Swash, buckle and sociopaths

THE blurb of James Lee Burke's new novel proclaims: "The best of American writing, never mind just American crime writing", and there is no doubt that this claim is justified. His Dave Robicheaux series, set in southern Louisiana, has maintained a consistency of excellence that is truly phenomenal, bringing to life as it does a whole social setting, a physical expediency of place and a deep psychological insight into the motives of the people who inhabit that place and time.

Granted, most of the characters in his work are deeply flawed, from Robicheaux on down, and the motivations that spur them are violent and questionable - but novel writing demands the violent and the disruptive rather than the placid and the ordinary. This area of the American south, with its mix of races and cultures, its rivers and bayous, its contrasting seasons of sun and storms and its belief in the powers of religion, voodoo and black magic is fertile ground for the fiction writer, and Lee Burke has made it his own particular stomping ground.

In Cimarrori Rose, however, he has moved his locale to a small town in Texas called Deaf Smith, and, instead of the steadfast Robicheaux, his protagonist is defence lawyer Billy Bob Holland. The two men are similar in makeup, though, with both of them stubborn to the point of insanity, physically tough, vulnerable to emotion and totally incapable of carving out uneventful lives in this naughty modern world.

The story begins with Billy Bob defending young Lucas Smothers against a charge of murder and rape. The boy had been discovered dead drunk, beside the violated body of Roseanne Hazlitt and, in spite of his protestations of innocence, sent for trial. In a James Lee Burke novel, of course, nothing is simple and above board, and the fact that Lucas is Billy Bob's putative son serves to complicate matters somewhat.

Billy Bob himself, in his time, has been a policeman and a Texas Ranger, and it was as the latter, and down below the Mexican border in pursuit of drug dealers, that he accidentally shot and killed his best friend, one L. Q. Navarro. Navarro now appears to him as a friendly spirit, advising and cosseting him in times of black depression.

Ranged against our hero is a formidable cast of friends and enemies. On his side he can number Temple Carrol, his female investigator, who may possibly be in love with him; Mary Beth Sweeney, a local police woman, with whom he believes himself to be in love; the prosecutor, one Marvin Pomroy, the only apparently honest man about; and a small Mexican boy named Pete, whom Billy Bob befriends.

On the other side of the line he has to face up to Jack Vanzandt and his wife Emma, rich, powerful and unscrupulous; their psychotic son Darl; a sociopath called Garland T. Moon; a freaky Mexican lawman, Felix Ringo; and as weird a bunch of DEA and FBI agents as ever trod the boards.

The result, though highly entertaining and engrossing, is not as sharply observed nor as tautly constructed as usual. Loose strings abound, the dialogue verges on the pretentious at times, and the author's habit of breaking up the narrative by making allusions to the physical environment becomes snigger inducing, as for instance, when he has Billy Bob, in the throes of intense sexual passion, gaze out his window to observe rain clouds drifting in, with the hint of thunder and lightning to follow.

However, that may well be nit picking. Cimarron Rose, whatever its faults, is still way ahead of most of the Grisham inspired bestsellers around nowadays. It has a swash and a buckle to it that invigorates the mind and causes the imagination to soar. But no more of Billy Bob - give us back our Robicheaux, the blue bayou, the scurry of mockingbirds against a mackerel sky and the rattle of tropical rain as something nasty moves in the depths of the mangrove forest. {CORRECTION} 97052600004