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."