The Hadacol Boogie by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Crime on February 10, 2026

Supernatural events have been part of the Robicheaux universe for more than thirty years. While I’m not usually a fan of supernatural fiction, I understand the temptation of crime writers to explain evil by suggesting its origin in the depths of hell. I always admire James Lee Burke’s prose and enjoy his storytelling, but his resort to the supernatural in The Hadacol Boogie gives me the sense that I’ve read the novel before.

The novel is set at “the end of the twentieth century.” Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell are Vietnam veterans who have been shaped by the horrors of that war. Shortly after the novel opens, kids in a boat see a tall ugly man whose hair seems to be made of sticks dragging a garbage bag across Dave’s property. Dave finds the bag and opens it to discover the lifeless body of a young black woman, a guitar string embedded in her throat.

Dave suspects that a handyman left the body on his property but does not attribute the woman’s death to him. The handyman, Boone Hendrix, claims to see dead people walking, but this is nothing new to Dave and Clete. Clete believes he communes with Joan of Arc, so Hendrix is no crazier than Dave’s best friend. Whether Hendrix calls upon supernatural powers to kill bad guys is an open question by the novel’s end.

The dead woman is Clemmie Benoit, who shares a last name with Dave’s new deputy sheriff, Valerie Benoit. For reasons that are never clear or convincing, Valerie is cagey about her relationship with Clemmie. Dave’s daughter Alafair knew Clemmy when they were both members of an amateur acting group, but she also seems reluctant to discuss their friendship. Their acquaintance foreshadows the danger that Alafair will eventually face as Dave tries to track down the killer. Valerie, in the meantime, is searching for Civil War artifacts, a fact that improbably plays into the larger story. None of these plot elements made much sense to me.

The surprisingly convoluted plot involves Jerry Carlucci, the owner of “a ramshackle saloon and brothel and café at the bottom of a levee a short distance from the saltwater that was eating away the Louisiana coast.” Jerry’s plan to develop casinos may be responsible for bringing the mob to the area. Another potential suspect is Elton Foot, who gets into a tussle with Clete that doesn’t end well for Elton. Also involved with Carlucci is Tommy Driscoll, who tells Clete he tried to get Clemmie off drugs after shutting down the trailer that a former owner of his bar had been using as a house of prostitution.

Some plot elements are puzzling and the ending is a bit predictable, but The Hadacol Boogie has other merits. I appreciate the way Burke expresses ideas, even when many others have expressed the same ideas in less elegant ways. For example: “Maybe she had found herself. You know what I mean? Three or four people are running around inside you, then one day you forgive yourself for your frailties and mistakes, and accept the world for the fine place it is and go about your way.”

Burke refuses to join the (mostly) southern movement to rewrite or whitewash southern history. Dave suggests that nobody else remembers the fourteen-year-old black kid who was electrocuted twice because the drunken executioner botched the first try. Dave will never forget. He remarks that “the past seemed stamped every place I looked.” He sees the slaves hanging from trees. He sees the cops who drop a gun on an unarmed corpse to justify the killing. Dave has no patience with people who cannot learn from the past, who “seem best at banning or burning what they can’t understand.”

Dave has a love/hate relationship with Louisiana that adds complexity to his character. He has spent most of his life in New Iberia, a community that feels like home. He loves the cuisine and lifestyle, but he is clear-eyed about the state as a whole, including its corruption and “long history with the Mafia”:

You well know that your beloved Louisiana is a haunted place and will never give you rest. Why is that? It’s because the enslaved have no tombstones, most not even coffins.

Clete believes “Louisiana is floating away while the worst people in the country wipe their feet on us.” Dave observes: “Louisiana is a haunted place. Maybe it has to do with our guilt.” That guilt includes Civil War editorials “about the supposed lust of black males and how the ferocity of their emancipation would be imposed on white women,” foreshadowing the Willie Horton ads of modern politics.

