Novelist James Lee Burke

How is it that a good Catholic boy from the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast became one of the best novelists in America? I have just finished reading his Rain Gods (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009) and consider it one of the best books I have read this year. I have always loved his Dave Robicheaux mysteries set in Louisiana Creole country, but his novels about the Hackberry family in Texas are several notches above them in quality. (See the quote from the novel in yesterday’s blog.)

The Old West ain’t what it used to be. There isn’t any more “Shall We Gather at the River?” or “My Darling Clementine” or pioneers on the trail. Something has happened to make the American Southwest a darker place. First and foremost, since the end of World War 2, it is the route of choice for heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and other drugs to enter the United States. A corollary: Several million people also crossed the border from the south without going through immigration.

There is also the consciousness that we stole a large part of Northern Mexico in the 1840s under the presidency of James K. Polk. We followed up by a concerted program of genocide against the Indians in the succeeding decades and are now following that up by official intimidation and deportation of peoples who have flowed across the border, many of them decades ago. Let’s face it, our history in the desert lands of the Southwest is no less than villainous.

I was first conscious of the New Old West when I viewed the rough cut of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch at Warner Brothers Studio in 1969. Then I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (New York:Random House, 1985) and saw the good guys and the bad guys in an entirely harsher light. Then I read James Lee Burke’s Feast Day of Fools in 2015 during a Mexican holiday—which, incidentally, was also set in present-day Texas with the same hero, Sheriff Hackberry Holland.