Crusader on the Bayou: James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series

Writing my Charlie Parker post the other day, I remembered I'm no longer up to date on James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series. It's been nearly a decade since I read one - 2008's Swan Peak - and after so many years I think it's finally time to catch up. Since then there've been four more books with another coming next year: The Glass Rainbow (2010), Creole Belle (2012), Light of the World (2013), Robicheaux: You Know My Name (2018), Ball and Chain (2019).

The series starts off with The Neon Rain (1987). In this book Dave Robicheaux is introduced as an alcoholic and a Vietnam vet and serving as a New Orleans police detective. He has a far too intimate relationship with violence. As the series progressed he was brutalized by fate and the corrupt and evil figures who haunted an increasingly phatasmagorical Louisiana.

Only one book, the stunning In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, could reasonably be called a supernatural story (but then, it could all just be alcoholic hallucinations). Nonetheless, Burke's Louisiana is haunted by the ghosts of murder victims crying out for justice, or at least to not be forgotten. The evil done by the gangsters, venal businessmen, and corrupt politicians that plague the state, stains and warps everything. Some villains even seem to reek of hellfire and sulfur. The Robicheaux books aren't paranormal thrillers or magical realism, but they have a fantastic (and fantastical) sense of place. Burke writes not just like he knows every back alley in New Orleans and dirt road of Iberia Parish, but the region's secret and forgotten history as well.

   Not many people believe this, but in the early months of 1942 Nazi submarines used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for the tankers that sailed without naval escort from the oil refineries at Baton Rouge into the Gulf of Mexico.
   It was a shooting gallery. Because of wartime censorship the newspapers and radio carried no accounts of the American ships sunk off the Louisiana coast, but just after sunset people could see the oil fires burning on the southern horizon, like a quickening orange smudge low in the winter sky.
   As a little boy in New Iberia, I heard shrimpers talk about the burned, oil-coated bodies of four merchant sailors who had been found floating like lumps of coal in an island of kelp, their sightless eyes and poached faces strung with jellyfish.
   I had nightmares for many years about Nazis, who I imagined as pinch-faced, slit-eyed creatures who lived beneath the waves, not far from my home, and who would eventually impose a diabolical design upon the earth.

from Dixie City Jam 

I've read seventeen entries in the series which is about 6,000 pages of story, so it shouldn't surprise you to read I fail to remember most of the details. I do, however, remember the general flow of Robicheaux's career and the brutalities inflicted on him by all manners of low characters and the tragedies he suffers. Always a good, if haunted, man, Robicheaux gradually becomes like something out of myth, a crusader armed with a pistol and a badge.

There have been plenty of similar characters - hard men who mete out justice in a hard world when no one else will - in crime fiction. It's not an original archetype. What separates the Dave Robicheaux books from so many others is Burke's exquisitely evocative writing about place. Whether the majestically corrupt city of New Orleans or the lush, green parishes of rural Louisiana, it pulses and seethes with life. Like Chandler's Los Angeles, Burke's fictionalized version of a real place seems somehow truer and more real than a non-fiction depiction.

****************************************************************

I just finished The Neon Rain (1987). I liked it well enough, but if it had been the first book I read in the series, and not In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead, I probably wouldn't have read any more.

The Dave Robicheaux of this first book is an asshole. There's no beating around the bush about that. He confronts people even when he knows better, dismisses people who can help him, and is basically just an annoying dick. Not all the time, but most of the time. 

The mystery in The Neon Rain isn't very compelling, another detrimental weakness. There's nothing original about it and if it you think it feels a like something you might have seen on Miami Vice you'd be forgiven. It's also not plotted very well. You can see where it's going all of the time, mostly because you've seen it before. 

The villains aren't very compelling either. They are mostly cookie-cutter mid-eighties-style Central American drug lords, ex-government spooks, and central-casting Mafiosi. Only some sharp dialogue keeps them from being completely forgettable. 

On the other hand, it is interesting to see Burke beginning to chart out how the series will develop. American involvement in Central America is what propels events in The Neon Rain. Robicheaux becomes convinced the dead woman he found while he was fishing was murdered, not just an overdose victime. His investigation leads him to a major drug dealer originally from Nicaragua. From there he finds himself threatened by a gang of assorted thugs from Nicaragua, Israel, and the CIA. 

This is something Burke will come back to time and time again in the later books. Someone is murdered, often a person of no consequence in polite society, and behind it are larger forces protected by wealth and power from justice. Confronting the sinister powers that be will become Robicheaux's 

raison d'être as the series progresses. There are also flashes of Robicheaux's Catholicism, a significant factor in propelling his unending drive for justice.

If you're going to read this series - and I heartily recommend you should - you have to start with this book. Robicheaux, obviously, is introduced, but there are also his crazed NOPD partner, Clete Purcell, and the angelic Annie. Despite the failings of the story and the weak villains, it's worth reading just to see where everything starts.

