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Iniquity, Innocence, and a Cajun Cop
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20467 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
2,946 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
Last winter, at the urging of a friend who knows that I enjoy a good mystery thriller, I read James Lee Burke's Black Cherry Blues, at that time the third of the Dave Robicheaux crime novels to appear in paperback. Even before finishing the novel, I knew I had found a gem. Black Cherry Blues is first-rate crime fiction: The action is swift and exciting, the descriptions rich and evocative, and the main character darkly compelling. Dave Robicheaux would join my favorite factional crime solvers, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee and Robert Parker's Spenser. Indeed, he would move to the head of the list; for McGee died with his creator, and the Louisiana policeman has far more solidity as a character than Spenser.
Not surprised to see that Burke's novel received the 1989 Edgar Award for be crime novel of the year, I joined my colleague in awaiting the imminent paperback appearance of the next work in the series, A Morning for Flamingos. I was not disappointed. (Apparently we are not alone in our enthusiasm: Pocket Books recently reissued the first two novels in the series, The Neon Rain and Heaven's Prisoners.) Robicheaux, it seems, does not easily let go of the reader. Burke's fifth Dave Robicheaux novel, A Stained White Radiance, published this April, is excerpted in this issue.
Burke's crime novels achieve their distinctive power by joining a rich texture of description to plots of suspenseful and violent action involving a distinctive memorable protagonist. The combination creates for the reader a palpable sense of life's mysterious intermingling of innocence and evil and the pain of struggling to preserve enclaves for the good against the spread of moral blight. Where another writer would confine description to the local color of New Orleans (recently a fashionable setting for both action and horror films), Burke does much more, creating an underlying feel of both the loveliness and squalor inherent in reality.
In the following short passage, Robicheaux takes the day off to give his ward Alafair, a Central American girl he pulled from a plane wreck, a canoe trip through the marsh:
“The morning air was moist and cool among the flooded trees, and in the shadows and mist rising off the water you could hear big-mouthed bass flopping on the edge of the lily pads, hear a heron lift and flap his wings as he flew down a canal through a long corridor of trees and disappeared like a black cipher in a cone of sunlight at the end.”
The
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