James Lee Burke's Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. I can see why. The story's good. Detective Dave Robicheaux and his adopted daughter, Alafair, are being threatened by south Louisiana thugs. He responds by beating up two of them in a motel room. After he leaves, one of the thugs kills the other and decorates the bathroom with his insides. Dave is accused of the murder. He discovers that the twosome and others are involved with organized crime, men who are systematically cheating Indians out of acres of oil-rich land. Dave heads to Montana to right wrongs and prove his innocence. Alafair goes with him.
I did have my usual problem with his way too over-detailed description. Trust me, Mr. Burke, I really don't need to know exactly what every character is wearing each time he appears. Nor do I care whether Alafair's jeans are zippered or have an elastic waist. Too much information!
Still, there were times when his writing truly grabbed me.
1) "… you're in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin—Cajuns … rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax." (page 3) Okay. Maybe the thing is that I like description when it's something more than a laundry list of furniture, trees or clothing.
2) Dave, the narrator, describes his housekeeper. "Her body looked put together out of sticks, and her skin was covered with serpentine lines. She dipped snuff and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes continuously, and bossed me around in my own home, but she could work harder than anyone I had ever known, and she had been fiercely loyal to my family since I was a child." (page 8) Hey! I know that woman, even without a description of what she's wearing.
3) Know what "fiigmo" means? It's cop-speak for "F—k it. I've got my orders." (page 26) I like anything that improves my vocabulary.
4) "… as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to include that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired—the Moe Howard affair,* the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups." (page 129) I love that last image and, meant in the nicest way possible, sense that a lot of the folk here make a similar use of suction cups.
5) "Don't live in tomorrow's problems. Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now." (page 139) Although, I like the sentences, I have to object. "You can always control now"? Gimme a break! Self-delusion is always so … so … so cute.
6) Dave watches a group of the bad guys having fun. "The Tahoe crowd were the kind of people who knew that they would never die." (page 149) I guess Detective Dave also finds self-delusion cute.
Except for the usual it's-too-long, Black Cherry Blues is pretty good.
*Anyone know what "the Moe Howard affair" might be? I don't so I thought about ...ing it out, but then I thought maybe one of you might know something. Anyone? Was Moe Howard a Stooge?
