THIS WEEK’S BOOK
“Creole Belle” by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, 529 pages, $27.99)
James Lee Burke’s 2010 novel, “The Glass Rainbow,” ended with a cliffhanger when the Louisiana lawman Dave Robicheaux and his best buddy, the private investigator Clete Purcel were engulfed in a fusillade of gunfire.
“Creole Belle,” the 19th book in the Robicheaux series picks up where that previous book concluded. Dave is in a New Orleans recovery facility. The gunshot wounds are slowly healing, and he is being heavily medicated for pain.
During a seemingly lucid moment he thinks that he has a visitor, a beautiful woman he knows. Her name is Tee Jolie Melton. She confides that “the man I’m wit’ does bidness sometimes with dangerous people.”
Dave is concerned. He tries to counsel her. As she departs she gives him an iPod loaded with some of his favorite music. She is a gifted singer. Some of the songs are recordings of her performances.
Shortly thereafter he gets released from the hospital. When he mentions that Tee Jolie paid him a visit in there he is met by disbelief because she has not been seen in months. She has vanished.
Dave wants to verify that this actually happened. The morphine he was on might have made him imagine it all. But he has her iPod. He had listened to her songs on it. Then when he tries to play Tee Jolie’s songs for someone else they are no longer on there. Very mysterious.
We know what comes next; Dave and Clete will try to solve the mystery of the Creole belle’s disappearance. Fortunately for us, we can luxuriate in the 500-plus pages of Burke’s sinuous tale before we can decipher this complex puzzle.
Dave and Clete are former New Orleans police officers, the “Bobbsey Twins of homicide.” While Dave has quit drinking, Clete never seems to stop drinking. They often take different approaches to vanquishing evil-doers. Clete is impulsive and explosive. Burke describes him as being like “a junkyard falling down a staircase.”
Author interview
I called James Lee Burke at his home in Montana. We talked about Dave and Clete. He explained that “the two men are opposite sides of the same coin. They form one character: One is the chivalric knight in rusted armor. The other is the merry prankster, the jester, the trickster out of folklore.”
“Creole Belle” is set with a backdrop of environmental devastation caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Burke populates his story with a slew of potential suspects who might know what happened to Tee Jolie.
There are many possible villains; a painter who might be a pedophile, a racist ex-cop, a war hero who could be a war criminal, some shady oil industry types and, the most intriguing of all, a hired assassin who might be Clete’s long lost daughter.
At age 75 Burke writes seven days a week. He told me: “In terms of what constitutes a person’s life; for me its family and friends. That’s it. When you get down the track, you get to the seventh-inning stretch, the conclusion you come to; that’s all that counts.”
“The rest of it doesn’t mean diddly squat on a rock. Its all just passing through, and you don’t take it with you.”
About the Author