Struggling with Private & Public Demons in the Novels of James Lee Burke, Part II: Dark Underbellies

Author James Lee Burke on his Montana ranch. (Photo: Getty)

Read Part I of this series here.

"For many years our state legislature has been known as a mental asylum run by ExxonMobil. Since Huey Long, demagoguery has been a given; misogyny and racism and homophobia have become religious virtues and self-congratulatory ignorance has become a source of pride." – James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

Since the 1987 publication of Neon Rain, Burke has mastered the technique of writing in the first person, remaining within the consciousness of his chief protagonist, enabling Dave to offer commentary on political, social, moral and philosophical issues. Robicheaux is set once again in the familiar setting of New Iberia along the bayou and opens with Dave seeing the ghosts of Confederate soldiers marching through the swamp. He is in a dark psychic space as his wife, Molly, has died in a car accident. In his grief and rage, his sobriety cracks as he succumbs to his demons who "live in me like a snake that slowly swallows its prey." During an alcoholic binge, he fears he might have murdered the taxi driver who killed his wife but afterwards he cannot remember if it really happened. Worse, the investigation of the man's death is assigned to a dirty cop.

Struggling with Private & Public Demons in the Novels of James Lee Burke, Part I: Savagery and the Past

This review that originally appeared in Critics at Large is reproduced on this site because Burke powerfully explores the evil that men do when they cross a line.

Author James Lee Burke. (Photo: Facebook)

"I became a cop in order to deal with a black lesion that had been growing on my brain, if not my soul, since I was a child." – James Lee Burke, Light of the World 

It is unwise to pigeonhole a multiple-award-winning crime novelist like James Lee Burke as a genre writer. His detailed rendering of the Cajun culture, its food, music, and dialect, along with his gorgeous descriptions of the bayou in South Western Louisiana, particularly during rainstorms, is a distinguishing feature of the Robicheaux novels. Consider this lyrical passage from his most recent novel, Robicheaux (Simon & Schuster, 2018): "The flying fish broke the bay's surface and sailed above the water like pink gilded winged creatures, in defiance of evolutionary probability." (Burke's descriptive prowess is also present in his twentieth Robicheaux creation, Light of the World [Simon & Schuster, 2013], which is set in the mountainous region near Missoula, Montana.) The Globe and Mailcritic, Margaret Cannon, offers high praise to Burke by comparing him to William Faulkner: his account of the bayous of Louisiana is similar to "what Faulkner did for backwoods Mississippi." Not surprisingly, Burke considers Faulkner, particularly his The Sound and the Fury, to be a major influence.

Burke's influence has extended beyond the crime novel to the larger culture. Like some of the best crime novelists, Burke uses the procedural as a vehicle for an overlay of political and social commentary. The 2005 Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, which submerged large areas of the poorest parts of New Orleans and exposed scandalous government neglect, even before the tidal surge hit with cuts in federal aid, was the subject of The Tin Roof Blowdown. The novel is comparable to the mammoth Spike Lee documentary When the Levees Broke, and the HBO David Simon series, Treme, for their portrayals of a community after the veneer of civilized society is stripped away and we find out what people are really like. The New York Times reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, declared that Burke's was the "definitive" crime novel about Katrina.