James Lee Burke's
Dixie City Jam is the best Detective Dave Robicheaux novel I've read yet. White supremacist groups, leftover Nazis, drugs ruining the ghettos, questionable police officers, sunken U-boats filled with possibilities, a truly sadistic bad guy who enjoys taunting his victims. What else could a reader want?
I still think Burke writes a bit too long and has way too many characters, but he is growing on me.
Specific moments that spoke to me:
1) I like action that's part of dialogue rather than being directly stated. Detective Robischeaux is talking on the phone to a New Orleans contact and asks him who the supervising officer on a case is. The contact replies, "A guy named Baxter. Yeah, Nate Baxter. He used to be in Vice in the First District. You remember a plainclothes by that name? . . . Hey, Dave, you there?" (page 11) Not only can you "see" Dave's departure, but those few sentences tell worlds about Nate Baxter and the relationship he had with Dave.
2) Dave's wife has lupus, and he arrives at this mindset: "I had come to feel, as many people do when they live with a stricken wife or husband, that the tyranny of love can be as destructive as that of the disease." (page 67) Now, if I can summon up the nerve to show that sentence to my husband, I might make him understand, at least a little.
3) Nice foreshadowing, IMHO. "If I had only mentioned his name or the fact that he was with his wife, or that he was elderly, or that he was a southern mountain transplant. Any one of those things would have made all the difference." (page 72) And, yep, right after that the sadist shows his nature, and the first really interesting plot twist occurs.
4) On people trying to gain control: "They got to make people afraid. That's the plan. Make 'em afraid of the coloreds, the dope addicts, the homosexuals, hit don't matter. When they got enough people afraid, that's when they'll move." (page 325) Copyright date on the book is 1994. Wonder if Mr. Burke remembered writing those words while the Bush machine was going full throttle forward.
5)
What if, instead of a particular crime, we were dealing with people, or forces, who wished to engineer a situation that would allow political criminality, despotism masked as law and order, to become a way of life?
Was it that hard to envision? The elements to pull it off seemed readily at hand.
Financial insecurity. Lack of faith in traditional government and institutions. Fear and suspicion of minorities, irritability and guilt at the homeless and mentally ill who wandered the streets of every city in the nation, the brooding, angry sense that things were pulling apart at the center, that armed and sadistic gangs could hunt down, rape, brutally beat and kill the innocent at will. Or, more easily put, the general feeling that it was time to create examples, to wink at the Constitution, and perhaps once again to decorate the streetlamps and trees with strange fruit. (page 341)
1994? Wow!
6) Dave is watching TV. "A gelatinous fat man, with the toothy smile of a chipmunk, was denigrating liberals and making fun of feminists and the homeless. His round face was bright with an electric jeer when he broached the subjects of environmentalists and animal rights activists. His live audience squealed with delight." (page 399) Bet Burke loved the Michael J. Fox imitation, too.
Yep. I think I'll keep on reading him.
