James Lee Burke's Books

Biography

James Lee Burke was born in Houston in 1936 and grew up on the Texas / Louisiana border at the tail of the great depression.

“When I was growing up in the South, my friend and I would try to figure out how to get 10 cents to go to the movies. We’d figure it out. Maybe shine shoes.” (January Magazine)

He attended the University of Madrid in 1959 as a graduate student, the first year that Franco allowed foreigners to enter Spain after the civil war. His experience with Franco’s fascist government left an enduring political scar.

“No one used Franco’s name in public, lest others think they were criticising him. Those who had fought for the Republic avoided any conversation about the Civil War, and the twenty thousand prisoners Franco executed after the war ended. A careless reference could get one into very serious trouble. Fascism is not an ideology; it’s a state of mind. Its basis lies in cruelty, misogyny, stupidity, ignorance, nihilism, malignant narcissism, penile envy, and the cowardice of the bully.” (Facebook)

He continued his study of English, ultimately obtaining a Master’s degree from the University of Missouri. Here he met his wife, Pearl Pai Chu, a Chinese refugee who had escaped her homeland under gunfire. Together they had four children, one of whom, Alafair Burke, is a law professor, former district attorney and the author of a host of crime novels, six of which she co-wrote with Mary Higgins Clarke.

Life and Work

Whilst his wife worked as a librarian, James Lee Burke held various jobs. He taught at the Universities of Missouri, Louisiana and Montana before settling in Kansas to teach creative writing at Wichita State University. Burke’s experience was far broader than academia. He has been employed as a long-distance truck driver, an oil surveyor, a social worker, and a police reporter.

“I’ve been around people in uniform who wear badges and are the sickest, most sadistic, misogynistic, depraved individuals on Earth, and there’s no other term for them. I was a police reporter and heard cops joke about cutting a Negro in half, drowning him with chains, humiliating women.” (Irish Times)

He also worked as a social worker at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he recorded prisoners’ music. Here the guards beat the inmates with three-foot lengths of hose pipe and did not attempt to hide it.

“‘Making a Christian out of a nigger’, that’s what he called it.” (Irish Times)

Burke was also cursed with alcoholism and was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous; becoming sober was a huge challenge.

“It was a combination of three psychological conditions, psycho-neurotic anxiety, which is like having your skin taken off with pliers, agitated depression, when a person smashes his fists into bricks and cuts his palms with his nails, and obsessive-compulsive behaviour when he cannot free himself from his bonds. Put that together, and it’s like being in a black box full of electricity. It has no exit, and people stick guns in their mouths, or they get drunk again, and maybe they should.” (The Guardian)

Despite such a varied career, Burke downplays its effect on his writing.

“I guess it’s because of the vacuum of experience in my life that I have to write all these lurid tales.” (Irish Times)

Writing Career

Burke succeeded early in his career, publishing his debut novel when he was only twenty-three. Half of Paradise received a six-column review in The New York Times. Burke followed this with a further two stories and then stalled. His fourth book, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, was rejected more than 111 times and stayed unpublished for over nine years. When the Louisiana State University Press published it in 1986, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

“I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day, I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” (Quotes Sayings)

It wasn’t until he was in his fifties that Burke became genuinely successful. After writing Black Cherry Blues (1989), his agent urged him to go on tour to promote it, but the timing clashed with the beginning of the academic year. Burke’s publisher promised he would never have to teach again if he did the tour. Black Cherry Blues went on to win an Edgar award, and Burke has been a consistent name on the New York Times best-seller list ever since. As Daniel Wallace put it in Garden and Gun, “You can tell a writer is doing well by looking at the cover: When his name is twice as big as the title, he has officially arrived.”

Burke has been awarded Breadloaf and Guggenheim fellowships, two Edgars and a handful of European crime fiction prizes, which is a rare mixture of accolades that reflects his literary style.

Novels

James Lee Burke’s books can be divided into two series and a handful of stand-alone novels.

Dave Robicheaux, a Vietnam veteran and ex-homicide detective, is his most famous protagonist. Like Burke, Robicheaux is a reformed alcoholic. He is a man who fights for the underdog, people who are ignored or exploited by the rich and powerful. In the first novel, The Neon Rain, Robicheaux finds a young black prostitute floating in a bayou. His search for the murderer leads him into a world of criminal corruption and forces him to confront his demons.

As well as Robicheaux, Burke has written thirteen novels about the Holland dynasty. These started in 1971 with Hackberry Holland, a Korean prisoner of war who returns to Texas to become a lawyer and sheriff. The plot line expanded to include Hack’s cousins and Great Great Grandfather. They span nearly two hundred years of western American history from Texas to Montana. Cimarron Rose, whose main character, Billy Bob Holland, is a former Texas ranger turned lawyer (and one of the Holland cousins), won Burke his second Edgar.

Storylines

Burke is clearly disgusted by corporate greed and what it is doing for the environment. He regards white-collar criminals as the most dangerous force in society.

“These guys will do anything for a buck. They would turn the Grand Canyon into a gravel pit.” (Crime Reads)

This animosity plays through his plot lines, which he likens to the story of the garden of Eden in the Bible.

“The story of Eden, and how it influences my work, is not the story of a snake in a tree but the story of what we are doing to the tree – what we are doing to the Garden.” (Crime Reads)

He is also dismissive of recent Republican policies in the US under the leadership of Donald Trump.

“It’s not left and right; it’s up and down. But this fellow we have running things now is a casino operator and knows his constituency. He’s soaked them for 20 years. He’s a master at capitalising on what is worst in people, and he starts from fear.” (Irish Times)

All of this combines in storylines that revolve around justice, greed, politics and cruelty.

Style

The writing in James Lee Burke’s books verges on the bipolar as he combines elegant prose when describing the natural environment with brutally graphic criminal activity.

Mist hung in clouds on the river’s surface and around the brush-choked pilings of the bridge; the air itself seemed to drip with moisture, and the shale rock in the parking lot glistened with a dull shine as the pinkness of the sun spread along the earth’s rim.
The Neon Rain

“Why do I always feel like you’re trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”
Swan Peak

No doubt Burke’s sophisticated style comes from his education. There are few crime writers who have forged a career in academia and quote medieval morality plays, greek mythology, Hemingway, Chaucer and Steinbeck amongst their influences.

I’ve always believed that great writers are the only ones we should read. That’s it. It’s like watching bad basketball or bad tennis. You watch those, and it messes up your own game. Read the good ones.” (Distinctly Montana)

Burke’s style is far more erudite than the traditional thriller or crime writer. The only thing that destroys his literary credibility is his book sales.