Passion

I just finished reading Purple Cane Road last night. This book did not end the way I expected it to. I did not think that Dave would find as much peace as he did with his mother's fate. What I did love about this book was the complexity of the Clete Purcel storyline.

There was a paragraph spoken by a crooked cop thinking of his father that stuck with me:

"It must have been grand to be around during World War II. Working people made good money and for fun went bowling and played shuffleboard in a tavern and didn't snort lines off toilet tanks; you walked a girl home from a cafe without gang bangers yelling at her from a car...Kids collected old newspapers and coat hangers and automobile tires and hauled them on their wagons down to the firehouse for the war effort.The enemy was overseas. Not in the streeets of your own city."

That's the kind of world that Dave Robicheaux loves and misses, and its a world I didn't even live in and yet love and miss. Dave is extremely nostalgic and, more than any other of the Burke novels I have read, the safe and comfortable world of his past is at risk.

It is also a good villian book, as Jonny Remetra is a bit larger than life and Gable is the asshole we all want to punch...even the deformed Micah makes the whole scene a bit surreal.

Everyting's Copacetic, Big Mon

Clete Purcel.

The first book I read was Black Cherry Blues, which takes place during a very odd point in Clete Purcels life. While Dave is out on bail for murder charges, Clete Purcel is his estranged friend who went on the pad, shot a government witness, then returned on the wrong side of the coin. This book is also the quietest chapter in Clete Purcel's life, with hardly any outrageousness. Those two factors make it very difficult to understand a statement like, "You gotta love Cletus." Even after reading some of the earlier Robicheaux novels it is hard to see the rough diamond that Clete is, but if by your fourth novel you aren't sold on the richness of Clete Purcel, then you are rooting for the wrong guys.

I sometimes wonder if James Lee Burke expends such large amounts of effort describing Dave's sense of law enforcement's futility only to justify the reality of Clete Purcels exploits.

I write this just after finishing Last Car to Elysian Fields, and in that novel were three selections that I feel say a lot about Clete Purcel while still being fairly concise. The first is spoken by Dave Robicheaux when he is in a tight spot:

"I figure I'm done, so what I'm about to tell you is the truth. I didn't smoke Frank Dellacroce, but I wish I had. He was a punk and a bully and somebody should have put the electrodes on him and blown out his grits a long time ago. When you get finished with me, Clete Purcel is going to turn over every rock in New Orleans and Fort Lauderdale until he finds you, then make you wish your mother had flushed you down the toilet with the afterbirth."

The second excerpt is Clete summed up in the author's own narration:

He considered his own behavior perfectly reasonable and did many of the above deeds and others that were worse with a lopsided grin on his face, thinking them hardly worthy of mention.
His best friends were drunks, grifters, and brain-fried street people, his girlfriends strippers and junkies. Gangbangers, pushers, strong-arm robbers, and dirty cops crossed the street when they saw him coming. He swallowed his blood and ate his pain and never flinched in a fight, no matter what his adversaries did to him. He was the bravest and most loyal man I ever knew, and also the most irreverent, reckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

The last quote, spoken by Clete himself, says it all:

"Listen up, Dave. We're the good guys. The problem is, nobody else knows it. But that's their problem, not ours."

The Farm

No prison gets more mention than the infamous Angola Prison. The Farm is where the hard time is served. Some of the testimonials of Angola paint a realm devoid of any hope, lately it has at least begun to focus on the next stage of the inmates lives and rehabilitation. The Farm that Dave and the natives speak of is an Angola of chain gangs, unjust beatings, solitary confinements, the kind of jail that conjures images of Cool Hand Luke.

The even appear to have an annual rodeo, who knew?

General Vocab

Octoroons, Redbone, Quadroon, Quintroon,

Nazi's, I hate these Guys

Having just finished Dixie City Jam, I found myself once again coming up against the Neo-Nazi as a villian. I say once again because just this past month I have seen the Neo-Nazi appear in the films Frontier(s), Outpost, and now here they are in the book I just read. The Neo-Nazi is one of the great villians because nobody goes out of their way to defend them publicly. You never read about them protesting at the opening of Indiana Jones films. These mothers are considered pretty vile no matter how you slice it, and you can make them as cold, cruel, evil as you want.

Will Buchalter in this book is one of the great evil human characters. Similar in some ways to Legion in Jolie Blonde's Bounce, Will violates the Robichaux household in haunting and graphic manners. His group the Sword I think may be a fictional creation, but there are articles to be found on other groups in this story, namely the AB.

Hometown

I felt that the best place to begin would probably be Dave's hometown. New Iberia is roughly 135 miles west of New Orleans and is 1, 735 miles from your driveway. Dave lives in the home his father built with lumber he cut himself. It is Dave's safe haven, the land where he can live his life in a romanticized recreation of the past that he misses.