Despite its allusion to the supernatural (Robicheaux wonders if he is in an alternate reality when he discovers that Louisiana has turned into Vietnam), an action scene near the novel’s end is tense and powerful, a combination that thriller writers often try to evoke, typically with less success than Burke. A scene with a gunner firing from a Huey struck me as highly improbable, but still less outlandish than action scenes in most modern thrillers. The abundance of supernatural elements in the story’s climax was nevertheless excessive.

Ultimately, The Hadacol Boogie is about pain and how to deal with it. Dave Robicheaux doesn’t want to give anyone advice, but his message resonates: the best way to cope with pain is to be a good person, to do good things, to carry on in the present without dwelling on (or forgetting) the past. That is the consistent theme of Robicheaux novels and it is one of the reasons Burke has been laminated on my list of top three crime novelists of the modern era.

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Don't Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 3, 2025

James Lee Burke earned a laminated spot on my list of top three crime fiction authors with his Robicheaux novels. He blends elements of westerns and crime thrillers in his Holland family novels. I’ve enjoyed every Burke novel I’ve read, although Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie — a Holland family novel that focuses on Bessie Holland when she was in her early teens — is a notch below my favorites.

Bessie lives in Texas with her father, Hackberry Holland. Most of the story takes place in 1916, when Bessie is fifteen. Hackberry is a former Texas Ranger. Bessie tells us that “Mama used to say he was the best and bravest man on the Rio Grande, if only he didn’t drink.” When he isn’t drinking, gambling, or working his ranch, Hackberry is in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa, who has been leading his revolutionary army in attacks across the US border, much to the delight of Germany.

Soon after the story opens, Jubal Fowler peeps at Bessie Holland “through the slats of the schoolyard outhouse.” When Bessie’s brother Cody confronts him, Jubal uses a slingshot to shoot a marble into Cody’s eye. Cody will eventually leave to find a life in New York. Middle chapters of the novel follow Bessie to New York, where she has adventures in the city’s slums before returning to her father in Texas.

When Hackberry  confronts Winthrop Fowler, Jubal’s father, about the marble incident, Bessie reacts to a perceived threat against her father in a way that leaves Winthrop disabled. Only a fib told by a man named Mr. Slick saves Bessie from prison.

Hackberry has a friend named Bertha Lafleur, whose life he saved when he was a Ranger. Bertha is now a madam who manages a brothel. Bessie is a Baptist who condemns Bertha and doesn’t believe her father should associate with her. That’s probably true, not because Bertha manages prostitutes but because she is willing to assist a heroin dealer in a way that betrays her friendship with Hackberry.

Bessie is more than a bit judgmental and something of a hypocrite, given the number of times she threatens to kill characters, all the while telling them not to swear in her presence. She’s also intolerably bossy, which I suppose captures the spirit of fifteen-year-old girls throughout history.

Bessie has few friends. One is Mr. Slick, although Bessie believes him to be a spirit, notwithstanding his eagerness to join her for meals whenever she invites him. Thriller authors can’t seem to resist the opportunity to introduce the supernatural into their fiction. Mr. Slick seemed like a pointless character to me.

Jubal Fowler is not exactly Bessie’s friend, although she finds herself attracted to him. While the Holland and Fowler families are in something of a feud, the attraction seems to be mutual when Fowler shields Bessie from being raped. He does nothing to prevent the rape of Bessie’s friend and English teacher, Ida Banks, in Bessie’s presence.

The supernatural also intrudes in the form of a little girl who was raped and killed but makes herself visible to Bessie when her grave is disturbed by oil drilling. Bessie seems to be living the little girl’s life, although we know from the start that Bessie is narrating this story many years after it occurred and thus is not killed like the little girl. Bessie will nevertheless experience another incident of sexual violence before the story ends. The novel’s rape scenes are not graphic but sensitive readers might find them disturbing.

During Hackberry’s absence, Bessie makes a deal with an oil company to allow drilling on the Holland ranch in an effort to save the family home from her father’s gambling debts. Bessie’s alliance with an oil company employee gives her another man to set her raging hormones afire, although her Baptist morals (and perhaps her own victimization) cool her desire. The oil man is too honorable to be working in the oil industry, which naturally does it best to cheat the Hollands as it goes about its business of decimating the Texas landscape. “There was a stench in the air like rotten eggs, a monotonous clanking of oil derricks, and a sky dark with soot, the fields lit with thousands of tiny tin flames that resembled rose petals.”

