#2 James Lee Burke...(Top 10 Crime Fiction Writer Series)

Back when I was first putting this list together, I wrote this about James Lee Burke:

James Lee is number one and by a wide margin.

Since then I’ve changed my mind. And over the next several weeks I’ll write about a few authors that I now place ahead of Burke. Not because I think less of James, but because I’ve discovered some writers who transcend even James Lee Burke’s enormous gifts. Everything else I said about Burke, I still believe.

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His books obliterate the line between great fiction and genre fiction.  The first book I read of his, Jole Blon’s Bounce, had little impact but many years later I picked up one of the Dave Robicheaux books – I forget which one, maybe Neon Rain –and it was like the wash of light under the door of a darkened room, the hint that there was something much different on the other side, that what little I thought I knew about ‘literature’ amounted to even less than I might have imagined.  James Lee Burke was writing crime fiction and he was writing great fiction.  No apologies needed.

Burke is great for all the reasons that I have read or heard – he writes beautifully about nature, his descriptions of Montana and Louisiana make me ache to be from there, his characters are unforgettable, simple until they aren’t, heroic until they aren’t, evil until they aren’t.  Burke captures something about humanity – that it’s irreducibly simple, that all of it can be captured in how we treat others, those we love and those we hate and strangers we pass in the street but…it is incomprehensibly complex - kindness and cruelty can ride the same breath and co-exist as chaotically as any swirl of molecules.

Burke uses dialogue in a way that few writers do – in fact, I don’t know another writer who uses non sequitur to emphasize the tension and danger just beneath the surface of a conversation.  Superficially, his characters often respond to each other as if they can only hear their own voices - 

“Live in the neighborhood?” I asked.

“Right.” He said.

I never did catch your name.”

“It’s Elmer Fudd.  What’s yours?”

“I like those platform shoes.  A lot of Superfly types are wearing those these days. Ever see that movie Superfly? It’s about black dope pushers and pimps and white street punks who think they’re made guys,” I said.

He brushed off his fingers on the napkin and pulled at an earlobe, then motioned to the bartender. ”Fix Smiley here whatever he’s drinking,” he said.
 
- but that misdirection is almost always the thin membrane between small talk and violence...sometimes language is not merely insufficient, it’s a provocation and the only defense is non sequitur.  It’s a device but it feels like one that Burke invented.
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Burke manages to marry the common and the classic in a way I’ve rarely seen.

I saw the ocean turn wine-dark under a sky bursting with constellations and knew that the truth of Homer’s line would never be diminished by time.

I see a man with calloused hands and sunburnt brow, broken where the cap fit tight across his head, reading the Iliad by dim light on an offshore oil-rig bunk.  It’s a romantic notion but a beautiful one.  I don’t know what Homer’s line is but I’m pretty sure I should.

So much of liking a writer has to do with the reader – what plucks a string for one won't resonate at all for another.  What draws me so strongly to James Lee is that his characters are defined by courage and
compassion.  The best of his characters have both and the worst have only courage.  And that Clete and Dave, like most men, obsess about lacking courage and don’t completely understand that what separates them from the worst of those that walk among us is their compassion. ​

I love James Lee’s sentences although there are others on the list that I might put slightly ahead of him for sheer poetry (Hello James Crumley and Ken Bruen) but the whole package, the words, the characters, the settings, the humanity put James Lee at the top and well out in front. Then. But not now. ​