I just spent the better part of a week with two of my oldest and best friends – not together, mind you, since I’m not even sure they know each other. First with one and then with the other, we revisited old haunts, swapped much-loved yarns and discovered a few new places we might seriously go next time. We promised, in parting, there would be a next time.
James Lee Burke is 89, and John Sandford is 82. In the course of this single week, I noticed online that each had just published a new suspense novel featuring his No. 1 creation – south Louisiana sheriff’s deputy Dave Robichaux for Burke and Minnesota-based U.S. marshal Lucas Davenport for Sandford. How could I resist my own personal reunion? Burke and Sandford are two of my heroes, because they’ve created two of my heroes.
It’s hard to come up with a more complex and self-analyzing (self-agonizing?) protagonist than Robichaux, an alcoholic Vietnam vet from the Texas Gulf Coast who ended up living in always-corrupt southwest Louisiana – a geography shared with Burke himself, except the author now lives in Montana. Robichaux, after starting out as a homicide cop in New Orleans, settled in New Iberia, a real-life town that clearly embraces this literary fame as part of its tourism pitch. Robichaux lives on the edge of being fired every day of his life, despite his now-decades of service, mostly because he’s a rule-breaker with an inconveniently strong sense of right and wrong.
In The Hadacol Boogie, Dave’s 25th starring role in a Burke novel, he again shares setting-the-world-aright duties with his old NOPD podnah Clete Purcell, one of the most fascinatingly messed-up figures in all of crime fiction. The overweight Purcell eats too much Popeyes chicken, drinks too much of practically every known alcohol and goes rogue WAY too often, meaning he’s stuck being a mere private eye. No police force would dare hire him. Yet when Clete shows up driving his Cadillac and wearing his porkpie hat, I join all the other fans of the series thanking God there’s a James Lee Burke.
Some themes in the new book will be familiar, such as the New Orleans Mafia and the battle of big money to destroy every last inch of a state that calls itself the “Sportsman’s Paradise.” What brings us to each new novel are Dave and Clete, first and foremost, plus the quirky family they form with Dave’s adopted daughter Alafair, even now that she’s grown up and mostly living in California. A thousand authentic details of Cajun Country turn up with every drive described, every flourish of music heard, every encounter with high life or low, and definitely every meal devoured.
What also brings us here, again and again, is Burke’s writing itself. He’s one of the few writers of genre fiction who makes us ride the near-drunken roller coaster of a prose threatening to be poetry – and perhaps the only one who puts us on alert every time he begins a simile. When Burke says something is “like” something else, get ready: the wildest cascading images will pour off the page. You see them, you hear them, you smell them. Reading becomes a sensory overload, often in unforgettable ways.
Minnesota would seem a very long way from southwest Louisiana, but I’ll go there any time – yes, even in the dead of winter – that John Sandford has a new Lucas Davenport yarn to spin. In recent years, Sandford has expanded his literary boundaries a bit with novels spotlighting Davenport sidekick Virgil Flowers and still other books focused on the marshal’s grown daughter Letty. The new book, Revenge Prey, is the 36th in the Davenport series, all having the word “Prey” in the title, and it has to be considered one of his best. It is a book that will keep you up reading way past your bedtime.
So, this time out… Davenport is called in to help with the transfer of a family attached to the federal Witness Protection Program. The family, it turns out, is actually quite Russian – and is hiding out not from the usual Mob boss they testified against in court but from the entire hierarchy of today’s Russia, Vladimir Putin on down. Putin’s people send in an assassination team, which has some but not complete success, and then keeps coming back to finish the job. It’s up to the CIA, the FBI, several branches of Minnesota law enforcement and, of course, Lucas Davenport to stop them.
Two qualities stand out, besides Lucas and his totally believable off-duty family life. One is the Russian hit squad, which turns up in chapters of its own until those merge with the “good guy” chapters in an inevitable shootout. Nobody writes shootouts better than Sandford. Each member of the Russian team is different in why he or she does the job and how much he or she can imagine surviving it. It would be so easy to have them all be cyphers. They are so not.
The second quality will be familiar to Sandford’s many fans. Known in real life as veteran news reporter John Camp, the author knows law enforcement bureaucracy backwards and forwards, along with the endless meetings and task forces and turf wars, mixed with the brazen seeking of credit and the even more brazen hiding from blame. We readers are in the room for every territorial battle. As Revenge Prey shows us once again, Sandford can make a multi-agency meeting sound a lot like a shootout with heartless Russian assassins.
Photos: (top) James Lee Burke; (bottom) John Sandford