As is always true of a Burke novel, the story moves quickly. Uneventful scenes are punctuated with moments that generate tension. As is always true of a Holland novel, the story is filled with historical insights. I wasn’t as taken with the plot, or with Bessie as a protagonist, as I have been with the stories and characters in other Holland novels, but Burke is one of the best prose stylists in American crime fiction. I enjoyed the novel more for the pleasure of Burke’s language than for the story he tells, despite its regular moments of excitement and dread.

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Clete by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 11, 2024

Some of my favorite crime writers have a greater interest in the supernatural than I do. James Lee Burke is one of those. I suppose monstrous crimes can be seen as the product of evil and evil can be seen as the realm of the supernatural. A disembodied force of evil has symbolic value for writers who confront crimes that are beyond ordinary experience. But the supernatural in Clete takes the form of a good person rather than an embodiment of evil.

Clete is narrated by Dave Robicheaux’s best friend, Clete Purcel. At various times in the novel, Clete gets advice from the ghost of Joan of Arc, or maybe Ingrid Bergman playing that character. Either way, she occasionally materializes and saves Clete’s life or cautions him not to be a fool. Clete has engaged in foolish behavior throughout his life, but now he’s sober and dedicated to helping others in his work as a private investigator. If Joan of Arc wants to help him, who am I to say that Clete is the victim of an overactive imagination?

The plot follows multiple threads. They are joined by Clete’s Cadillac. Clete leaves it at a car wash. When he returns, he finds that some thugs from the Dixie Mafia are taking it apart. After dealing with the thugs, he discovers that they were searching for something that they believe to have been concealed in his car. One theory is that the car wash owner, Eddy Durbin, let his brother Andy use the car to mule some drugs from Mexico. Clete later learns that the hidden object may be something different from the black tar heroin or fentanyl that is prevalent in Louisiana.

The nature of the substance supposedly hidden in Clete’s car is a bit vague. At one point Clete is made to believe that his exposure to the hidden substance might be fatal. The threat posed by the “lethal chemical called Leprechaun” enters and leaves the story at random intervals, never taking a firm hold. An FBI agent who seems to be looking for Leprechaun similarly makes occasional appearances without adding much to the story.

Clete connects the destruction of his car to a Nazi named Baylor Hemmings. Clete carries a picture of a Holocaust victim and her children, apparently to remind himself of how evil the world can be. Clete’s occasional references to the picture seem forced. They never resonate with the power that Burke likely intended. Of the thousands of Holocaust images, what it is about this particular picture that has gripped Clete is never made clear.

In his search for Hemmings, Clete questions a bail bondsman named Sperm-O Sellars, whose sideline is described as white slavery. Clete and Robicheau rescue a captive woman named Chen whose passivity has been assured by keeping her high on heroin. They’ll eventually need to rescue her again.

Sperm-O made the mistake of grabbing the ankle of Gracie Lamar, a dancer at a strip club who kicked his teeth in. Sperm-O hires Clete to find her after she jumps bail. Gracie turns out to be an ex-cop who got fired for unorthodox conduct that included killing some men who, in Clete’s judgment, probably deserved their fate.

All of that somehow ties into a plot thread involving Lauren Bow, a con man who made a fortune selling soap franchises, a Ponzi scheme that has gotten him into tax trouble with the IRS. His wife, Clara Bow, wants to hire Clete. She says she intends to divorce her abusive husband and claims he is blackmailing her with forged evidence that she was a participant in his tax fraud. Clete is a protector of abused women and so, against his better judgment, agrees to help her.

Bodies begin to drop. Clete and Robicheaux become targets, perhaps because Clete took his car to the wrong car wash, perhaps because they are questioning dangerous people.

In addition to Joan of Arc, another character seems to be related to the supernatural. When he dies, his body decomposes at a startling rate and with an unusually putrid stench. I can’t say that I understand how that character fits into the larger plot. But then, I can't understand why Joan of Arc has taken an interest in Clete Purcel.

