Compelling, If Flawed, Men in Pursuit of Evildoers

REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON

I can’t get enough of Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell, two figments of the literary imagination of novelist James Lee Burke. Dave and Clete are the compelling, if flawed, heroes at the center of Burke’s twenty-one Dave Robicheaux detective/thrillers, beginning with The Neon Rain in 1987.

They are back again in full flower in Burke’s latest, The New Iberia Blues (Simon & Schuster, 447 pp., $27.99).

Dave and Clete both served combat-heavy tours in the Vietnam War—Dave as an Army Lt. and Clete as a Marine grunt. Both continue to experience nightmares and flashbacks a half century after coming home from the war. Dave is a recovering alcoholic who struggles daily with the bottle blues. Clete drinks and eats—and does just about everything else—to excess. Both men are incapable of sustaining intimate relationships with women. Both have rocky relationships with their daughters.

Dave and Clete have been known to severely bend (and sometimes break) the law in pursuit of evildoers. That’s why the two former homicide detectives were booted off the New Orleans police force years ago. Dave is now a sheriff’s deputy in New Iberia Parish in southern Louisiana where Clete works as a rough-and-tumble private detective. They are best friends—when they’re not arguing and disowning one another.

Why are these two men so compelling? Clete has been known to call Dave noble mon, the Cajun French equivalent of “good buddy.” But I prefer to think that the key to both men’s likability has to do with the English word “noble.”

Yes, they are flawed, but at their core both Dave and Clete are noble men. They stand up for the weak and put upon, and they mete out justice to bad guys who deserve it. Plus, they’re smart, strong, savvy, selfless, and brave—and overcome their not insignificant weaknesses to do everything they can to try to see that good triumphs over evil.

In all the Robicheaux books innocent lives are lost, careers destroyed, and too many people get emotionally battered before the noble men triumph in the end. That’s certainly the case with The New Iberia Blues.

As usual, Burke peoples the novel with sociopathic, ultra-violent characters. They kill and maim at will, driving Dave nearly mad when he can’t figure out whodunit. His daughter is threatened. Clete comes close to buying the farm. Many others find themselves in deep, deep trouble.

Add to the mix the fact that Dave embarks on an unstable relationship with a much younger woman who happens to be his new partner on the job. He conflates that love affair with his quest to solve a series of especially grisly murders that smack of ritualism and symbolism.

He suffers from Vietnam War nightmares and flashbacks. In fact, Burke brings the war and Dave and Clete’s time in it into the narrative more than two dozen times. As in the other novels, Burke has an uncanny way of brilliantly evoking wartime Vietnam, especially considering he did not take part in the war. Here’s one example, Dave explaining “the pucker syndrome.”

It’s “a level of anxiety you’d eat glass to get rid of,” Dave explains to the reader. “Think about a column of men going down a night trail, rain clicking on their steel pots. The trail is sown with 105 duds or toe poppers or bouncing Betties. You feel as though your skin is being peeled from the bone by a pair of plyers. You wait for the klatch under a man’s boot or the ping of a trip wire, and you fear your insides will turn to water and your sphincter to jelly. To up the ante, Sir Charles blindly fires a grenade with a captured blooker into the jungle, showering dirt and water on the canopy of trees. Your rectum has constricted to the size of a pencil head. That’s the pucker syndrome.”

Well, yeah.

Then there are Dave’s deep self-destructive cravings. He all but destroys the relationship with his partner and with his conflicted, upright boss, Iberia Parish’s first female sheriff. He gets as close as possible to going back on the bottle. And more.

But he’s noble. And so is Clete. And it’s a pleasure to read Burke’s lyrical prose and work your way through his ever-twisting plot to the end of another great police procedural.

Also falling into that category: Michael Connelly’s latest plot-twisting, fast-moving, and captivating Harry Bosch novel, Dark Sacred Night (Little Brown, 448 pp., $29). This is Connelly’s twenty-first Bosch cop tale since 1992 when he created the Vietnam War veteran LAPD detective in The Black Echo, a smashingly good book that included flashbacks to Bosch’s war service.

In the new book, which came out last fall and soon hit the bestseller lists, Bosch shares the stage for the first time with Renee Ballard, another LAPD detective. Her father served in the Vietnam War.

Harry Bosch has many characteristics in common with Dave Robicheaux. They’re both Vietnam War veterans who survived rough childhoods and rough tours of duty. They both had emotionally rocky homecomings. They are both dedicated police officers whose professional (and personal) lives are affected by their experiences in the war. They’re relentless in their pursuit of evildoers. They sometimes bend the law in their quests to bring murderers to justice.

Harry’s Vietnam War service is not a theme, but it comes up in Dark Sacred Night, in which Bosch and Ballard work together to solve the brutal murder of a young woman. Harry’s semi-retired, working on cold murder cases for the San Fernando PD. There’s an oblique reference to Harry’s war in the first third of the book. Then, a bit more than halfway through, Harry, a former Army tunnel rat, pours out a war story to Ballard. To wit:

“I was in Vietnam back in ’69 way before you were even born, I know. And on this one day, I had just gotten back to base camp on Airmobile after a hairy op where we had to clear the enemy out of a tunnel system. That’s what I did over there. Tunnels. It was late morning and base camp was completely deserted. It was like a ghost town because everybody was sitting in their tents, listening to their radios. Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon, and they all wanted to hear it.”

Later, the hard-charging Ballard has a memory of her father telling her about his war service. He spoke about “Vietnam and about killing people,” Connelly writes, “putting it the way Bosch had put it, saying he’d had to do it and then had to live with it. He wrapped all of his Vietnam experiences into one phrase, ‘Sin loi.’ Tough shit.”

I always thought that “sin loi” meant “sorry about that.” But when I looked it up, I found it also can mean “excuse me,” “too damn bad,” or, as Connelly put it, “tough shit.”

The book’s other Vietnam War reference is in the form of a flashback Bosch has under extremis when he hears a police helicopter overhead. “In his early life,” Connelly writes, “Bosch had spent fifteen months in Vietnam. Not a day went by in that time that he didn’t hear helicopters. It was the background music of the war. Hiding in the elephant grass, waiting for a dustoff, he had learned early how to read their sound for distance and location. He could now tell that the airship flying above them was spiraling in increasingly large circles.”

No plot spoilers here, so we won’t go into how Bosch wound up in that tight spot or what happened after the police helicopter flew over and then away. I strongly suggest reading the book to find out. If you’re a fan of fast-paced, clever police procedurals with realistic characters and settings, it will be your pleasure to discover why Harry Bosch had that flashback and how the book spins out to its satisfying conclusion.