JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE, by James Lee Burke, Simon and Schuster, 349 pages, $25.
James Lee Burke, in his 21st novel "Jolie Blon's Bounce," continues to plumb his most popular character, Det. Dave Robicheaux.
The novel is the 12th in the Robicheaux series and finds the detective once again struggling triumphantly against the evil that surrounds him and invades him.
Burke is a crime-fiction favorite, as well as critically acclaimed — his novels often find their way onto the New York Times best-seller list, and he's twice won the prestigious Edgar Award.
But Burke's journey to the top certainly hasn't been a straight one.
After initial success at 19, with "Half of Paradise"" then a couple of other fairly successful novels, publishers suddenly wanted nothing to do with Burke. It took the author seven years and 111 rejections before anyone would publish a paperback copy of "The Lost Get-Back Boogie," which was then nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
He found his way back to the top of his game, largely thanks to the fictional Robicheaux.
Burke's "Bounce" pits Robicheaux against another arsenal of baddies — mobsters, pimps, crack dealers, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs. Thankfully, he has help from his loyal contingent of friends — mobsters, pimps, crack dealers. . . .
You get the idea.
The novel begins with the vicious murders of two very different women — one a 16-year-old honor student, the other a drug-addicted prostitute with mafia ties.
The suspects run an even broader gamut: Tee Bobby Hulin, a small-time jazz musician and big-time crack user, is charged with the crime, and everyone but Robicheaux is sure he did it. Hulin's sometime employer and drug supplier, Jimmy Dean Styles, also clearly possesses the evil necessary to commit such acts. And Marvin Oates, an unassuming Bible salesman, keeps turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Perry LaSalle, a defense attorney with a family history of owning slaves, is even more eager than most lawyers to hide the truth. The worst of these is unquestionably a man named Legion (Biblical allusion very much intended — he dies among a horde of pigs). Legion is 74 when the novel begins, but he's inhumanly strong and vicious, borderline demonic.
Tying in his Southern past, Burke makes Legion a former plantation overseer who committed all the terrible acts that white men in power over black people were prone to do.
Burke has been called the "William Faulkner of crime fiction," and while he's good, I wouldn't go that far.
True, Burke masterfully integrates history and suspense, and ties the sins of the Southern fathers into everything from murder to traffic violations. But his characters — at least in this novel — lack the disturbing depth and realism inherent in Faulkner's work.
The novel is quite good, though, and, thankfully, Burke leaps over one major pitfall of many a series writer: He doesn't assume that the reader has read every other book in his series.
And the writing is surprisingly leisurely for a crime novel. Burke takes the time to describe his character's surroundings with musical eloquence: "A love affair with Louisiana is in some ways like falling in love with the biblical whore of Babylon. We try to smile at its carnival-like politics, its sweaty, whiskey-soaked demagogues, the ignorance bred by its poverty and the insularity of its Cajun and Afro-Caribbean culture. But our self-deprecating manner is a poor disguise for the realities that hover on the edges of one's vision like dirty smudges on a family portrait."
I suppose Burke and Faulkner do have one thing in common; they both make it look so easy.
E-mail: krisywhitley@yahoo.com