Every Cloak Rolled in Blood by James Lee Burke

Published by ‎ Simon & Schuster on May 24, 2022

Aaron Holland Broussard is part of the Holland family that James Lee Burke has chronicled in a dozen novels. Broussard is also Burke’s alter ego. At 85, it isn’t surprising that Burke uses Broussard as a way to reflect on his life, on the mystery of existence, and on loss.

Broussard is an 85-year-old novelist who, like Burke, lives with the pain of a daughter’s death. Burke explains in a letter to the reader that his daughter died of natural causes in 2020. Broussard feels he is being “boiled alive” by “psychoneurotic anxiety and agitated depression.” Broussard’s daughter died but is still at his side, appearing to warn him of dangers arising in both the corporeal and spirit world.

Broussard lives alone, although prolific writers who are surrounded by family spend much of their life alone in the act of creation. How much of Broussard is really Burke is unknowable to anyone who doesn’t know Burke. Nor does it matter. The novel is not a biography; it succeeds or fails as a matter of literary merit.

Broussard has evolved during his long life. He feels shame for supporting Strom Thurmond’s election and for cheering American pilots who gunned down civilians fleeing their village during the Korean War. Yet he was never part of a mob — not a Klansman, not a waver of Confederate flags, not a bigot. He believes heroism should walk with humility, that bravery follows kindness. He is a decent man who regrets his mistakes.

The story begins with a young man painting a swastika on Broussard’s barn. At various times, Broussard confronts or tries to reason with or help the boy and the father who poisoned him. The story involves drug dealing and buried gold on a reservation, a couple of gruesome murders, ineffective cops, and an unfortunate woman who wants to make a movie with Broussard. While some of the story is reality-based, a good bit of the novel asks the reader to believe (or at least accept that Broussard believes) that spirits of the dead are trying to influence us with evil or save us from ourselves. Broussard, on the other hand, wonders if he might be delusional, forced by grief to see things that aren’t there. A reader might wonder if that’s true, but that does not appear to be the conclusion that Burke invites.

Every Cloak Rolled in Blood succeeds despite its reliance on the supernatural themes crime writers often use to address the existence of evil. Broussard explains that the “great mystery for me has always been the presence of evil in the human breast.” On several occasions, Broussard encounters Major Eugene Baker, the officer who ordered his cavalry troops to massacre peaceful members of the Blackfoot tribe as they slept. A state trooper named Ruby Spotted Horse has a cellar that is a “conduit into a cavernous world that has never been plumbed,” a place where Baker’s spirit resides, among others who have the power to “come back upon the living.”

I’m not a fan of supernatural themes — the supernatural seems too easy as an explanation of evil, a copout that allows humanity to avoid responsibility for inhumane behavior — although I forgive Burke and other accomplished writers for evoking evil spirits. Burke’s prose makes forgiveness easy, particularly when he offers other insights into the human condition. Examples:

“I do not enjoy my role as an old man in a nation that has little use for antiquity and even less for those who value it.”

“I hate the violent history of the Holland family, and I hate the martial mentality of those who love wars but never go to them.”

“When you lose your kid, the best you can hope for is a scar rather than an open wound.”

 “I would like to claim power and personal direction over my life. But not a day goes by that I do not experience a reminder of an event that left me at the mercy of strangers.”

“The United States prides itself on the freedom of the individual, but we are still a Puritan nation and obsessed with sex.”

Burke’s letter to the reader describes Every Cloak Rolled in Blood as an “attempt to capture part of mankind’s trek across a barren waste into modern times.” Modern times include “the recalcitrant and the unteachable” who refuse to wear masks during a pandemic because the selfishness of cultural grievance is more important to them than public health. Those grievances include being the butt of jokes told by the “Hollywood friends” of liberals on Saturday Night Live, a grievance that fails to consider what they have done to earn mockery. The trek includes a long history of violence and bigotry and oppression. Burke writes movingly about Native Americans who were slaughtered and brutalized by white soldiers who, instead of being tried for war crimes, were lauded as heroes.

Burke describes Montana landscapes with religious awe and views his characters through the focused lens of compassion. The novel is, in some sense, a howl of pain, notable more for the emotions it evokes than the plot. But it is also a reminder that we must always struggle to understand our place in the universe, to be a barrier against the historic march of evil, to be strong but polite, open but on guard, emotional but not helpless or hopeless.

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Another Kind of Eden by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 17, 2021

Another Kind of Eden takes place when Aaron Holland Broussard is 26. Aaron has been to war, earned a degree, and written a novel. He describes himself as “a failed English instructor.” Aaron was a teenager when he appeared in The Jealous Kind, one of my favorite James Lee Burke novels.

