“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending
I’ve been listening to James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels. Other than Ann Rice ( who I find unreadable), they’re perhaps the most popular novels out of Louisiana. I read most of the novels the first time spaced over the years as they were published, but I’ve been listening to them in bunches. In bunches they’re relentless.
Burke was born in Houston, and still has ties here. I went into Orvis once to buy something, tippet or leaders probably, and the young woman behind the counter had a name tag, Alafair. I told her I was reading a novel with a character named Alafair and she said that it was a grandmother’s name and that Burke was her great uncle. Even before Orvis I had linked Burke with fly fishing; I started reading Burke after a local bookshop, Murder by the Book, recommended Black Cherry Blues as reading material for a fly fishing trip to Idaho, and Burke’s main characters, Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell, fly fish. In Black Cherry Blues a serial killer runs over Purcell’s fly rod with a car. Dang. They’re violent books.
There was another young woman in law school with me who I also think of when I think of Burke. I didn’t know her, and never talked to her, but she was noticeable: petite, pretty, dark honey skin and lighter honey hair, and well-dressed for a student. Rich looking I guess. I remember a conversation about her once with other law students. Someone said her family was New Orleans’ mafia and to stay away. As far as I could tell most everyone did stay away. I’m sure there’s plenty of organized crime in Houston, but somehow New Orleans’ mafia just had that special ring.
Burke captures that special ring, that special Louisiana familiarity with prostitution, poverty, violence, drugs, alcoholism, murder, racism, gambling, corporate and environmental greed, and general depravity. Laissez les bons temps rouler. Before there was Las Vegas there was New Orleans. Before there was online porn there was Storyville and Bourbon Street.
Mostly nothing good ever happens in a James Lee Burke novel. Made guys bring crime into Iberia Parish day-in, day-out, and then for the weekend Roubicheaux visits New Orleans for some real violence. Wives get executed when the mob hit misses the hero. Victims of childhood abuse nail their hands to the backyard gazebo. The hero’s sidekick drinks Scotch in his milk and regularly goes off the rails. Gun bulls rape the inmates, oil wells blow, Justice is not just. The only time that violence isn’t a breath away, the only time there’s anything like peace, is when Roubicheaux is in the natural world, watching gar turning in bayou currents under the green canopy of the Louisiana coast. The books ring true, unrelenting as they are, because we are certain that New Orleans’ mafioso and corrupt politicians and violence are the stuff of Louisiana. And it’s true. Louisiana routinely has the highest murder rate in the nation, more than twice that of Texas, which is not a place known for peaceful coexistence.
There are plenty of causes for Louisiana crime. U.S. News & World Report seems now to be mostly a publisher of lists: best of this, worst of that. It ranks states, and of the 50 states Louisiana ranked last. I don’t know how they come up with their list, but they try to measure different weighted factors that are supposed to matter to people: health care, education, economy, infrastructure, crime and corrections . . . Health care? 47. Education? 49. Its highest ranking, 42, is for quality of life. You have someplace where everything else is bad, It makes sense crime is bad. Or maybe it’s just always been that way.
It does have good fishing though, and gumbo.