James Lee Burke

• Born: December 5, 1936
• Place of Birth: Houston, Texas

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Dave Robicheaux, 1987-; Billy Bob Holland, 1997-

Contribution

Within a decade after publishing his first mystery novel, James Lee Burke established his reputation as one of America’s premier practitioners of the genre. What sets him apart from others writing in a form that frequently emphasizes complex plotting at the expense of characterization and thematic development is his ability to incorporate elements of serious, mainstream fiction into his work. Burke explores important social, moral, and even philosophical themes while still incorporating the requisite elements of suspense and action expected in the kind of hard-boiled detective fiction that is his trademark.

Because Burke began his career writing other forms of fiction, he pays less attention to the kind of careful plotting found in the work of other mystery writers, and his heroes are thoughtful, introspective, and literate men. Through them, Burke explores questions about human relationships—love, family, estrangement, alienation, and social responsibility—and about environmental issues such as the despoiling of the land by exploitative businesses. He also uses his novels to examine the role of corrupt, lax, or simply inefficient governmental officials in promoting or allowing the kinds of evil that pose real dangers to civil society.

Biography

James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas, on December 5, 1936. His mother was a Texan, and his father was from New Iberia, Louisiana, and worked for the oil and gas industry in the region. Early in his life, Burke determined to become a writer. After completing high school, he enrolled at Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) but did not graduate. Later, he enrolled at the University of Missouri, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1959 and a master’s degree the following year.

Burke’s first published works are what could be considered mainstream fiction. Modest success came relatively early. Half of Paradise (1965), a novel he completed when he was only twenty-three, was published to critical acclaim in 1965, and his next work, To the Bright and Shining Sun (1970), received a similar reception when it appeared in 1970. However, his third novel, Lay Down My Sword and Shield (1971), did not fare as well. Critics panned it, and for fifteen years after it was published in 1971, Burke did not sell another novel to a major publisher. He worked various jobs to support himself, including as a social worker, oil lease negotiator, newspaper reporter, and college English instructor. During the 1970s, he fought alcoholism, finally achieving sobriety with the help of a twelve-step program in 1977.

After publishing his third novel, he continued to write and submit his work for publication but without success. More than a hundred publishers rejected The Lost Get-Back Boogie (1986), the story of a Louisiana convict transplanted to Montana. Finally, Burke revised and shortened the novel before offering it to Louisiana State University Press, which published a collection of his short stories in 1985. The novel appeared in 1986 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Burke became a mystery writer almost by accident. In 1984, challenged by a friend, he tried his hand at a mystery novel. The result was The Neon Rain (1987), a work set in New Orleans introducing Detective Dave Robicheaux. The book immediately established Burke as a new voice in the genre. The Robicheaux novels began to appear at the rate of one each year, and the third in the series, Black Cherry Blues (1989), earned the 1989 Edgar Award for the year’s best novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

By 1990, Burke’s growing popularity brought sufficient financial security that he was finally able to devote full time to writing. He began dividing his time between homes in Montana and south Louisiana, the locales in which much of his fiction is set. The series of Robicheaux novels was interrupted in 1997 when Burke brought out Cimarron Rose (1997), the first of a new series of mysteries featuring Billy Bob Holland, a Texan whose fictionalized family history is modeled on Burke’s mother’s family. The work earned him his second Edgar Award, making Burke one of the few writers to receive multiple honors from the Mystery Writers Association. Additional novels featuring Robicheaux and Holland followed regularly, although Burke took time away from mystery fiction in 2001 to complete White Doves at Morning (2002), a historical novel set during the Civil War, followed by Flags on the Bayou (2023).

Burke's further works in the twenty-first century include novels, short story collections, and additions to long-time sagas. Among the Dave Robicheaux novels, Burke published The New Iberia Blues (2019), A Private Cathedral (2020), and Clete (2024). He published Feast Day of Fools in 2011, continuing the Hackberry Holland series. The Holland Family Saga was published entirely in the twenty-first century—Wayfaring Stranger (2014), House of the Rising Sun (2015), The Jealous Kind (2016), Another Kind of Eden (2021), and Every Cloak Rolled in Blood (2022). Additionally, Harbour Lights, a compilation of short stories, was published in 2024. For these great works, he was awarded the Diamond Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association of Britain.

