Michael Henderson

Down by the bayou

Burke’s masterly new crime novel featuring Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel should be greeted with a fanfare of trumpets

issue 09 February 2019

The king of crime fiction doesn’t need a crown and sceptre. Every page proclaims his majesty. James Lee Burke has now written 22 books about Dave Robicheaux, but readers will never grow tired either of him, his friend, Clete Purcel, or the bayou. The New Iberia Blues should be greeted with a fanfare of trumpets: it is a masterpiece.

As his admirers know, Burke is no mere crime novelist. His lifelong subject is the fall of man, and Louisiana is his demi-Eden. The swamp maples and mossy oaks, the pinks of dawn and the crimson hues of twilight are all here again, though the mood is autumnal, for Robicheaux’s sand is ‘shrinking, shrinking’. It is appropriate to quote the man from Dorset, because Burke’s bayou is no less evocative than Hardy’s Wessex. They are both great painters of landscape.

The cast is familiar: Florida hitmen, New Jersey mobsters, and the Confederate ghosts that come upon Robicheaux in the light of day.

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