Crime, Redemption and Videotape: James Lee Burke

Charles Waring

To mark the auspicious occasion of the publication of James Lee Burke's new hardback opus, Purple Cane Road, Orion's press department went into overdrive (or should that be overkill?) and put together an attractive promotional package for prospective book reviewers - it included a signed proof copy of the new novel (a collectors item indeed!) plus an explanatory 'letter' from the author himself and, perhaps most significantly of all, a forty-eight-minute video which finds Burke discussing his life, philosophy and work. We'll get to the book later, but first, let's briefly examine those other items.

In the printed letter (you didn't think it would be handwritten did you?), Burke addresses the reader and talks nebulously about concepts like a writer's artistic vision and the mysterious act of creation, concluding somewhat pretentiously, "I think Purple Cane Road is a song, my best work certainly and a novel that I will always love, in the same way you love your child." Hmm. However, the promotional video, entitled James Lee Burke's Crime and Forgiveness, offers a candid and insightful portrait of the author that for me, at least, dispelled any cynicism in my mind that the letter had engendered. The video is obviously tailor-made for commercial television, evidenced by the fact that it is divided into four, advertisement-friendly, segments of equal duration. Visually, it offers a clichéd perspective of the Bayou territory covered by Burke's Dave Robicheaux books. You get a music soundtrack consisting of a bluesy, lonesome harmonica competing with the sibilant noise of chirruping cicadas against a visual backcloth of sultry southern swampland. The film is heavy on atmosphere but also, surprisingly, offers substantial insight à propos of Burke's authorial raison d'être and personal philosophy. Less effective, however, are the melodramatic visual recreations of scenes from Burke's books (with the novelist narrating) which punctuate the author's confessions to camera.

Burke himself is not the intense, saturnine figure you might imagine from reading his work. Sporting a mandatory cowboy hat and speaking in a soft tone with an elongated southern vowel sound, the novelist is relaxed and amiable. Although middle-aged with a creased, well-worn visage and yellowing, uneven teeth, Burke exhibits an almost boyish demeanour that doesn't come across on his more sober publicity photos. He expatiates on various topics, ventilating his thoughts in the kind of cogent, articulate manner that you'd expect from such an eloquent prose writer. Like so many Americans, James Lee Burke has a clear sense of his own roots and takes pride in his heritage. In the video, he visits a Methodist churchyard in New Iberia, Louisiana, where many of his forbears are buried. He can trace his ancestral history back to the period of the Texas Revolution in the early part of the nineteenth century when William Burke, an Irish immigrant hailing from Waterford, joined Sam Houston's army and fought against the Mexican forces led by Santa Anna. William Burke miraculously managed to escape a massacre inflicted on his fellow Texans only to succumb to scarlet fever two years later at the age of thirty. As for the writer himself, we learn that he was a social worker in the mid 1960s working in South Central Los Angeles and that his experiences there laid the foundations for the moral perspective that informs his crime fiction.

Burke's detective protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, inevitably comes under scrutiny. He talks at length about Robicheaux's virtues and foibles and also attempts to shed light on the defining 'Garden of Gethsemane' moment, which has helped shape the Cajun detective's life. What Burke is describing is essentially a kind of religious epiphany, a moment of transfiguration: "Dave Robicheaux in the novels talks about experiencing the Garden of Gethsemane. He doesn't coin the term - a psychologist gives it to him in a therapy session. But it's a term that psychologists use to describe an event which St John of the Cross called 'the long night of the soul.' Only a small percentage of the human population ever experience it, but the person who goes through that rite of passage, that keyhole in the dimension, is forever changed by it. The people who experience it eventually have what the layperson or even a theologian might call a religious moment, where they make a decision about their lives that they never share with another: they never tell anybody about it but they're forever changed and they turn into good people. But they literally sweat blood."

Morality and the eternal conflict between good and evil are the main focus of Burke's cogitations regarding his own work. "The evil we find in my books is of two kinds: we meet some sociopaths who are obvious - they're the kind of guys who end up on death row and in penitentiaries. They're recognisable because they're usually ugly and stupid and they break into jails rather than out of them. But Dave Robicheaux is always more concerned, as Billy Bob Holland is, with those who insinuate their way into the mainstream of society. These are sociopaths who are far more cunning. They have the appearance of normalcy but they're totally devoid of conscience. They're out of Machiavelli's The Prince - nobody refers to The Prince as a sociopath but that's exactly what he is. Virtually all political leaders who have large influence are students of Machiavelli, not St Francis of Assisi." Quite.

Burke describes himself as a traditional liberal but has views on the nature of evil, which, with their sense of Biblical transgression from righteousness, go against the grain of orthodox social work training. Burke's viewpoint is reflected in Dave Robicheaux's own perceptions. "He [Dave Robicheaux] says maybe there are those who are made different through environment or genetics but there's a third, more disturbing theory, that perhaps there are those who make a conscious choice for evil. They step of their own volition across the line and deliberately murder all light in their souls and, he says, that's the group that causes the real problem. It's not something they evolved into. There's a moment that comes - like the Garden of Gethsemane experience - when they choose evil rather than good as a world that will define their lives. I believe that." Robicheaux himself, with his alcohol dependency and propensity to use violence, is a seriously flawed man, a person who has been tainted by the evil he encounters and as a result bears both physical and psychological scars. It's a burden, though, that the police, with their close proximity to those who commit heinous acts, have to shoulder - but the consequences can be catastrophic: "That kind of life [Dave Robicheaux's] exposes a person to cynicism and a dark view of humanity that has an obviously injurious effect on the psyche: alcoholism, divorce rates, suicide rates are all high among police officers." Burke also acknowledges that the police and criminals 'share commonalities', which results in an almost symbiotic understanding of one another's rationales.

