Last Car to Elysian Fields, by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux is an alcoholic detective working in southern Louisiana; this is the third book in which he stars I’ve read. The plot is a bit crazy, including a decades old murder of a blues guitarist, a tragic car crash that kills three teenagers, and a hired killer that masquerades as a priest. You don’t read Burke for the stories, though; you read Burke for the rich and evocative descriptions. “New Orleans wasn’t a city. It was an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge.” Or, “Lightning rippled like quicksilver across the thunderheads in the south, and the sugarcane in the fields along the road to St. Martinville thrashed and flickered in the wind and rain, the oak canopy blowing leaves that stuck like leeches on my windshield.” I love imagery like this; it makes the literary experience so much richer.

First Sentence:

The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue of an inverted ceramic bowl.

Jolie Blon’s Bounce, by James Lee Burke

I only recently discovered Dave Robicheaux, but when I came across another novel starring him in the bargain bin I couldn’t resist. Jolie Blon’s Bounce is much later in the series than Black Cherry Blues; in the latter Robicheaux has just recently lost his wife and has a young daughter but here he has married again and his little girl is about to graduate high school. The jump didn’t hurt my enjoyment, though; the author does an excellent job of filling the important gaps and getting me up-to-date quickly.

I liked this installment more than I did the first one I read. There was a real mystery to solve here and a lot less angst and hand-wringing from the lead character. The resolution is a bit far fetched, but plot is almost secondary in a Robicheaux novel. The real reason to read Burke is for his rich descriptions: “The two gamblers looked like a Mutt and Jeff team. One was big, lantern-jawed, stolid, with coarse skin and knuckles the size of quarters, whereas his friend was sawed-off, porcine, with a stomach that hung down like a curtain of wet cement, his Jersey accent like a sliver of glass in the ear.” Coupled with his lush and reverent descriptions of the Louisiana bayou, reading this was a sultry pleasure.

First Sentence:

Growing up during the 1940s in New Iberia, down on the Gulf Coast, I never doubted how the world worked.

Black Cherry Blues, by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux is an alcoholic southern ex-cop; one of those characters that is good at everything but has a tortured soul. He gets framed for a murder in Louisiana yet while on bail manages to get to Montana where he brazenly challenges a mobster he believes is responsible. I pictured him as a cajun Dirty Harry, albeit somewhat shorter for some reason. The movie Heaven’s Prisoners (based on a different novel in the series) starred Alec Baldwin as Robicheaux which doesn’t fit my mental image at all; perhaps that is why the only thing I remember is Teri Hatcher!

The plot is thin and the characters shallow, but the descriptions of mood and setting were almost lyrical. “Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water.” I love writing that shows the reader a sense of color and texture as well as the setting, and Burke gives that in spades. While Robicheaux is no Spenser, I expect I’ll be reading more of him in the future.

First Sentence:

Her hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window.