My Favourite Books

Number 12 - The Neon Rain - James Lee Burke A genuine wonder of the world is American pulp fiction. You can buy stacks of hard-boiled detective stuff, ranging from the veteran masters of the genre (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain etc) to less well-known writers like Donald Westlake, Charles Williams, Lawrence Block etc. All with their own angle on the detective story. I love it all. In the last 20 years or so a number of writers have lifted the crime tale up to a different level. Elmore Leonard may be the best-known of the modern writers but far and away my favourite is James Lee Burke - this book is merely representative of about 20 of his novels. The principal in most of these books is Dave Robicheaux, Vietnam vet, recovering alcoholic, and Cajun detective, operating in the Lake Ponchartrain area around New Orleans. Although most of these books are 'action-packed' thrillers in the best tradition of pulp fiction, this is in fact not pulp fiction at all. This is high-class literary writing. Normally, I can't be bothered with flowery descriptive narrative telling me about landscapes or geography or environment generally. But in the case of Burke, his technique is so compelling that I can't get enough of his descriptions of azalea, bouganvillea, cypress and rhododendron bushes growing in grand profusion along the banks of the Ponchartrain, or the aroma of roasted cajun chicken being served on a bed of dirty rice with a side order of boudin and bluepoint crabs and a bucket of iced fried shrimp and boiled crawfish on the hard-shell and a long-necked bottle of Jax and watermelons and cantaloupes and strawberries, and oysters and zydeco music and ante-bellum houses and cottonwoods and willows and poor-boy sandwiches and hyacinths and pecan trees and fishing-boats and bluegill, perch and roach spawning in the bays and bayous and jazz and a blood-red setting sun and sheet lightning over the lake and levees and electric storms and electric mist............. ...........and all the things which were swept away by Hurricane Katrina........ I have never been anywhere near New Orleans or Louisiana, but Burke's books lets you smell it, taste it, hear it, see it. A tactile pleasure which never diminishes - and that's before we even get anywhere near the thrilling plot-lines. Top class.