A Honeycomb World: John Connolly's Charlie Parker series

The Woman in the Woods, the latest Charlie Parker book by John Connolly, just came out. Even with having to read Downbelow Station and the next Black Company book, Shadow Games, I will start  reading the Woman at once. These days, Connolly's books are the pretty much the only ones I let trump whatever else I'm reading.

I'm came to the Charlie Parker books sort of backwards. A few years ago, I saw a solid horror movie with Kevin Costner called The New Daughter. At some point I found out it came from a short story of the same name by a guy named John Connolly. The story was in a collection called Nocturnes. I bought it, read the "The New Daughter" first, then worked my way through the rest of the book. The story is much better and weirder than the movie and the rest of Nocturnes contains some of the best contemporary horror. I recommend it highly.

When I was looking for Nocturnes on Amazon, I saw he'd written a crime series with a detective named Charlie Parker. From the too-cute-by-half name and the fact it was twelve books long I figured it wasn't for me. It had the distinct look of an airport thriller and I wasn't flying anytime soon.

The thing is, apparently, one of Nocturne's big selling points was the inclusion of the Charlie Parker novella "The Reflecting Eye." Airport fiction it is not. It was killer detective fiction with some really cool supernatural creepiness. It was so good, I tracked down the first series book, Every Dead Thing.

EDT blew me away. In the first couple of pages Connolly ran his protagonist through the ringer. Not even James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux has ever suffered as deeply as Charlie Parker, and that's saying a lot (sidenote - the Robicheaux novels are some of the most well written and powerful crime books, a description which is completely inadequate, around). That half way through there was a car chase on Todt Hill in Staten Island, my home town, made it just that little bit more enjoyable.

I quickly got my hands on the next six books and read them back to back. A year later I read another four and last year I finished off the last three. Up to date, I had to wait, quite impatiently, for last week to roll around. The day The Woman in the Woods became available I bought it and started reading it. Normally, I'd be done with it already, but the demands of Black Gate superseded my natural inclinations for once and I'm forced to read it more slowly than I'd prefer. Such is the reading life of a volunteer book blogger.

I am not a fan of long series, particularly unfinished ones (I saw some authors on Twitter the other day upbraiding a reader for refusing to buy books in an unfinished series. Screw that noise, is all I have to say to that nonsense.). Nonetheless, I dove headfirst into a massive series with no knowledge it might be ending any time soon. Once I read "The Reflecting Eye" and Every Dead Thing, those things didn't matter in the least. 

I have two defenses, and both rest on me not knowing what I was getting into with Every Dead Thing. First, I just assumed it was an essentially endless series like so many modern ones. There'd be some episodic elements and character evolution, but essentially the series would go on until the author was ran out of steam. Secondly, I didn't know how crazy and how the supernatural elements would become. In fact, while the supernatural's present in EDT, it could reasonably be read as Charlie Parker going mad. 

If memory serves me, it's not much different in the second book, Dark Hollow. Again, drawing on my decreasingly reliable memory, the third entry, The Killing Kind, is where Connolly pulls the mask off enough to let the reader know these books are not just really dark hard-boiled stories, but batshit crazy horror writing. 

This is a honeycomb world.
You must be careful where you step.
And you must be ready for what you might find.
                                                  from The Killing Kind 

The Killing Kind is where Connolly introduces the term honeycomb world. Reality isn't just what we humans see around us. It's a place riddled with pockets of evil and weirdness where schemes and plots unravel in places darker than the shadows. Once introduced, it becomes the defining theme of the series. Nothing can be assumed, because there are definitely principalities and powers at work behind the constant barrage of horrors visited on Charlie Parker and his friends. 

The only series I've read more of is Terry Pratchett's Discworld, but that's really several series set in the same world. Connolly's is sixteen novels and a novella all (save one) starring Charlie Parker (ed. as of 2025, there are 22 books). There's a great arc to the books that's still taking shape. Whether Connolly's leisureliness is a plus or minus depends on the reader. My own opinion varies from book to book. 

Sometimes, the story is so powerful it doesn't matter to me a whit that there's not an inch of movement along that arc. A few times, books dedicated wholly to racing up the great arc are less gripping than I hoped they would be. Still, not one of them was less than "really good" and most are freaking great. 

Parker is broken multiples times, sometimes by malign forces, sometimes by his own deliberate stupidity. Still, he staggers back up every time to face off against evil. He has gradually emerged as a tool of justice, often for the weak and abused. On a basic level, it's just pulp fiction, but Connolly writes with fire and crafts tales of terrible power and, sometimes, dark beauty. The strength of the very best pulp fiction (see REH) is that in the hands of a master it can be used to tell of essential truths and create heroes drawn from deep, cultural archetypes, that speak to the reader on the deepest levels of myth. If you think I might be out of my mind, grab a copy of Every Dead Thing and decide for yourself. 

