Since I discovered hard-boiled detective fiction in my teens, mysteries have been at the core of my voracious reading. I started with my holy trinity of private eye writers, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, plus a nod to Baker Street a few years earlier, I’ve gone on to read scores of authors who pen crime fiction in the private or police detective mode. Mysteries provide brain food galore to my analytical intellect and fascination with the strange beast that is human behavior,
Recent years may be up among the most-rewarding of my lifelong genre binge. Largely due to two superb novelists who follow the prime tenets of the tradition and then adapt and burnish it all with distinctive and compelling characters and story flourishes all their own. This column is the first of two about contemporary mystery authors who, for my money, stand head and shoulders with the icons of the genre. Many loyal readers, as well as critics, would agree with me.
My regular reads of perhaps the most successful mystery writer these days, James Lee Burke, began around the same time in the 1990s as I took two visits to the mise en scene of most of his books: Louisiana’s Cajun country. Nowhere else in in the nation does traditional regional culture remain so vibrant. Burke captures the polar beauties and tragedies of the redolent region where he grew up with vivid realness.
The hero of most of his books, Dave Robicheaux, is a former New Orleans cop and recovered alcoholic who works for the sheriff’s department in the small bayou city of New Iberia. He’s a good man haunted by ghosts from his life and family, as well as the region’s historical strife that linger around his existence like swamp gas.
Running parallel in the area with similarly wonderful food, music and other regional flavors are the White Cajun and African-American Creole cultures, not just divided but at odds due to systemic racism. Political and economic corruption suffuses Louisiana’s economic groundwater; the petroleum and chemical industries sully the fecund environment where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Old Southern privilege and endemic poverty grind against one another in troubling ways. It’s a thorny thicket Robicheaux must negotiate with most every case he tries to solve.
Yet for all the conflict and strife hard-wired into the world that surrounds Burke’s hero, the author is also keenly attuned to the beauty and mystical allure of the bayou region where he grew up. And he evokes its charms with the skillful linguistic brushstrokes of a mater realist painter.
Robicheaux is a largely kind and wise soul without the prejudices that suffuse the Bayou State. Through a number of the books he works with an illiterate yet worldly-wise Black man that runs his boat rental business. His sheriff boss is a lesbian. Content of character in a person’s soul is how he assesses them. He sometimes bends his standards in pursuit of justice, but strives against the vagaries of life and human behavior and tries to resist the allure that alcohol once held. In short, a man with flaws and issues but honor and integrity at the core of his soul – a classic literary detective profile.
To date, Burke has published 24 Robicheaux novels that all feel like a deep dive visits to Southern Louisiana, with side trips to the Crescent City. All of his mystery tales twist and turn like the region’s swampland waterways.
It now escapes me which of those books I first read. Then I continued to buy entries in the series as I came across them in no particular order. Burke’s skills as a literary craftsman bring just enough backstory to every book no matter where it stands in the series. The comfort of the familiar alongside the yin/yang of the Bayou culture and landscape, the ingenious twists and surprises of Burke’s plots and the flesh and blood of Robicheaux and other characters consistently provide the finest reading.
Populist Picks
Documentary Film: “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” – The tale, music and people of America’s finest annual celebration of Louisiana music and its related roots artists and styles from beyond is like a non-stop viewing party to be savored on Prime.
Documentary Film: “Ren Faire” – In the state just west of Louisiana is a whole other kind of fest: the Texas Renaissance Festival, the biggest event of its kind in the nation for those who like to visit and cosplay ye olde times.This HBO streamer gets inside the fascinating event as its founder prepares to retire.
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2024
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