The eulogies are coming in: Rick Bragg’s lyrical memories on Friday, Richard Ford’s reluctant gaze today, Ann Rice’s not-so-lyrical accusation, too, not to mention Andrei Codrescu’s footnote.
But we don’t think anyone has written about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with greater charm or intimacy than James Lee Burke. More than half of his roughly two dozen novels are set in and around New Orleans and the Louisiana bayous. Here, for instance, he takes us on a simple, geographic tour with the St. Charles Avenue streetcar — reputed to be America’s oldest trolley line — as seen through the eyes of Dave Robicheaux, the Cajun Vietnam vet and former Big Easy detective:
At one time New Orleans was covered with streetcar tracks, but now only the St. Charles streetcar remains in service. It runs a short distance down Canal, the full length of St. Charles through the Garden District, past Loyola and Tulane and Audubon Park, then along what is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the world. St. Charles and the esplanade in its center are covered by a canopy of enormous oak trees and lined on each side by old, iron-scrolled brick homes and antebellum mansions with columned porches and pike-fenced yards with hibiscus, blooming myrtle and oleander, bamboo, and giant philodendron.
That passage, picked at random from the 1988 crime thriller “Heaven’s Prisoners,” doesn’t do Burke’s writing justice. Some have called him “the Faulkner of crime fiction.” I like to think of him as the common reader’s Cormac McCarthy. He’s less high-flown than either of them, but his writing is filled with much the same depth of feeling about the human condition as both, and sentence for sentence we’d say Burke is easily in their league.
— Tireless Staff of Thousands