Revisiting Children's Books

 

 If you're not following along with me over at Black Gate (what, you're NOT?), I'm excavating my parts of my childhood and revisiting some of the fantasy that was important to me before the age of sixteen that isn't by J.R.R. Tolkien. I just read Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three (1964), I'm presently reading Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), and next week I'll pick up Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time (1962).

   It was the death of Ursula K. Le Guin which triggered me to do this. As I wrote recently, the Earthsea books were incredibly important to me and my friends. After the Lord of the Rings, they were easily the most-read series among us. I think we had all read them well before we started playing D&D, so their influence went straight into our playing. True names, familiars, wizard colleges, shape changing, it all got thrown into our early games. Of the three authors just mentioned, she was the only one all of us read.

   Everyone I knew seemed to have read A Wrinkle in Time, but I don't know anyone else who read Alexander's books. L'Engle's books don't lend themselves as easily to gaming, but Alexander's do. I definitely included a dozen or so Horned Kings in my games over the decade. My penchant for adding Celtic stuff to my campaigns came from my love for the Prydain books and Moorcock's Corum books.

   You can't always go back home again. When I tried to read de Camp's The Fallible Fiend a year or two ago I couldn't make myself do it. Where once I found wry satire of humanity, I now only found bad jokes. Like with The Tritonian Ring, which I managed to finish and review, there's a great central conceit to the novel but the execution is poor. I was very surprised when I listened to the Sanctum Secorum podcast on The Fallible Fiend and they all pretty much dug it (and they mostly didn't like Three Hearts and Three Lions - what is this world coming to?). (But then they love Zelazny's Night in the Lonesome October, which is great, so maybe they're okay. It's very confusing.)

   I am very happy to learn, sometimes you can go home. The Book of Three was as good as I remembered, A Wizard of Earthsea far better than I hoped for, and a few chapters in, A Wrinkle in Time remains absolutely delightful. I read other fantasy and sci-fi as a kid, but, again, other than Tolkien's, little of it made as much of an impression on me.

   Leaving aside Alexander, they also helped form a common language between me and my friends. For us, there was no such thing as fandom (looking at what fandom's become now, I can only say "Thank God.") to connect us to some wider world. At some point, you realized you liked sf/f and started keeping an eye open for it or other people who read it.

   Contra a thread on Twitter recently, being a consumer of this stuff was not good for social acceptance. It also didn't make you someone given to excluding other people. Everyone needs friends, and someone who was into Elric and Lord of the Rings was a better prospect for friendship than a jock, regardless of class, race, or religion. Later, when I started playing D&D, we didn't keep out girls. If we knew any girls who wanted to play, we would've said "Yes!" very loudly. That many us didn't know many girls, and that they would've scared the heck out of us, was one of the reasons we had so much time for gaming in the first place. Sf/f fans were exactly social outcasts, but there was more than a hint of the nerdish to us.

   Lloyd Alexander and Ursula K. Le Guin are books woven from the same basic threads, as far as I'm concerned. The Book of Three and A Wizard of Earthsea are both largely about a young man maturing and learning the weight of his actions and the necessity of taking responsibility for them. Simple lessons, but ones that have probably more value today than fifty years ago. Aside from something as mundane and extra-literary as relevance, the books remain good stories told well.

   They're very different, stylistically. Alexander writes more prosaically, keeping things fairly simple. Even with its dark moments (wicker men full of people set ablaze for example), The Book of Three has moments of humor, both verbal and slapstick that keep things light - even as Alexander is slowly building up serious themes. There's little to no humor in Le Guin's book, which, overall, has a more serious and somber atmosphere than Alexander's.

   Le Guin's book is written in a more consciously archaic and poetic style. I don't have a lot of patience for that these days (writes the guy who's working his way through The Night Land), but she does it very well, never becoming too stiff.

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.

That's the opening paragraph, and it's wonderful. She tells you outright that Ged is a mighty wizard with great deeds to his name, but now she's going to tell you the truths behind how he came to be that man. It's the perfect intro, promising great things, which Le Guin then goes on to deliver. The novel is by turns exciting and introspective. Ged's magical repulsion of the Kargish raiders and his battle against the dragons of Pendor are rousing, and Ged's journey to the evil Court of Terrenon on Oskill is wonderfully dark and creepy. Ged's coming to terms with the cost of his pride and his responsibilities as wielder of tremendous power is presented flowing from the story and not just from Le Guin's desire to lecture.

I'm sorry this piece isn't more coherent, but it's serving as a bit of a kickstarter for getting me writing here again as well as an opportunity to ramble around the corners of my memories. I'm only just now recalling that the same friend, Karl H., pointed me both to A Wrinkle in Time and A Wizard of Earthsea (he also gave me James Blish's Black Easter, a very different sort of book).I got to Alexander from the inclusion of an excerpt from The Black Cauldron in my second grade reader. I can still remember the illustrations of Gurgi, and the three witches. It wasn't until a year of two later that I found the series on my neighborhood library's shelves.

I'll stop there. How do you remember the sf/f books of your youth? What books were they? Any of these?