Category: Fiction Reviews

There’s an eternal debate about whether the best Crime Fiction can ever hold its head up as the equal of the literary novel. ‘Proper’ authors like Martin Amis, William Boyd and even Charles Dickens turned their hand to mystery fiction. And there exists a strata of ‘crime’ novelists who can be counted among the great and the good of literature. James Lee Burke is among the best.

Let’s not pretend that the average Christie/ Rendell/ PD James pot-boiler is anything other than (in Graham Greene’s words) an ‘entertainment’. But some Mystery authors are extraordinarygood. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking John Harvey, George Pelecanos, Elmore Leonard, David Peace and Raymond Chandler. A good crime novel can be a good novel. This by James Lee Burke falls very much into both categories.

When the stink of destruction and death lifts off the page and you can practically hear the cries of anguish, you know that the author is a novelist to be reckoned with. Whatever the genre. That’s what James Lee Burke has done with ‘The Tin Roof Blowdown’.

This powerful post-Katrina novel features James Lee Burke’s main series policeman, Dave Robicheaux. Called out of his own police district of New Iberia to help out in the beleaguered Big Sleazy. The disappearance of a Catholic Priest and a seemingly random shooting and looting divert Dave’s attention. Not to mention, the unexpectedly rich pickings from the home of old-school mobster and florist, Sidney Kovick. In Burke’s skilled hands, there are more shades of grey than you’ll find in an eye-specialists’ wall-chart. No one is all bad: nor is anyone (Robicheaux and the Priest included) – beyond reproach.

Step up Otis and Melanie Baylor…

Otis and Melanie Baylor seem to be at the centre of everything. Middle-class whites, their daughter was raped by young black men. Admittedly no angels, the same men show up unwittingly to loot the houses in Baylor’s street. Otis gets mad. His father and uncle took part in Ku Klux Klan burnings in Alabama, so his background isn’t too promising. Shots are fired. But the Baylors deny being part of it

It’s Robicheaux’s job to check it out. But one of the looters, Bertrand Melancon, sees his brother shot and seriously wounded and a young friend killed. He also soon becomes aware that the diamonds and cash they’ve stripped out of Kovick’s walls are likely to get him tortured and disposed of, as a couple of psychopaths take up his trail. As Robicheaux’s ex-partner, renegade bail-bondsman Clete Purcel tells him: “Hey, kid, if you stole anything from Sidney Kovick, mail it to him COD from Alaska, then buy a gun and shoot yourself. With luck, he won’t find your grave.'”

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina came as a devastating blow to a country that thought its racial divide was largely behind it. New Orleans has always been a powder keg of race relations. Black players couldn’t get served in numerous hotels and businesses in the Big Easy in the early 1960s. This led to the 1965 New Orleans Football Boycott. White cabdrivers routinely refused to carry black passengers, no matter what their status. The treatment of the poor black population in the aftermath of the Hurricane’s devastation recalled these days and Burke puts a fictional but very insightful spin on real-life events and emotions.
‘The Tin Roof Blowdown’ is James Lee Burke’s masterpiece. How can he possibly better it?
Jim Driver

Exit Music is the final case for Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus. At least, that’s what the PR people tell us. Ian Rankin returns to the form that established his name as one of Britain’s keenest crime writers back in the mid-1990s. The most recent outings lacked the vigour and richness of the series’ undoubted highlight, Black and Blue. But Exit Music ends on a genuine high.

Before DI John Rebus’ scheduled retirement in November 2006, he and Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke are attempting to clear up a batch of unsettled cases. Rebus is recalled to investigate a dissident Russian poet killed in a botched mugging.

Russians in Edinburgh

Edinburgh is playing host to a Russian delegation and the powers that be are keen that the case should be wrapped up as quickly and discretely as possible. But Rebus and Clarke aren’t too sure, especially when a second, seemingly connected, death occurs. When someone murders his long-term nemesis, gangster ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, Rebus becomes the prime suspect.

Exit Music is pretty much a book of two halves. In an unacknowledged homage to John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series, the first line on the first page repeats the opening sentence in the very first Rebus book, Knots and Crosses: ‘The girl screamed once, only the once.’ After that, the novel clip-clops along without too much sparkle. Rebus looks back on his life and on his ‘career’. We get to go along for the journey. For a while, there’s the fear that there’s just too much navel-gazing and too little investigation.

Then the professional mastery we know and expect from Ian Rankin kicks in and the final half of Exit Music entertains, surprises and ultimately satisfies. Anyone who thought they had the solution licked by page 100 will certainly be admitting defeat before they hit the last page.

Along the way, Rankin drops hints as to what the next move will be. Who will be Siobhan’s CID partner and will she take over the series, with Rebus perhaps acting the part of a weird, whiskey-sodden Mycroft Holmes? Or maybe Rebus will be reluctantly invited to join the Serious Crimes Review Unit looking – in the style of BBC TV’s New Tricks at cold, unsolved cases? Perhaps both; maybe neither? Jim Driver