The plot seems more of a muddle than is customary with a James Lee Burke novel. It is nevertheless interesting and moves at a satisfying pace, not so quickly that it overlooks the need to build atmosphere and suspense, not so slowly that the reader’s mind begins to wander. As always, I admire Burke’s prose. He’s simply one of the best wordsmiths in the crime writing business. In Clete, however, he tends to express the same ideas redundantly.

Burke didn’t sell me on the Leprechaun plot or on Joan of Arc, but his action scenes are credible and the characters of Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel have become iconic in the world of crime fiction. I always look forward to reading about their adventures. The different perspective here, seeing Dave through Clete’s eyes, adds another window through which the reader can view their enduring friendship. If this isn’t the best of the Robicheaux novels, it is still better than the average thriller writer can produce.

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Harbor Lights by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 23, 2024

The stories in Harbor Lights feature people who have been in prison and people who might end up in prison. Some are drifters, others are professionals. Some live in solitude, others share their life with a child. Most have experienced a significant loss. Some have given up on life, others are still trying to figure it out. They are all from the deep South although some have migrated to the West. Nearly all the protagonists try (not always successfully) to cling to their moral center. Collateral characters are often racists and white trash who never had a moral center. A few characters are ghosts.

Three stories feature Burke’s recurring character and alter-ego, Aaron Holland Broussard. “Deportees” tells a story of Aaron’s grandfather as he stands up to southern hatred of Mexicans and Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The title story is told from Aaron’s perspective as the son of a man who defied the FBI by telling the press about his sighting of a German submarine while fishing off the coast of Louisiana. In retaliation, the FBI arrested the woman with whom Aaron’s father was having an affair, accusing her of being a communist spy. The story is about the ugly truth a boy learns about his father and the far uglier truth he learns about the country in which he lives.

The melancholy that pervades the novella “Strange Cargo” is almost overpowering. Aaron may have symptoms of cancer that he refuses to let his doctor diagnose because (in the doctor’s view) Aaron believes he deserves to die. All the things he loves are in the past. Following Holland family tradition, Aaron stands up to a tobacco chewing sheriff who is known for his racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and vindictiveness. The sheriff is haunted by the ghost of a slave just as Aaron is haunted by the ghost of his daughter. Aaron also sees spirits of slave chasers and their victims. If this were a different kind of story, the supernatural might threaten to get in the way. Since the story is ultimately a contemplation of death — its many causes and its effects on others — the supernatural makes a fitting contribution. It is also an exploration of southern hypocrisy, which Aaron comes to understand as an inevitability, even in his own life. The story requires Aaron to confront his family’s past (as well as his own) and, in doing so, addresses issues that arise in Another Kind of Eden and Every Cloak Rolled in Blood.

In “The Assault,” the police take little interest in investigating a beating that a couple inflicted on a professor’s (admittedly drunken) teenage daughter. The helplessness he has felt since his wife died in a car accident for which he blames himself is amplified by the assault, contributing to his sense of failure as a husband and father. While he is fishing with a Black professor, he has an encounter with racist rednecks. The police are more interested in the professor’s response to abuse than they are in the abuse inflicted upon the professor's daughter. A series of confrontations escalate from threats to violence. This is one of Burke’s most intense stories and my favorite in the volume.

“Going Across Jordan” tells the story of two drifters who ride the rails and enjoy a special kind of freedom. The older man irritates the authorities by singing Woody Guthrie songs. While working on a ranch in Wyoming, the younger man makes a foolish decision to accept his boss’ offer to borrow his Cadillac to bring a pretty Black girl back to the ranch. The young man learns that people with power who do favors for the powerless always have an ulterior motive. He also learns something about love and about achieving justice without resorting to violence.

I did not dislike any story in the collection, although three stories I liked a bit less. “A Distant War” is a story that would be at home in the Twilight Zone. A veteran whose radiator hose breaks brings his half Vietnamese son into the wrong bar (and maybe the wrong dimension) where he meets the wrong people at the wrong time. “Big Midnight Special” is a story about fighting and country music told in the setting of a prison. A seismologist who works in the oil drilling industry sleeps with the wrong married woman before all hell breaks loose in “The Wild Side of Life.”