As a post-war drifter, Aaron “learned quickly that the Other America was a complex culture held together by the poetry of Walt Whitman, the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the prose of Jack Kerouac.” Aaron spends the spring and summer of 1962 working on a dairy and produce farm in Colorado. The owner, Jude Lowry, is a decent man. Aaron is sufficiently decent to resist the advances made by Lowry’s wife.

Aaron works with Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams, two men who have his back when he’s attacked for driving a truck that has a union sticker. The Sheriff, Wade Benbow, briefly locks up Aaron despite his correct suspicion that the fight was started by Darrel Vickers, whose father Rueben is a well-connected rancher. Darrel is suspected of killing a little girl by locking her in a refrigerator when he was still a child.

Aaron learns the identity of his attacker from Jo Anne McGuffy, a waitress who paints macabre scenes in her spare time. Her paintings are based on the Ludlow Massacre, a mass killing of striking workers perpetrated by anti-labor militia members in 1914. Over the course of the novel, Aaron falls in love with Jo Anne, although she’s sleeping with her professor, Henri Devos, and if Darrel is worthy of belief, has been his lover, as well.

The plot involves threats to various people, mostly women, including Jo Anne and some women on a hippie bus who are being pimped out. They hippies “were the detritus of a Puritan culture, one that made mincemeat of its children and left them marked from head to foot with every violation of the body that can be imposed on a human being: state homes, sexual molestation, sodomy, gang bangs, reformatory tats, fundamentalist churches . . . . Their hallmark was the solemnity, anger, and pain in their eyes.” Spud is a suspect when a hooker turns up dead (because Spud works so that he can afford to visit hookers), but Aaron has seen no evil in Spud’s heart. Another woman, one of the hippies on the bus, is hospitalized for reasons that nobody wants to discuss.

Aaron saw more than his share of evil during the Korean War; he blames himself for a loss of an MIA friend. Benbow saw his share when he liberated a subcamp of Dachau. The notion of evil as a force is a popular theme among thriller writers who try to understand and explain the human condition. Burke has turned to that theme again and again, sometimes envisioning evil as the offspring of the supernatural. There are supernatural elements in Another Kind of Eden, including a war buddy who appears from the dead and creates a miracle at a delicate moment. Apparent demons and glimpses of ghosts, perhaps real and perhaps not, pop up near the story’s end. While I could have done without the supernatural, I always appreciate Burke’s effort to comprehend the absence of compassion and decency in human behavior.

Aaron learns something about himself as he struggles against evil men. He comes to accept that “the Holland legacy of violence and mayhem had always lived inside me,” but the acceptance of his inner demons gives him peace without encouraging him to embrace the violence. He instead embraces the inevitability of death: “As Stephen Crane wrote at the close of The Red Badge of Courage, the great death was only the great death, not to be sought, not to be feared, but treated as an inconsequential player in the human comedy.”

The supernatural elements put me off a bit, making me rank Another Kind of Eden below Burke’s best work. But novels that are not Burke’s best are better novels than most crime writers can compose. Burke’s prose style and the depth of his thought make him one of my three favorite writers of crime fiction and one of the best writers of American fiction in or outside of any genre.

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A Private Cathedral by James Lee Burke

 

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 11, 2020

Like many Robicheaux novels, A Private Cathedral is a meditation on the nature of evil. Crime writers have a tendency to conceptualize evil as a force, sometimes one that has supernatural origins. James Lee Burke did that in Light of the World. He returns to the theme of evil as a force beyond human understanding in A Private Cathedral.

Dave Robicheaux tells the story as something that happened many years in the past. In the present, Robicheaux and his friend Clete Purcell contemplate the evil of white supremacists who stand guard over statues of Confederate generals and the oppression of freedom that they represent. In the past, the story opens with Robicheaux watching Johnny Shondell, Louisiana’s answer to Elvis, performing on a bandstand. Isolda Balangie, who appears to be seventeen, approaches Robicheaux because he was once a cop. She tells him that the Balangie family has hated the Shondell family for generations. Johnny Shondell is nevertheless delivering her to his Uncle Mark for reasons Robicheaux would prefer not to understand.

Robicheaux visits Marcel LaForchette in prison at LaForchette’s request. Robicheaux agrees to see him because he “wanted to believe that evil has an explainable origin, one that has nothing to do with unseen forces or even a cancerous flaw in the midst of Creation, and that even the worst of men could reclaim the light they had banished from their souls.” LaForchette, a former mob enforcer who claims to have information about the Kennedy assassination, would like Robicheaux to give him a job so he can be paroled to Louisiana. His promises of reform make Robicheaux wonder whether he might have reclaimed the light.