Analysis

The designation of James Lee Burke as a member of the hard-boiled school of mystery and detective fiction is fully justified. His novels are dark and often cynical, filled with raw and earthy language spoken by characters from the lowest strata of society. Exceptionally adept at creating atmosphere in his work, Burke writes vividly about the places where the action of his novels occurs. Sometimes, these settings mirror the mayhem and chaos being acted out by his characters; more often, however, the idyllic backdrops of the south Louisiana bayou country or the mountains and plains of Montana form a sharp contrast to the violence being perpetrated in them—and to them.

Burke’s characters, good and bad, are prone to violence to achieve their ends. His protagonists do not hesitate to mete out their form of justice when they perceive that the legal system may not deliver the verdict they believe to be right. However, they are not one-dimensional but rather more like the heroes of existential writers Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre than those of Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler. Robicheaux and the cast of characters in the novels in which he is featured are reminiscent of characters created by southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. There are echoes of Southern Gothic reminiscent of Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931) and Requiem for a Nun (1951) throughout the Robicheaux series. In Burke’s fiction, as in Flannery O’Connor’s most celebrated novel, a truly good man—or woman—is sometimes very hard to find.

Burke’s novels exude a great sense of irony as well. Both his major protagonists are men who emerge from violent pasts. Robicheaux is a Vietnam veteran who witnessed the horrors of war firsthand and struggled with an alcohol addiction all his life. Holland, a former Texas Ranger, lives with the guilt of knowing he accidentally killed his partner during a drug raid. Both want to settle down into family life and escape the dangerous world that consumes them. Robicheaux marries four times and even adopts a young Central American girl in his vain attempt to achieve some measure of normalcy in his life. Both Robicheaux and Holland have deep roots in the places in which they live, and environmental issues become a major theme in a number of the books.

Burke demonstrates through his novels that, no matter how hard these men try, they can never be at peace. They overthink and care too much about their families, heritage, and environment to let evil forces run unchecked. That is the central thematic issue running through the individual stories that make up the canon of one of America’s great voices in mystery and detective fiction.

The Neon Rain

In The Neon Rain, the first of the Dave Robicheaux novels, Burke establishes a complex personal history for his protagonist while taking readers on an exciting and dangerous journey through the New Orleans underworld. Robicheaux’s crusade to identify and apprehend the murderer of a young prostitute leads him into a web of sinister activity that eventually ends with his discovering a plot to smuggle arms to Nicaraguan rebels. His personal life is constantly in danger, and although he is thwarted in his investigation on more than one occasion, he manages to escape death and identify not only the prostitute’s murderer but also the head of the smuggling ring, a retired Army general bent on preventing Nicaragua from falling to the communists as Vietnam had.

Robicheaux receives help in his investigation from his partner, Detective Cletus Purcel, whose moral code is considerably more lax and whose personal life is in even greater disarray than Robicheaux’s. The two have a relationship that Burke has described as akin to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; their friendship allows them to forgive each other’s failings no matter how egregious. Robicheaux also receives help of another kind from Annie Ballard, a social worker who recognizes in him an essential goodness that lies beneath the violent streak he exhibits when his life, or the lives of those he loves, is in danger. Both characters figure prominently in later novels in the Robicheaux series.

Black Cherry Blues

The third novel in the Robicheaux series, Black Cherry Blues, takes Robicheaux to Montana, another locale that Burke knows intimately. Following the suspected murderers of men involved in what he thinks may be a shady oil-lease deal, Robicheaux discovers that the trail leads to Sally Dio, a Mafia don for whom Clete Purcel is now working as a security guard. Robicheaux discovers that Dio is engaged in land speculation that involves swindling Native Americans out of the oil rights on tribal lands. Once again, Robicheaux’s life is threatened, but Purcel comes to his aid; between them, they do considerable damage to those Robicheaux suspects of trying to hurt him and of threatening his adopted daughter Alafair, who has accompanied him to Montana. As Black Cherry Blues demonstrates, Burke’s Robicheaux becomes more thoughtful and self-reflective in each succeeding novel of the series. The protagonist is now a widower, and the death of his wife, Annie, is chronicled in Heaven’s Prisoners (1988), the second novel in the series. While Robicheaux tracks down murderers, he must fulfill the duties of a single parent, caring for the daughter he and Annie had adopted. These added complications make Robicheaux seem more like an Everyman, the character Burke has identified as his detective’s literary prototype and forebear.

