Moving through the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke, I've just finished
A Stained White Radiance. The story centers about the children from an abusive family who have now grown up and are making names for themselves in the areas of politics, religion and crime, making enemies all the while. And that's where Dave Robincheaux comes in, does his job, and makes sure the baddest of the bad guys gets what's coming to him.
I'm starting to notice things about Burke's writing.
1) His love for New Orleans and the areas around it comes through loud and clear.
Over the years I had seen all the dark players get to southern Louisiana in one form or another: the oil and chemical companies who drained and polluted the wetlands; the developers who could turn sugarcane acreage and pecan orchards into tract homes and shopping malls that had the aesthetic qualities of a sewer works; and the Mafia, who operated out of New Orleans and brought us prostitution, slot machines, control of at least two big labor unions and finally narcotics.
They hunted on the game reserve. They came into an area where large numbers of the people were poor and illiterate, where many were unable to speak English and the politicians were traditionally inept or corrupt, and they took everything that was best from the Cajun world in which I had grown up, treated it cynically and with contempt, and left us with sludge in the oyster beds, Levittown, and the abiding knowledge that we has done virtually nothing to stop them." (pages 36-37)
I might quibble with the prostitution onset, but I won't deny the sadness and caaring that lie behind the words.
2) Sometimes he can write a simple sentence that, IMHO, actually says much more than the words themselves. "My palms were ringing with anger." (page 251) My palms have done that, but I didn't know the words to express it.
3) Dave attends a picnic where a local politician is to speak and describes the people there.
This was the permanent underclass, the ones who tried to hang on daily to their shrinking bit of redneck geography with a pickup truck and gun rack …
They were never sure of who they were unless someone was afraid of them. They jealously guarded their jobs from blacks and Vietnamese refugees, whom they saw as a vast and hungry army about to descend upon their women, their neighborhoods, their schools, even their clapboard churches, where they were assured every Sunday and Wednesday night that the bitterness and fear that characterized their lives had nothing to do with what they had been born to, or what they had chosen for themselves. (pages 252-253)
Wow! Red state alert! Red state alert!
4)
… Bobby Earl (politician mentioned above) has his thumb on a dark pulse, and like all confidence men, he knows that his audience wishes to be conned. He learned long ago to listen, and he knows that if he listens carefully they'll tell him what they need to hear. …
If it were not he, it would be someone like him—misanthropic, beguiling, educated, someone who, as an ex-president's wife once said, allows the rest of us to be comfortable with our prejudices. (page 367)
Remind you of anyone in politics today? And, out of curiosity, anyone know who the ex-president and his wife might be?
For crime series, I still like Ed McBain's 87th precinct books better, but James Lee Burke is growing on me.
