"When in doubt," Raymond Chandler once counselled would-be crime writers, "have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." James Lee Burke seems to have taken the advice to heart. Rather than come up with a plot, he throws his cop and lawyer heroes into a mess of quaintly named misfits and psychos, lets clues and motivations bleed out as they tear at each other, then, once death has thinned the numbers, brandishes the "explanation" with an undeserved "Taddah!".
Heartwood, his second novel to feature Texan lawyer Billy Bob Holland, is no exception. Just halfway through this book, Billy Bob's client's blind but psychic wife has shot the eyes out of a would-be rapist called Bubba, an escaped prisoner named Stump has killed a policeman with a bow and arrow, and a couple of drug dealers have drowned in their own car. Writers often simper that they don't know how a novel will end until the final chapter, but in Burke's case you suspect he really is making it up as he goes along. It's testimony to his skills of characterisation and description that he still manages to produce tales of entrancing beauty.
As fictional heroes go, Billy Bob Holland is a spring chicken alongside Burke's Louisana cop Dave Robicheaux, who now has nine novels under his belt. But he is already shaping up as an equally solid character. He is a good man (the Catholic Burke has no problems with absolutes like good and evil), but with enough flaws to make him human. In his past, when he was a Texas Ranger, he would think nothing of "busting a cap" on drug-runners, and he still bears the scars of the bungled mission where he ended up killing his partner. He is lonely, prone to falling for the wrong women, and prey to black rages. At moments of stress, he talks to the ghost of his dead friend.
But it's in the description of places and societies that Burke really comes into his own. No one who has read any of the Robicheaux novels will forget the eerie majesty of the Louisiana bayou, and while Heartwood's hill country is less spectacular, Billy Bob's love for this soft land is contagious. "How many people," he asks, "lived in a three-story purple-brick house, surrounded by poplars and roses and blooming myrtle, with a breezy top-floor view of a barn, horse lot, windmill, chicken run, cattle pasture, ploughed acreage with rows of vegetables that ran all the way to the bluffs, a willow-lined tank stocked with striped bass and crappie and bream and catfish, the scars of the Chisholm Trail baked like hard ceramic into the hardpan, and a meandering green river and rolling hills in the distance?"
No one in this country; possibly no one in America. But while you have this book in your hand, you can almost smell that blooming myrtle. Whatever it is.
