For some reason my whole Burke didn't post. I'm trying again.
Enjoyed James lee Burke's Crusader's Cross. It's another Detective Dave Robicheaux novel with the usual cast of gothic Southern characters. You know, if someone based his knowledge of southerners totally on the characters in William Faulkner and James Lee burke novels, he'd think there wasn’t a sane human being south of Baltimore. Then again, maybe there isn't.
Two overall comments before I tackle specifics in Crusader's Cross:
1) Comparisons happen, and I'm not sure the one I'm about to describe says either of the writers involved is a "better" writer. As most of you know, the Dave Robicheaux series is the second "detective" series I've set out to read my way through. (Actually it's the third—no, fourth—fifth?—but we'll get to those in the next point.) The first was Ed McBain's 57th precinct novels. Now one thing I admired appreciated in the McBain novels was the author's absolute brutality. I'd get to know and like some character, then—bam!—forty pages later he'd be dead. I thought Burke was going to do something similar in Crusader's Cross. Robicheaux falls in love and gets married—oddly enough to sort of a Catholic nun lite. She's on the bad guy's hit list and I really thought Burke was going to pull a McBain and kill her off. (That, incidentally, would have put being Robicheaux's wife on the endangered species list.) But Burke didn't. At the last second Robicheaux swoops onto a torture scene and, in essence, unties his wife from the railroad tracks. Good choice? Bad choice? I have really mixed feelings. It might be because IMHO Robicheaux's wives are far from Burke's most interesting characters. In fact, I find them—gasp!—almost normal.
2) The other thread of commonality I noticed was in detective-series books was that detectives are frequently recovering alcoholics and consistently have at least one incident of falling of the wagon. Dave does so in Crusader's Cross, and I immediately flashed back to Laurence Block's Matthew Scudder series—another one I now read as each is published. Then I wondered if such an event was common to all detective series. I quickly assured myself it was not. Kinsey Millhone has a picking-the-wrong-man problem, but I don’t remember booze ever being an issue. And no detective in the 57th precinct had an alcohol problem. Nor did Nancy, Bess, George or Ned.
Specifics:
1) Dave ends a conversation with his half-brother, thinking "that Jimmie, like all brave people, would continue to believe in the world, regardless of what it did to him." (page 122) I identify with that description. I also wish the words didn't sound so damning.
2) Odd wording, IMHO. "'Go have lunch with me,' I said." (page 195) It's a command? Not an invitation I'd be keen to accept.
3) "New Orleans' tradition of vice and outlawry goes back almost two hundred when the French used southern Louisiana as a dumping ground for both criminals and prostitutes." (page 209) I didn't know that. France's Australia?
4) The about-to-be Mrs. Robicheaux is talking about her father. "He had simple admonitions. 'Feed your animals before you feed yourself. … Take care of your tools and they'll take care of you. … Put your shotgun through the fence, then crawl after it.' My favorite was 'Never trust a white person black people don't like." (page 223) I was teaching at Alabama A&M when I met Mr. mar. One of my students worked at the men's store where he bought his clothes. Oops. Should have read that admonition a lot of years earlier.
5) "An evil man once told me that hell was a place that had no boundaries, a place that you carry with you wherever you go." (page 230) I'm pretty sure I agree with that, so why was Dave hearing it from an "evil man"? Because it was something he didn't want to hear?
6) "At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered Emancipation, what they came to call 'Juneteenth,' …" (page 299) Gee, Mellow starts a thread, and now the word shows up everywhere. You sure can learn a lot on Reader Rant.
7) "Those who live with insomnia and who consider sleep both an enemy and a gift will understand the following. Some of us cannot comprehend how anyone except the very good or those with no conscience at all can sleep from dusk to dawn without dreaming or waking." (page 351) Take it from one who knows: sleeping pills can help.
8) "My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others and brings little wisdom to any of us." (page 389) Is that sentence as depressing as it sounds?
9) My vocabulary now includes rictal (page 140), the adjective form of rictus, "the expanse of an open mouth, a bird's beak, or similar structure." (Hey. Word doesn't like either form.)
And that's the latest chapter in the Dave Robicheaux saga. Sigh. Only two fish left to go.
