Tag Archives: Clete Purcel

The Hadacol Boogie, by James Lee Burke*****

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The Hadacol Boogie is the 25th in the Dave Robicheaux series, and in some regards, it is the best. My great thanks go to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

All of the books in this series boast complex plots and resonant characters. Particularly rich is the relationship between Dave and his former cop partner, Clete Purcel, whom he has known since early childhood. In most stories, Clete is a loose cannon—the reason he is no longer a cop, but a private eye—and Dave is his moderating influence.  “For whatever reason, Clete could not resist swatting a hornet’s nest wherever he went.“  But this story presents a shift, in which Dave is not fully in control of his own behavior. I have never seen anyone else, whether writing fiction or nonfiction, refer to a “dry drunk,” which is when a recovering alcoholic, without having consumed alcohol, exhibits the behaviors of a drunk, with terrible impulse control and bouts of rage. Dave does some of that here, and Clete is the one to rein him in.

But that isn’t the greatest thing about this story, to be honest. I’m ready to be done with mysteries involving alcoholic protagonists, and so Burke’s excellent writing skills prevent me from throwing up my hands or rolling my eyes, but the “dry drunk” isn’t a compelling part of the narrative for me. No, apart from the fact that Burke is a compelling craftsman—the Denver Post once called him “America’s best writer”—this particular novel is interesting to me because Burke has, at last, developed a female character that doesn’t fit into the Madonna-whore dichotomy that marks most of his earlier work. (An earlier exception is Dave’s boss, Helen, but it feels as if Burke is cheating a little bit there. I enjoy reading about Helen, but it’s clear that the one and only reason she isn’t dying to hop in bed with Dave, like every other female character has, or has wanted to, is because she is a lesbian.) Valerie Benoit is Dave’s new partner. It doesn’t take long for us to be aware that Detective Benoit has a thing for Dave. She’s young, he’s 60, but damn, he’s such a hot guy. At this point I’m ready to toss my reader across the room. Please, no! No! But the story doesn’t follow the trajectory that other women tend to do in Robicheaux’s books. Benoit wants Dave badly, yes, and I wish he’d left that out of this, but he didn’t. The thing that makes this story different is that Benoit is developed as a character should be; her love for Robicheaux isn’t all that we learn about her, nor necessarily the most important. And she and Dave don’t land in bed.

How cool is it for a highly successful writer to show this kind of growth when he’s past 80? I am so damn impressed, and I hope that we continue to see Benoit, not as his wife or his lover, but as a separate character with an independent identity.

I confess that I have never understood the culture of the place where this story unfolds; there are social formalities and intricacies mentioned that simply don’t apply in 2026 Seattle. I suspect these niceties also apply to the author, so it’s just as well I haven’t met him; I have no doubt I’d stick my foot in it, probably sooner rather than later.

Like the other books in this series, this one will appeal most to readers that lean a bit to the left, and that enjoy a literary mystery. There’s plenty of action here, but those that don’t want descriptive settings and allegory should probably go find themselves something else to read.

This book can certainly be read as a standalone, but it will resonate even more to the faithful that have read some or all of the series, as it does build on earlier events. Highly recommended.

Clete, by James Lee Burke*****

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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.

Highly recommended.

A Private Cathedral, by James Lee Burke*****

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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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cwNHIsoHG0