Mortality is mortality. It comes to you when it’s ready. We don’t set the clock.
The Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke is one of the finest ever written. As the faithful know, Clete Purcel is Dave’s partner in whatever he does. Once they were cops that called themselves “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.” (You probably need to be a boomer to get the reference.) Now they are on their own, but they are still like family to one another. This is the 24th in the series, and it’s the first to be told from Clete’s point of view. It’s a brilliant idea for two reasons: first, because Clete is a well written and wildly popular character, and also because it gives us a chance to see Dave through someone else’s eyes, someone that loves him, but isn’t him.
My thanks go to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the invitation to read and review, along with my profound apology for being so very late. This book is for sale now.
In this installment, a new drug ring has come to Louisiana, and it’s creating still more violence, more death, and more crime in general. Clete, who is now a private detective, is hired by a woman named Clara Bow. (If the name rings bells, it’s because the real Clara Bow was a famous movie star from the silent film era.) The Clara that hires Clete wants him to look into the activities of her skeevy ex-husband. Once he begins, we hardly have enough time to breathe. Clete hits the ground running, and there are no slow passages till the book concludes.
My favorite passages are the ones in which a woman named Chen, whom Clete rescues, then falls for, tells him how he appears to her. Here’s one: “You always gentleman, Mr. Clete. Your cats sleep on your face and you no mind. The world kill men like you because you brave and you kind.”
Later, Chen promises him that she won’t go back to taking drugs. “That because I go to a meeting every day with the Work the Steps or Die Motherfucker group. The Motherfuckers are very nice.” He advises her not to use that term in public. Don’t you love it?
Like every book in the series, this one moves seamlessly from scenes with quirky characters and dark humor, to glorious literary passages that I have to read more than once just to admire the writing, to passages that are gritty and violent and occasionally terrifying. Let me put it this way: you will never be bored.
Can you dive in mid-series? I did; then I became so enamored that I went back and read all the rest of them.
A Private Cathedral is the twenty-third in the immensely popular Dave Robicheaux series, which began in the early 1980s. James Lee Burke has been called “America’s Best Novelist” by the Denver Post, and his books have been made into movies. Lucky me, I read this one free and early; thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the review copy. This book is for sale now.
Fans of this series—and there are many—will recognize all of Burke’s signature elements. Set in New Iberia, Louisiana, a small working class enclave about an hour from New Orleans, we find the usual wealthy, sleazy bad guys, in this case the Shondell family and the Balangie family; their victims, ordinary people with no money that scrape by the best they can; a pair of grizzly murders; and in this instance, a case of human trafficking. There’s always a woman or two ready to fling herself into Dave’s arms, even though he and Clete are supposedly getting old, and as usual, one of the women stands on the tops of his feet before she seduces him, or vice versa. (This has got to be some sort of private joke or reference on the author’s part, because you know that a writer with this level of skill cannot be inadvertently ascribing the identical quirky behavior to all of his protagonist’s romantic interests across over three decades of a series.)
And of course, best of all perhaps, we have Dave’s fiercely loyal best friend, Clete Purcell, a man that looks “like an albino ape” and whose impulse control is even worse than Dave’s, at least most of the time. He shows up in his pink Cadillac wearing his signature porkpie hat, and I smile. I can’t help it. Clete does this to me every single time, and I’ll bet a whole lot of other readers feel just the same way.
“He was the trickster of folklore, a modern Sancho Panza, a quasi-psychotic jarhead who did two tours in Vietnam and came home with the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts and memories he shared with no one. Few people knew the real Clete Purcel or the little boy who lived inside him, the lonely child of an alcoholic milkman who made his son kneel all night on rice grains and whipped him regularly with a razor strop…Nor did they know the NOPD patrolman who wept when he couldn’t save the child he wrapped in a blanket, ran through flames, and crashed through a second story window with, landing on top of a Dumpster…He hated evil and waged war against it everywhere he found it. I sometimes wondered if he was an archangel in disguise, one with strings of dirty smoke rising from his wings, a full-fledged participant in fighting the good fight of Saint Paul. “
My sole complaint, a key one I probably wouldn’t give any other writer a pass on, is the way the author deals with his female characters. All the women and girls are mothers, whores, lovers, or children, and in some cases more than one of the above. No woman comes into the stories on the merit of her occupation, her character, or her abilities, aside from Helen, a long-running character that is exempted by virtue or being a lesbian and androgynous in appearance. (God forbid she be gorgeous and gay, or gorgeous and straight and completely sexually uninterested in Dave.) But the fact is, Burke has been writing and publishing great novels since 1965, and now he’s an 83 year old author and it seems unfair to expect him to change direction with regard to his female characters, or to suddenly regard them as equals in all respects rather than to nurture the whole pedestal package.
Moving on.
The story commences with Dave suspended from the sheriff’s department, and he’s behaving badly, embarking on a series of “dry drunks,” a term used liberally throughout this series and that I’ve never seen or heard of anywhere else. He’s so far out of line that Clete has to reel him back, when more often it’s the reverse. A teenager named Isolde is being sold by her parents, and Dave is attempting to rescue her. But it’s a useless endeavor because there is so much money and power buffering the offenders. Meanwhile, Clete is kidnapped and hung upside down and tortured by a being that seems otherworldly to him—mostly because it is. And this is a departure for Burke, a good one, as it turns out.
Those familiar with the series and the author know that redemption is at the core of every story he writes, and given the amount of mystic imagery that appears in his prose, it isn’t a long stretch to go from imagined spiritual beings to actual ones, which is what he does here. And I can only bow in awe at a writer—even one with residual sexist attitudes—that can take a long-running, iconic series like this one, a series that has run for more than 30 years, and decide to expand it across genres now. This would be remarkable for anyone, but for an octogenarian, it’s jaw-dropping.
I also enjoy the way he develops the side character, Father Julian, who is heroic and who pursues pedophiles and brings them to justice. Way to fight stereotypes.
I love the ending.
Highly recommended to Burke’s many fans, and to new readers as well.
A heartfelt tribute, featuring a lot of famous writers:
Seattle Book Mama 