Yesterday I finished James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown, and that catches me up in the Detective Dave Robicheaux series. Emma says a new one will be out this fall, which, I figure, means Swan Peak, advertised on the back of Tin Roof, will appear in paperback. So, I guess technically I’m only temporarily caught up. Good.
Anyway, a couple general comments on Tin Roof. First, I keep comparing this series to Ed McBain’s 87th precinct novels—probably shouldn’t, but I do—and I’ve noticed Burke lacks McBain’s hardhearted edge. In the 87th precinct stories, characters die. Admittedly the body count hasn’t included any of the regular detectives, but he’s killed off enough one-book major characters so that when anyone’s threatened, I worry. In the last two Robicheaux books, however, the end has been Dave to the rescue. Will he make it in time? Is it “the end” for Molly and Alafair? Ah, shoot. He saved them before; I bet he will again. As a result, IMHO, the suspense doesn’t work. But I’ve invested a lot of emotion in these characters. Do I want them to die? I’m torn. I’m pretty sure Aristotle—and McBain—would advise killing them, but …. I don’t know. Still. Maybe sometimes the train has to run over the damsel or the villain loses his power to frighten.
Secondly, a large portion of Tin Roof disappointed me. The thing I’ve come to like best about Burke are his sentences or paragraphs where he says something about the human condition in a manner that takes my breath away. There weren’t many of those in the first two thirds of the book. But the last third? That’s another story.
Modifying the above, throughout the book Burke’s horror of what Katrina did—and what the government let happen—to New Orleans drives the story. That, in and of itself, makes Tin Roof worth reading.
Specifics:
1) “As Americans, we are a peculiar breed. We believe in law and order, but we also believe that real crimes are committed by a separate class of people, one that has nothing to do with our lives or the world of reasonable behavior and mutual respect to which we belong. As a consequence, many people, particularly in higher income brackets, think of police as urban maintenance personnel who should be treated politely but whose social importance is one step above gardeners.” (page 202) Yup. Seems to me that pretty much sums it up.
2) “… his mouth forming a smile that made of her think of earthworms constricting on a hand-rolled piece of pie dough.” (page 211) Dang! Wish I’d written that.
3) “Old black men knocked out ‘The Tin Roof Blues’ in Preservation Hall.” (page 260) Anyone know what “The Tin Roof Blues” were? Are?
4) A bad guy, Bledsoe, defines solipsism as “the belief that reality exists only in ourselves and our own perceptions.” (page 358) That triggered something in my mind, and a few pages later when a character says, “Bledsoe’s a psychopath. He’s incapable of accepting injury done to himself by others,” (page 364) it became clear what I had been reminded of. Substitute “great art” for “reality.” Gee, seems like it’s possible to run into virtual solipsists in cyberspace.
5) “I’m always amazed at how the greatest complexity as well as personal courage is always found in our most nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the personal histories of classical Greeks.” (page 450) Really? I’m going to have to start looking for that.
6) “Or was William Blake’s tiger much larger than we ever guessed, its time finally come round.” (page 455) I love literary references—maybe because I feel smart when I “get” them. There are two in that sentence, aren’t there?
7) “I felt a sense of peace, as though I’d been invited to a war but at the last moment had decided not to attend.” (page 465) Ahhh. Interesting concept, isn’t it?
8) “The reason why guys like BTK and John Wayne Gacy and the Green River guy, what’s-his-name, Gary Ridgeway, can kill people for decades is they’re protected. Their family members live in denial because they can’t accept the fact that they’re related to a monster, or that they’ve slept with him or had children with him. How would you like to find out your father is Norman Bates?” (page 469) My friend Tessa says one reason she never had kids was ‘cause she was scared of giving birth to a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. Or, even worse, IHHO, an Alex Keaton.
9) Dave is tracking down the background of a bad guy. “Then I used the most valuable and unlauded investigative resource in the United States, the lowly reference librarian.” (page 472) YES! She, of course, finds what he needs to know. (Never thought of the following before but a truism might be: never play Trivial Pursuit with a reference librarian.)
10) An overview of Burke’s view of New Orleans: “New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of federal funding to the city and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine into the welfare projects. The failure to repair the levies before Katrina and the abandonment of tens of thousands of people to their fate in the aftermath have causes that I’ll let others sort out. But in my view the irrevocable fact remains that we saw an American city turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States. If we have a precedent in our history for what happened in New Orleans, it’s lost on me.” (493) Me, too. Can you think of one?
On that note, I’ll stop.
