Im sorry he didnt live to read James Lee Burke. As William Faulkner aged, he claimed only Shakespeare and the King James Bible…. Its blues-jazz New Orleans, a steamy swirl of Southern Gothic, its detective-crime fiction at its very finest. Its riveting stayed up all night reading it yes, its that good.
So I decided to begin at the beginning, to go back to this, the first of the Dave Robicheaux series. I just read New Iberia Blues and was enthralled. Review #3 Audiobook The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke The real mystery is how is this stuff still in print? Hack work from a career hack. None of the Vietnam War stuff rings true, either. The New Orleans setting is as cliched and fake as they come. The people in the story exist for another old white guy to express his Thoughts. You won’t believe any of the people in the story, they don’t act like humans but like words on a page. You won’t believe the narrator is a cop, or that the author knows anything about law enforcement. Here’s an early line that shows the author’s lack of ability: “The second man was short and olive-skinned, with elongated Semitic eyes and a hawk nose.” Didn’t know eyes could be a racial identifier? They can if the author is racist. It’s 270 pages of endless, unrealistic dialogue where people don’t act naturally but exist purely for exposition. The people talk the entire story into existence.
Review #2 The Neon Rain audiobook in series Dave Robicheaux One of the best series going in my opinion and it was a treat to revisit these characters in the formative year. A pair of great psychotics that don’t compare with some of the later creations, but still rack the tension up to 11. The violence is there but not as prolific as in later books, and the booze genie comes out of the bottle one more time with a lot of action and degradation to follow. His relationship with Purcell is far more confrontational than in the later books, and his relationship with Annie is just beginning. This book has all Robicheaux’s demons on display, a corrupt New Orleans Police force, his booze-addled, violent partner, Clete Purcell, the downtrodden sharecroppers and minorities, the criminal and political elite who Dave despises, and Dave’s own personal demon: alcoholism. JL Burke evokes New Orleans and the old south with all of its depravity and beauty in lyrical prose that is pure poetry, while still turning out a first class suspense-crime novel. I have read all of the books in the series as they were released but recently decided to return to the well and reread the first installment. The Neon Rain is the first installment in the Dave Robicheaux series.
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