As Edinburgh is to Rebus and Oxford to Morse, so New Orleans and its surroundings are to Robicheaux. The streets of the city and the bayous of the surrounding countryside are the place where James Lee Burke’s hero, a recovering drunk and a Vietnam vet, does his policing. Though I’ve never been there, Burke has over the years convinced me that I know the place quite well.
In the latest Robicheaux novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, the background comes to the fore, for the story is set in the days immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina. There’s a detective yarn to be told, of street “pukes” whose opportunistic burglary and wrecking of an abandoned house get them — and Robicheaux’s family — into deep water; but deeper still, and darker, is the story Burke tells of the way New Orleans, in the aftermath of the hurricane, was left by local and national government to rot. It’s an angry book, one that captures as vividly as any reporters have done the events that “turned a gingerbread Caribbean city into food for every kind of jackal in the book”.
New Orleans, Burke writes, was “a song that went under the waves”. He has long been singing it better than anyone. If you’ve not read James Lee Burke before, this is as good a place as any to start.