Yes, this is yet another American crime writer. So what was it about Professor Bill Speck and the USA?
Partly, Bill was happy to credit his Americanophile nature to an exchange visit which he made as a young member of the RAF cadets. I cannot recall him telling me if this was the ATC and attached to his Bradford Grammar School or not. Nor can I fix this visit to the USA in time, but probably shortly after WWII. Later Bill was to be a great friend and collaborator with the American historian Mary Geiter, (see her piece on 'American Bill' elsewhere on this blog).
But back to the matter at hand. Bill insisted I read Burke, the Louisiana author and I'm glad he did.
I've forgotten which book was my first. It could have been 'The Lost Get-Back Boogie' or 'Cadillac Jukebox'. But I have in front of me now 'Dixie City Jam', my latest good read.
The flawed detective 'hero' is Dave Robicheaux. Robicheaux is a reformed alcoholic but is most informative about the bayou, American jazz, (a shared passion with Bill), and has a keen social conscience, (also shared with Bill). In this story Roicheaux tangles with modern 'Nazis' bent on salvaging a Germand U-Boat and gives as good as he gets from hoodlums of the Irish and Italian communities. Dave Robicheaux has dependable friends like Clete who says on p.255 of my Phoenix paperback printed in 20015:
'Let me take y'all to supper tonight'...
'That sounds very copacetic', I said.
My second day in Vietnam a hard-nosed gunny gave me some advice about
fear and memory and all that stuff:
"Never think about it before you do it, never think about it after it's over" '
'No kidding?' I said.
'I tried', he answered, and held up his palms and made half-moons of his evebrows.'
Later in the novel, on p.327 Dave Robicheaux meets Hippo Bimstine behind the counter of one of Hippo's drugstores:
'Hippo had the confident and jolly appearance of a man
who could charm a snake into a lawnmower.
"Another nice day," he said.
"It sure is", I said.
"So why the dark look? You dump some money at the track? His smile was inquisitive and
full of play.
"I guess I get down when I find out a friend has tried to blindside me".
"What are you talking here?" He tried to look me steadily in the eyes.
"Max Carlucci's been saying peculiar things about you Hippo".
"Consider the source".
"I am. He's got no reason to lie. He says Tommy Lonighan told him you
removed some stuff about the nazi U-boat from the public library".
"I'm under arrest for library theft?"
""Buchalter and his buttwipes used up my sense of homor, partner".
Music is often a feature of the Ribichaux novels. On p.348-9 a chracter called brother Oswald Flat tries to explain why an evil man can't love music but is interested in it for some other reason:
"Music's one club. Hit's like belonging to the church.. Hit don't matter which room you're in, as long as you're in the building. You with me?"
"You know some jazz musicians??"
"I'll have a go at hit from a different angle", he said. "I used to record gospel at Sam Phillip's studio in Memphis. You know who else recorded in that same studio? Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins,Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggert. You want me to go on?
"I think Will Buchalter [ the sadistic baddie] has some kind of involvement with historical jazz or blues. But I don't know what it is".
Violence and hard language have their part in Burke's novels but always in context. And to offset this is the love of his wife 'Bootsie' and daugher Alafair. More importantly, the storylines are very good and the battles between evil and good are significant.
LAST CAR TO ELYSIAN
FIELDS
by
James Lee Burke
[please forgive me for these notes gathered some years ago and kept on the old computer in my shed!]
…A group of tourists were walking
by, talking among themselves about either A Streetcar Named Desire the play by
Tennessee Williams, or the original streetcar itself, which today sits like an
immobile and disconnected anachronism on a cement pad down by the river.
The
dishevelled man stood up and began waving his arms at them, ‘That streetcar
didn’t go out to Desire,’ he yelled, ‘It went out Elysian Fields. It was the last
car that still run out to Elysian Fields. All these streets here was
Storyville. It was full of coloured whorehouses and women who killed themselves
with morphine. Hey, don’t you go in them crypts! The kids from the Iberville
Project climb over the wall and bust people like you in the head. Are you
listening to me? This ain’t New
Orleans. You’re standing in the city of the dead. You
just don’t know it yet,’ p.110.
I long ago became convinced that
the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable
information does not lie with the government or law enforcement agencies.
Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the
Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union’s
impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin’s leaders were trying to
cut deals for their memoirs with new
York publishers. Or if a person really wishes a
lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the
IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and
ask the same questions to a different representative.
So where do you go to find a researcher who
is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to
discerning the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history and
literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?
After
lunch I drove to the city library on Main and
asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup, p.113.
…’We’re the good guys. The problem is nobody else knows it. But
that’s their problem, not ours,’he said…
Clete
had made a point, one which I don’t think was either vituperative or vain.
Legal definitions had little to do with morality. It was legal to
systematically poison the earth and sell arms to Third
World lunatics. Politicians who themselves had avoided active
service and never had listened to the sounds a flame thrower extracted from its
victims, or zipped up body-bags on the faces of their best friends, clamoured
for war and stood proudly in front of the flag while they sent others off to
fight it.
The
polluters and the war advocates are always legal men, as the Prince of Darkness
is always a genlemen.
The John Gotttis of the world make good entertainment. The polluters and the war
advocates can be seen at prayer, on camera, in the National Cathedral. Unlike
John Gotti, they’re not very interesting but they cause infinitely more
damage, p.342.
How had Hemingway put it? The
world was a fine place, and well worth the fighting for…I thought perhaps the
world was more than just a fine place, that perhaps it was a domed cathedral
and we only had to recognise and accept that simple fact to enjoy all the gifts
of both heaven and earth, p.366.
[acknowlegdements at the end of 'Last Car...'
I would like to thank
Leslie Blanchard at the Iberia Parish Library and Vaun Stevens and Don Spritzer
at the Missoula
public Library for their friendship and generous help over the years.]
If you like the Robichaux novels then, like me, you may want to follow other Burke characters into the world of Montana.