Every story in this collection provokes thought. A reader might easily choose any of them as a favorite. All are told in a prose style that elevates grittiness to elegance in a way that only James Lee Burke can. This collection is a must for his fans.

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Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on July 11, 2023

Set in Louisiana during the Civil War, Flags on the Bayou is a departure from the crime novels that James Lee Burke usually writes. While the novel reads like a thriller, many of the crimes that inform the novel are crimes against humanity — slavery, the wholesale slaughter of war, enforced poverty, sexual abuse of women. Yet circumstances make key characters into killers, setting up a crime story about two women who must run from the law, women who (in a nineteenth century version of Thelma and Louise) would rather die than tolerate more abuse.

Near the end of 1863, Confederate soldiers are in retreat. By virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation, there are no more slaves, but not all plantation owners agree. Slaves continue to work in the fields while slave catchers continue to round them up, whether or not they have been emancipated, to sell them at slave auctions.  

Hannah Laveau is a (former) slave who lost track of her son at Shiloh. Hannah might be a witch. God might be talking to her. She might have mutilated and killed plantation owner Minos Suarez after he raped her. She wanted to kill him but isn’t sure whether she did. She might have done the same to her jailer.

Pierre Cauchon, a constable in charge of Negro affairs who is widely regarded as white trash, considers it his duty to bring Hannah to justice, but he must deal with the humiliations he has endured from Wade Lufkin, Hannah’s (former) owner. A duel with Lufkin scars Cauchon’s face but does not solve his problem. Nor does it resolve Lufkin’s tender feelings about Hannah or Cauchon’s about Darla Babineaux, a (former) slave owned by Suarez who refuses to work in the fields again. Wade and Cauchon are both tormented by guilt about the harm they have caused to others, just as they are tormented by love.

Florence Milton is a teacher and an abolitionist. Her skin is the right color to earn respect in the South, but she is regarded as a criminal because she works to help escaped slaves find their freedom. Her gender makes her a target regardless of her political beliefs.

Two characters, both brutal and crazed, represent the worst of the Union and Confederate officers. Colonel Carleton Hayes is a character who, more than any other, embodies evil. He commands hundreds of irregulars, fighting his own battles by unconventional means. He has slashed and burned his way through the war, destroying a Texas village because a woman spat on one of his men. Yet he considers himself an exemplar of southern manners and decorum. Captain John Endicott kills and rapes indiscriminately. Other soldiers say that Endicott does not represent the Union but they do nothing to stop him.

Burke is one of my favorite writers. His characters are complex, his stories move at a steady pace, and his prose is astonishing. His narration and dialog are always quotable:

Colonel Hayes: “There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.”

Hayes: “War is a confession of failure, and its perpetrators are the merchants of death, not because they are killers but because they never had the courage to live a decent life.”

Cauchon: “With regularity, North and South, we give power to people who have no interest in us.”

Cauchon: “You don’t need to seek revenge against your enemies. The bastards eventually fall in their own shite.”

Cauchon: “Never let them tell you that there is rhyme or reason to war, lest you join the lunatics who have perpetuated its suffering from the cave to the present.”

Burke never writes a novel based on a simplistic view of the world. He recognizes good and evil and understands the vast area of gray that separates them. Soldiers and officers from both the North and the South committed atrocities during the Civil War. Soldiers fought for pride more often than they fought for ideology. Soldiers from the North looted plantations and confiscated livestock that owners needed to feed their children. Soldiers from both sides raped women. There was no glory in the Civil War, no matter how often its battles are reenacted or its officers are commemorated.

Burke considers Flags on the Bayou to be his best novel. I think he said the same thing about The Jealous Kind (2016), a novel that I would probably put at the top of the list, but Flags on the Bayou belongs in his top five. It brings the tension and pace of a thriller as it encourages the reader to contemplate the moral issues that surround war in general, and the Civil War in particular.

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