LaForchette used to work for the Balangie family (he claims to have been the driver on the whack of a child molester ordered by the Balangies) but when Robicheaux next hears about him, he is on parole and working for the Shondells. Two private investigators approach Robicheaux for information about the disappearance of Isolde and its possible connection to LaForchette’s release.

The investigators end up dead and dismembered, as do a good many others. Robicheaux would like to stay out of it, but he can’t abide the Balangies and Shondells using a teenage girl as currency for a deal. His friend Clete Purcell would also prefer to avoid the drama until he finds himself strung upside down as a fire is being set below his head. Purcell isn’t sure how this fits into the Balangie/Shondell situation, but he means to find out.

This sets up what seems like a typical crime story — typical for Burke, who sets his stories in the deepest depths of southern corruption and depravity — but the novel takes a twist with the introduction of a reptilian character named Gideon Richetti, who is either a time traveler or has lived through evil events in the distant past. Richetti represents enduring evil, the kind that brought us Auschwitz and Huey Long and prisoners who die from dehydration after being locked for days in a steel coffin in the Louisiana heat.

Against his better judgment (or perhaps in the absence of judgment), Robicheaux becomes involved with Isolda’s mother, Penelope Balangie, who may or may not be married to Adonis Balangie. He also becomes involved (he thinks, given that he attributes his involvement on both occasions to blackouts) with Leslie Rosenberg, a woman Adonis is keeping on the side. Other key characters include a priest who may or may not have given into his temptations and a bent cop named Carroll LeBlane.

The plot is harrowing. As was true in Light of the World, its supernatural elements might (but probably don’t) have earthly explanations. Robicheaux would like to find a rational explanation for the slave ship he keeps seeing, the one that is also in Purcell’s dreams. He would like to think there is a reason for Richetti’s knowledge of events in Robicheaux’s past that he has never shared, or for Richetti himself, who starts the novel as more snake than human but evolves the story progresses. Those explanations will be just as hard for the reader to conjure as they are for Robicheaux. Everything that troubles Robicheaux could be in his imagination because, as he acknowledges, “superstition has its origin in fear.” Robicheaux has plenty to fear, but Burke makes clear that he isn’t alone. All our problems are grounded in fear.

Burke’s point seems to be that evil has had such an ineradicable presence throughout history that it can only be explained as a force that influences good people to do bad things. The alternative, as Robicheaux ponders, is that humans are not good at all, that they are fundamentally flawed and will trip over themselves in their hurry to harm others to satisfy their own sense of superiority. “I believe that most human activity is not rational and is often aimed at self-destruction,” Robicheaux says. “I also believe that ordinary human beings will participate in horrific deeds if they are provided a ritual that will allow them to put their conscience in abeyance.” Hence the ability of humans not just to turn their back on obvious evil, but to encourage it.

One reason to read any Burke novel is to luxuriate in his prose. “Here’s the strange thing about death,” Robicheaux explains. “At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself home alone and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about.”

The other reason to read Burke is that few crime writers manage to plumb the souls of their protagonists, the struggle between their flawed natures and their fundamental decency, with such depth while still telling a riveting story. A Private Cathedral is just the latest reminder of why Burke occupies a laminated position in my list of favorite crime novelists.

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The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 8, 2019

“There are moments when you realize that our greatest vanity lies in the belief that we have control of our lives and that reason holds sway in human affairs.” Dave Robicheaux is prone to moments of darkness, an understandable reaction to the miseries he has faced. In The New Iberia Blues, his moments tend to be darker than we have seen in most Robicheaux novels, potentially imperiling his relationship with his daughter and everyone else he cares about. He is feeling his mortality and catching glimpses of whatever lies beyond. Yet he still retains the ability to notice “the leaves blowing along the sidewalks, the flowers blooming in the gardens, the massive live oaks spangled with light and shadow, all of these gifts set in juxtaposition to the violence and cruelty that had fallen upon us like a scourge.”

Dave finds a dead woman’s body nailed to a cross floating in the ocean, visible from the home of a Hollywood director Dave has known since they were both growing up in Louisiana. He wonders whether the director, Desmond Cormier, has anything to do with the woman’s death. Other suspects include a producer with a shady past who is staying with Cormier and another producer who is hanging out with Dave’s daughter.

More murders ensue. They might or might not have been committed by the same killer but they all seem to relate to tarot cards. Dave and the reader are tasked with deciding whether and how the killings are connected.

Dave’s newest partner, Bailey Ribbons, is smart and attractive, which in Dave’s world makes her a target for all the people who have an axe to grind with Dave. Chester Wimple, who smiled as he killed a bunch of people in the last Robicheaux novel, returns in this one. He’s one of James Lee Burke’s creepiest creations.