Cimarron Rose

Cimarron Rose, the first of the novels featuring Billy Bob Holland, revolves around attempts by the former Texas Ranger turned defense attorney to clear his illegitimate son, Lucas Smothers, of the murder of a young girl. Holland’s investigation takes him into the world of the affluent East Enders of Deaf Smith, Texas. One of his principal suspects is a young man from the East End with fetal alcohol syndrome. Another is a psychopathic drifter who seems to know quite a bit about Holland’s past. Holland also stumbles into the midst of a federal investigation of drug operations and ends up falling in love with the agent working undercover in the local sheriff’s office. Federal investigators are aided by a Mexican drug agent who Holland recognizes as a former drug runner whom he had wounded years earlier in the attack during which Holland accidentally shot his partner, L. Q. Navarro. The complicated plot is resolved when Lucas is acquitted, and Holland can identify the girl’s killer.

In Cimarron Rose, Burke offers serious reflections on how the past influences the present. The action is interrupted regularly when Holland reads his great-grandfather's diary, an outlaw turned preacher. This technique allows Burke to suggest historical parallels between Holland and his ancestors. Burke also incorporates dream sequences in which Holland talks with his dead partner; the conversations function much like interior monologues, revealing not only what Holland must do to save Lucas but also how he must exorcise the demons from his past that give rise to his own violent tendencies.

Pegasus Descending

In Pegasus Descending (2006), nearly two decades after making his first appearance in The Neon Rain, an older, wiser, and even more philosophic Dave Robicheaux is again working full-time as a detective in the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office. When circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of a college girl seem suspicious to him, he launches an investigation that brings him face-to-face with gangsters attempting to take over casino gambling operations in southern Louisiana. As Robicheaux gets closer to the truth, people begin to get hurt or die; Robicheaux must rely again on his friend Cletus Purcel to help identify the killers and foil his enemies’ plans. In the process, he can settle an old score by bringing to justice the man responsible for the murder of a friend slain twenty years earlier when the alcoholic Robicheaux had been too drunk to prevent the killing.

In Pegasus Descending, Burke continues his exploration of themes that have interested him since the publication of his first Robicheaux novel: the plight of the people of south Louisiana trying to preserve their culture against the growing encroachment of outsiders. The exploitation of the working classes by those with money, power, or influence, and by corrupt government officials; and the duty of good people to stand up to injustice even if it means putting themselves in harm’s way. Unlike many other mystery and detective fiction writers, however, Burke brings a level of realism to his characters reminiscent of that found in mainstream fiction. The most notable example of this quality in Pegasus Descending is Burke’s focus on the fact that his detective is aging. At the same time, Robicheaux deals ruthlessly with those who perpetrate violence. He becomes even more cognizant of his own mortality and the preciousness of the life he enjoys in the region of America where he was born and lived.

Principal Series Characters:

• Dave Robicheaux is a police detective and recovering alcoholic working in and around his hometown, the south Louisiana city of New Iberia. Somewhat cynical and disillusioned with the justice system, Robicheaux is a quiet man whose lifelong dream is to raise a family. He finds himself constantly thrown into a world populated by criminals and psychopaths, where he must use violent means to protect those he loves and restore a sense of order.
• Billy Bob Holland is a former Texas Ranger who has gone to law school and is a defense attorney. Like Robicheaux, however, trouble seems to seek him out, and often, he resorts to violence to bring evil people to justice.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2013.

Bogue, Barbara. James Lee Burke and the Soul of Dave Robicheaux: A Critical Study of the Crime Fiction Series. McFarland, 2006.

Coale, Samuel. The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000.

Creamer, Ella. "Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke Share Diamond Dagger Lifetime Award." Guardian, 23 Jan. 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/23/lynda-la-plante-and-james-lee-burke-share-diamond-dagger-lifetime-award. Accessed 20 July 2024.

"James Lee Burke Books." James Lee Burke, www.jamesleeburke.com/james-lee-burke-books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Vaughn, Corey. "Burke Statue Unveiled in Downtown New Iberia." The Daily Iberian, 9 Apr. 2024, www.thedailyiberian.com/news/burke-statue-unveiled-in-downtown-new-iberia/article‗e1003e7e-f5d0-11ee-82a1-2b8718d695a3.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.