Regarding the liberal sprinkling of violence that characterises his books, Burke has this to say: "When we see violence used, either by Billy Bob Holland or Dave Robicheaux, it is always in defence of another. Both narrators always indicate that it is not a victory but a defeat because violence always dehumanises. It debases the perpetrator as well as the victim, even when it absolutely necessary." Finally, Burke claims that the most rewarding aspect of being a writer is meeting readers who confess to him that his books have prompted them, like hero Dave Robicheaux, to confront their alcoholism and adopt positive measures to begin a new life.

From the video evidence, James Lee Burke, appears to be almost as interesting a character as those found in his novels. However, I believe that the real key that unlocks the door to a writer's psyche is found in the books they write rather than the interviews they give. James Lee Burke has two new books out at the moment and here's the CT verdict on both.

Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke
Orion
£5.99
isbn: 0752843346

Let's face it, Dave Robicheaux wouldn't know happiness if it pistol-whipped him across the head. If truth be told, the Cajun copper is something of a miserable bastard, whose unrelenting trials and tribulations in eleven of James Lee Burke's crime novels would give even Job a run for his money. While Robicheaux's soul has not yet been totally possessed by the twin demons of booze and violence, he is unequivocally a man haunted by ghosts from the past - his experiences in Vietnam while in the army, and subsequently on the mean streets of New Orleans as a cop, brought him face to face with his own moral fragility in a world which thrives on cruelty, pain, violence and senseless death. Furthermore, he has been tainted by his proximity to evil. But it has become the oxygen he breathes. This is not to say that Robicheaux is nefarious or corrupt - in order to combat the evil he encounters he has to adopt a similar mindset. He has become as predatory as the wrongdoers he pursues. Consequently, Robicheaux, finds it hard to live with himself and reconcile his work as a cop with family life. Aware of his own failings, he tries desperately to redeem himself by quitting the bottle and curbing his violent disposition. But those two aspects of his personality are far too deeply rooted in his own psyche for him to renounce them altogether.

Each new Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke achieves much more than the presentation of a new episode in the detective's life - it adds additional layers to an ever-evolving, complex portrait of his personality. Purple Cane Road is James Lee Burke's eleventh mystery novel featuring the so-called 'gumbo gumshoe'. The charismatic Cajun detective investigates the brutal slaying of an elderly man, Vachel Carmouche, the former State executioner, who is found hacked to death in his kitchen. Suspicion falls upon the Creole twins, Letty and Passion Labiche, both of whom claim to have been sexually abused as children by Carmouche. While Robicheaux attempts to get to the bottom of this seemingly straightforward case, he is shaken by a revelation from a pimp regarding his own mother, who was murdered in the 1960s: apparently, two bent cops who were moonlighting for the mob were responsible for her death. Add to this equation a corrupt attorney general and a bizarre contract killer who is stalking Robicheaux's daughter and you have an inventive book whose plot lines intersect with a compelling complexity. Both the book's primary and secondary characters are substantive and memorable while the action travels at a brisk pace. But it is Burke's narrative that commands most attention - the prose he uses to evoke atmosphere achieves a lyricism that almost achieves the sonorities associated with poetry.

Although the novel's tone is elegiac and aches with an excruciating sense of despair, it's Robicheaux's humanity which shines a light through the gloom and invests the book with a life-affirming quality. Purple Cane Road is undoubtedly Burke's best novel yet, an ambitious work which blurs the boundaries between so-called 'serious' literature and crime fiction.

Heartwood by James Lee Burke
Orion
£5.99
isbn: 0752834193

New out in paperback is Burke's second novel featuring the former Texas Ranger turned small town lawyer, Billy Bob Holland (he previously appeared in Cimarron Rose). Set in the small Texan community of Deaf Smith, Heartwood begins with local business tycoon and professional arsehole, Earl Dietrich, accusing a former rodeo champion down on his luck, Wilbur Pickett, of purloining a valuable watch from his safe. However, Billy Bob's acceptance as Pickett's defence lawyer and his subsequent examination of the evidence opens a proverbial can of worms involving oil prospecting, insurance scams, murder, racism, homophobia, mercenaries, clairvoyant Native Americans, corrupt small town cops and Latino gang bangers. And while all this is going on, Billy Bob nurtures a smouldering, latent passion for the Amazonian private eye, Temple Carroll.

Like James Lee Burke's other alter ego, Dave Robicheaux, Billy Bob Holland is a haunted man - he is accompanied by the spectre of LQ Navarro, a former Texas Ranger colleague whom Billy Bob accidentally shot dead on a drug raid in Mexico. Navarro appears at intermittent intervals throughout the novel to impart nuggets of wisdom to the lawyer. Burke handles this potentially risible supernatural element of the book with aplomb, preventing the relationship between these two characters descending into Randall-and-Hopkirk-like absurdity. An immensely satisfying read.