The New Iberia Blues includes a dead-on description of the Southern white trash who “glory in violence and cruelty and brag on their ignorance, and would have no problem manning the ovens at Auschwitz.” Race is not directly related to the crimes Dave Robicheaux investigates in The New Iberia Blues, but as one of the characters notes, everything in Louisiana is about race. Burke doesn’t back away from that ugly reality.

The novel also showcases the resentment that some people feel about “Hollywood types” who don’t share their narrow values, as well as the lack of sensitivity that Hollywood types have toward people who have less money and education and opportunity than society’s more privileged members. Robicheaux has examined what America has become and knows that it is pointless to “argue with those who are proud of their membership in the Herd,” but he also takes the time to understand why the herd mentality has become so prevalent.

Burke writes beautifully about the environmental and cultural devastation inflicted on Louisiana by industry and seedy politicians to the detriment of Cajuns and blacks and all of the state residents who live in poverty. He writes with dismay about the horror of war and “those people who love wars as long as they don’t have to participate in one.” He writes even more beautifully about the personal turmoil that afflicts Robicheaux and Purcell and even a psychopath like Wimple. When Robicheaux’s daughter tells him that he feels guilty about everything he loves, she nails a common problem — the inability to love without guilt.

Tension mounts as lurking threats give way to imminent danger in the novel’s last act. Burke provides several good suspects and a variety of motives for the multiple homicides. Trying to affix guilt or to maintain trust is as difficult for the reader as it is for Robicheaux and Purcell. The ending is just fantastic. And while the novel is very dark, Burke always reminds the reader that no matter how small a glimmer of hope might be, it can never be extinguished.

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Robicheaux by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 2, 2018

Dave Robicheaux falls off the wagon, has a blackout, and finds himself accused of murdering T.J. Dartez, the man who was responsible for his wife’s death. That’s a fairly standard thriller plot but James Lee Burke is not a standard thriller writer.

Dave’s involvement is investigated by an unlikeable colleague named Spade Labiche — unlikeable because he’s racist, sexist, and corrupt. While Dave is being investigated, he’s assigned to an investigation of his own. An acquaintance, Jimmy Nightingale, is accused of raping the wife of another acquaintance, Levon Broussard, after Dave introduced them. Nightingale is a politician who owns part of a reverse mortgage company that preys on the elderly and on Dave’s buddy Clete Purcel. He’s the kind of patrician elitist who tries to convince good old boys that he’s one of them, conning his way to election victories.

Broussard and Nightingale and Tony “Nine Ball” Nemo, who controls the southern branch of a criminal organization, are all involved in the production of a Civil War movie based on one of Broussard’s books. Broussard is a decent guy who has a blind spot about the Civil War. After Broussard shows Dave a Confederate flag carried by a 14-year-old boy at Shiloh, Dave thinks of his friend: “Yet here we stood in reverence of an iconic flag that retained the pink stain of a farm boy’s blood, and whether anybody would admit it or not, the cause it represented was the protection and furtherance of human bondage.” Dave’s daughter Alafair helps write the script, although she doesn’t have much use for Nightingale or Nemo or, for that matter, Labiche.

James Lee Burke’s discussion of the rape investigation presents a balanced view of the difficulty that fair-minded officers have when the truthfulness of a sexual assault allegation is less than clear. He also gives a harsh but unbiased account of corruption and unchecked drinking as a way of life in parts of Louisiana, while extolling the virtues of Cajun culture.

As always, Burke is a keen observer of life. He writes about what Americans do “when we lose faith in ourselves and reach out for the worst members of our species.” He unmasks hate-mongers who disguise their vile rhetoric as a protest against political correctness. All of that adds interest to the story without becoming a distraction.

Dave suspects that Nemo and a cruel character named Kevin Penney were somehow involved in the murders of eight prostitutes (the Jeff Davis Eight) that were the backdrop to The Glass Rainbow. A creepy but oddly principled killer named Chester (a/k/a Smiley) also wanders through the story, complicating Dave’s life with a string of murders.

Burke’s characters are always strong. Dave’s friend Clete plays a significant role as he tries to balance his innate goodness against his desire to destroy evil. Dave has similar problems, although his real battle is with his desire to drown his problems in alcohol, which is what caused the mess that starts the story.

The plot is intricate but credible. Burke doesn’t tidy up every loose end, but life is untidy. Robicheaux isn’t my favorite Burke novel, or even my favorite Robicheaux novel, but Burke is one of my three favorite crime writers and his books never disappoint.

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