraphs of The Neon Rain. The first “Robicheaux” was published three years later, and he hasn’t stopped writing since.
The titles offer a flavour of the world he has colonised: Black Cherry Blues, Cadillac Jukebox, Sunset Limited. This Louisiana is a republic of coastal marshes and tin shacks. Whether its tormented people are black, white, Creole or Cajun is immaterial. Here, Burke has said, “it’s hard to tell what anybody is”.
Robicheaux’s father, Big Aldous, was a bar-room brawler and offshore derrick man. His mother, Alafair MacGuillory, took in washing by day and brutes by night before she was murdered by a punter. Back from Vietnam, where he was wounded by a “bouncing Betty”, he took to the bottle, earning a reputation for violence softened only slightly by years of renunciation. “The bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world,” he writes in A Morning for Flamingos, “seldom have heroic physical characteristics, or the auras of saints.”
In an act of sustained concealment we barely see Robicheaux. Not until the opening chapter of Clete does Burke tell us what he looks like: “a meditative and handsome guy, six foot one, his shoulders square, his skin tanned, a patch of white in his black hair… [people] didn’t know he got his white patch from malnutrition as a child”.
His boisterous ally we see all too clearly. With his fire hydrant neck, rancher’s shoulders and steel fists, Purcel is present in flesh and blood. He wears a pork pie hat, favours flowery shirts, and the scar which runs through one eyebrow is a badge of honour. Usually he is found in licenced premises, two quarts down.
“You need your own Zip code,” a crook says in Crusader’s Cross, and that’s the way he likes it. After a glass he fills mobsters’ limos with cement, throws prowlers off roofs and turns on the lights in a porn cinema to see who’s enjoying the show. He goes on the pad for a gangster, and tampers with the fuel tank of a plane that flies into a mountain. Roughnecks bold enough to challenge him in biker bars are swiftly acquainted with the nearest window. “Salting the mine,” Purcel calls it, and those fists are particularly steely when he confronts abusers of children and women. Whipped in childhood by his drunkard of a father, Purcel has devoted his life to punishing the cruel. As Robicheaux says, when he is exasperated by the latest eruption: “I never knew a braver man.”
Purcel returned from two tours of Vietnam with the Navy Cross, two Purple Hearts “and memories he shared with nobody”. Robicheaux loses one wife, Annie, to a gunman and another, Bootsie, to lupus, before he takes up with Molly, a former nun. They stand on level ground, these pals, scorched by loss.
Robicheaux enjoys the steadier life. Batist, an illiterate black man, helps to run his bait shop, and there is pride in watching his adopted daughter, Alafair, grow up to be an American. He gave her the gift of life, pulling her from the air pocket of a submerged plane on a flight from El Salvador. Apples and trees, Burke’s own daughter, Alafair, is also an acclaimed novelist.
The books are violent. They are also riotously funny, so long as you enjoy laughing. They are literary, too. Robicheaux reads as widely as Adam Dalgliesh, PD James’s poet-detective, and the Romantics are never far away. A Stained White Radiance, the fifth book in the sequence, comes directly from Shelley.
But a very different poet springs to mind, after a sustained read: AE Housman, and his army of mercenaries: “Their shoulders held the sky suspended;/They stood, and Earth’s foundation stay;/What God abandoned, these defended,/And saved the sum of things for pay.”
Robicheaux and Purcel, outsiders by temperament and choice. Is there, Robicheaux wonders in Creole Belle, any curse worse than approval? “It’s a fine thing to belong to a private club based on rejection and difference.”
Clete
James Lee Burke
Orion, 336pp, £22
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This article appears in the 27 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Optimist’s Dilemma