Tangled Web UK Review November 2000
Purple Cane Road by
James Lee Burke
hbk out July 00
Published by Orion
at £12.99
James Lee Burke won’t fly. John Connolly, in conversation with Dennis Lehane at the N.F.T. earlier this year, tells how he therefore went to America to interview him, the man whose work he and many other well respected crime writers will say is just the best. ‘Purple Cane Road’ takes some beating. It arguably rises above most of his other books, good though they all are. His main strength for me is his masterly evocation of the place where his book is set – New Orleans, the bayou, the trees, the rain, the wind, the hurricanes, the moist heat. And the cast of characters he creates exists vividly – characters with names like Letty Labiche, Passion Labiche, Zipper Clum (who got his name by carving all over a girl’s face with a razor blade), Little Face Dautrieve, Clete Purcell, Belmont Pugh, Johnny Remeta – names that give the flavour of the mix of people in the world of vice and crime in which Burke’s Detective Dave Robicheaux operates and is at home. But this time it is personal. His mother’s name, Mae Guillory before she was married, has been slandered and, according to Zipper, she was murdered by cops in the pay of the Giacanos.
Robicheaux is haunted by dreams in which his mother tries to escape the two cops, ‘on a dirt road that led past a neon-lit dance hall. The road was bordered on each side by fields that were bursting with fat stalks of purple cane, their leaves rustling with wind. She was running down the dirt road in the pink uniform she wore to work at the beer garden, her hands outstretched, her mouth wide with a desperate plea’. Robicheaux will not rest until he discovers the truth of the circumstances of his mother’s death and clears his mother’s name, which, of course, he does. Crime writing in the ‘noir’ mode does not come better than this.
(
Phyllis Davis
)
