posted on 30 Jul 2023

The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke

The recent death of Cormac McCarthy has robbed the world of the most eminent chronicler of America’s dark heart. That baton has now passed on to the 86 year-old, James Lee Burke, whose new book, Flags on the Bayou appears this month and will, if early reviews are to be believed, continue to explore the visceral battle between good and evil that rages through all of Burke’s books.

Burke is a prolific novelist but, for me at least, his sequence of books featuring the tortured soul of the New Orleans homicide detective, Dave Robicheaux is the cream of his work. I’ve written in praise of this sequence in other posts on this site but this review focuses on the very first novel of what has become a twenty-three book series, The Neon Rain, published in the UK in 1987.

As you might expect from a story that will introduce us to Robicheaux for the first time, there’s quite a lot of background filling to be done. We discover that this is a detective that doesn’t just have a dark past, he’s positively got a tribe of demons following him around. He’s a alcoholic desperately hanging on to his ‘recovery’; his wife has left him for an oil executive; his police partner, Clete Purcell seems to have even more dark shadows hanging over him than Robicheaux himself; his relationship with authority is strained at the very best; the ghosts of his experiences fighting in Vietnam regularly visit his sleep; and, he’s got what you might call a morally flexible approach to justice in pursuit of his idea of human decency. As you might expect, this is a constantly explosive mixture. Robicheaux may be the unlikely moral centre in an evil world but he has the ability to bring chaos and destruction to good people as well as bad.

All of this set-up is really the primary strength of the novel because, to be honest, the plot of the book itself isn’t one of Burke’s strongest – it feels as if the creation of Robicheaux as a character took all of Burke’s attention and left too little of his focus on the storyline. Burke, along with his central character, grows in confidence and creativity later in the Robicheaux series but here the characteristic dive into the corruption rife amongst police and villains alike feels a bit thin.

As with any review of any detective thriller, it’s important not to give away too much of the plot and Burke’s own website probably gives you just enough to illustrate the territory we’re in:

“New Orleans Detective Dave Robicheaux has fought too many battles: in Vietnam, with police brass, with killers and hustlers, and the bottle. Lost without his wife's love, Robicheaux haunts the intense and heady French Quarter—the place he calls home, and the place that nearly destroys him when he becomes involved in the case of a young prostitute whose body is found in a bayou. Thrust into the seedy world of drug lords and arms smugglers, Robicheaux must face down the criminal underworld and come to terms with his own bruised heart and demons to survive.”

But it’s probably best to think of this as the ‘gateway’ novel into the Robicheaux series because you’ll either be hooked in by the seething, morally ambiguous and overwrought atmosphere of Burke’s world or you’ll conclude that this is not the space for you. The Neon Rain is certainly not the very best of the best when it comes to Burke or to Robicheaux but what you will find here is something of a map to the themes that will play out in darker and darker detail as following twenty-two books unfurl themselves.

Paperback editions are easy enough to find and not expensive but, as is often the case with first books in any popular series, the first edition hardback comes at a punishing price.

 

Terry Potter

July 2023