On March 27th, 1836, a man named William Burke from Co Waterford found himself thousands of miles from home, marching to his death in a small Texan town called Goliad. Burke had left Ireland the year before, hoping to create a new life in America.
Taking up arms alongside the Texans fighting the Mexican general, Santa Anna, he was among more than 300 men captured by the Mexicans following the fall of Goliad.
By the end of the day of March 27th, most of them had been clubbed, bayoneted or shot to death by their captors in an incident that became known as the Goliad Massacre. But William Burke was not among them. He escaped, along with a handful of other men, by the intervention of a Mexican prostitute known only as the Angel of Goliad, and lived to join up with Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto the following month, where the Texans routed the Mexican forces and captured Santa Anna himself.
Burke subsequently moved to Louisiana and succumbed to cholera before the end of the decade, but he had succeeded in establishing a foothold for his family in the south.
Four generations and 163 years later, William Burke's great-great-grandson, James Lee Burke, smiles at the memory of his ancestor. Like William, Burke is a survivor. He has survived alcoholism, early success, unemployment, countless professional rejections and more than a decade in the publishing wilderness. Spoken of with almost universal affection by booksellers, editors and colleagues, he is now, without doubt, the greatest living mystery writer in America, and also one of the country's finest novelists. "I had early success and late success, and a long time in between with no success," he muses, a cup of coffee before him in the kitchen of his home in Missoula, Montana, and a large Miraculous Medal dangling amid the grey hairs on his chest. "But you learn. You learn that it's all rock 'n' roll . . . "
James Lee Burke's particular form of rock 'n' roll began in 1936, when he was born in Texas to a family originally from New Iberia, Louisiana. His father, who worked for a Houston pipeline company, died in a road accident when Burke was 18. His mother, now aged 92, still lives in the south, and Burke continues to spend half of each year in Louisiana.
One of Burke's cousins was the late Andre Dubus, one of the best American short story writers of the century, and it was partly their competitive natures that led him to publish his first short story at the age of 19. From there, he progressed to novel writing and, by 1960, had completed his first book, the bleak, fatalistic Half of Paradise.
"It took me five years to get it in print," he recalls. "I wrote most of it when I was 22 or 23 years old. I always wrote more easily than I published. I didn't have trouble writing then, but it was always hard for me to publish. Half of Paradise was rejected everywhere. I was very discouraged. I didn't think I'd ever get it published, so I wrote another one and couldn't publish it either."
Eventually, the widow of George Poole, a writer and veteran of the anti-Franco Lincoln Brigade, introduced Burke to Poole's agent, and Half of Paradise was published to rapturous acclaim. "I got a six column headline review in the New York Times book magazine," he recalls. "The fella who reviewed it compared me to Gide, Faulkner, Hemingway, Sartre and Thomas Hardy. It was the first review I ever got and I thought, this is nice. It's been downhill ever since." Burke laughs. There appears to be little or no bitterness in him as he remembers the hard times that followed. Yet it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to guess that it was a long, difficult struggle for Burke and Pearl, his wife of 39 years, to get to where they are now, to the point where he can look back and laugh softly at the darker times he has left behind.
If Burke thought that things might get easier for him after Half of Paradise, he was wrong. The next novel he wrote remains unpublished. To the Bright and Shining Sun, his second published novel, was rejected by 14 houses before it was accepted. His third, Lay Down My Sword and Shield, was critically mauled. "It got pretty worked over," he says softly. "It got hit pretty hard. I had published three books by the time I was 32. It was pretty good. I thought I was home free." His next novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, was rejected 111 times and was under submission for nine years. The years that followed were a kind of hell for Burke. "I stayed out of hardcover print for 14 years. I couldn't sell iced water in Hades. I don't know how many books I wrote during that period, but I couldn't sell any of them." Eventually, he published a paperback original, Two for Texas, only for the publisher to shred it while it was still selling. Out of print, struggling with an alcohol problem and trying to raise four children, Burke took on a variety of jobs. He has, in the course of his life, worked in the oil business and as a land surveyor, practised journalism, driven trucks for the forest service, taught in five colleges and acted as a social worker on skid row in Los Angeles. He has admitted to becoming bitter to the point of nihilism during those years spent without a publisher.
His salvation came, gradually, in the form of sobriety, attained through the support of a 12-step group; the rediscovery of his childhood Catholicism as he relearned the concept of his "higher power" (a tenet of the 12-step programme); and the decision of the Louisiana University Press to publish, in 1985, a collection of Burke's short stories entitled The Convict and, one year later, The Lost Get-Back Boogie.
The Lost Get-Back Boogie is the story of Iry Paret, a young blues musician who moves to Montana following his release from a Louisiana prison and becomes involved in a family's struggle against a company which is poisoning the local river, and with the estranged wife of his best friend. It's another dark, powerful novel, albeit with some form of redemption at the end that is extracted at considerable cost, and it earned Burke a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
But Burke was about to embark on a series of novels that would alter the nature of the mystery genre forever. He applied his lyrical skills, his hatred of injustice (Burke is a resolutely old-fashioned liberal from the Dorothy Day/John Steinbeck mould) and his concern with morality to the tale of a Louisiana policeman named Dave Robicheaux, his family and his best friend, Cletus Purcel. "As a writer, I knew more about my art when I was 20 than I did when I was 40," says Burke of the genesis of the Robicheaux novels. "I had to go back and relearn all those things."
Beginning with The Neon Rain in 1987 and continuing most recently with last year's Sunset Limited, the Robicheaux novels constitute the most important sequence of mystery novels published in the past 20 years, and one of the finest ever written. They are compassionate and moving, racially and politically concerned - the US involvement in Central America is a recurring theme - and peopled with finely-drawn characters and extremely nasty villains, all set against Burke's brilliantly-rendered descriptions of the natural world. Black Cherry Blues, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Heaven's Prison- ers and Sunset Limited are particularly notable, but each of the novels has its own place in this stunning series.
Yet Burke admits to having read little in the genre, apart from Charles Willeford and James Crumley, both of whom were friends, and a single Raymond Chandler novel. In fact, he was initially attracted to the field because a friend told him that he had tried writing every other kind of book, and that two good chapters of a crime novel would probably get him an advance.
"If you are governed by the requisites of the genre, you might be writing something - I don't know what it is, exactly - but it's not art," Burke comments. This probably goes some way towards explaining the beauty, originality, ambition and complexity of the Robicheaux books: they are, first and foremost, novels. That they are written in the mystery form is, in some ways, almost incidental. To read them is to find a great novelist applying his gifts to a sometimes underrated genre, reinventing and reinvigorating that genre as he does so.
"He is not just writing crime fiction," says Patricia Mulcahy, who has edited 11 of Burke's novels and of whom the author is unstinting in his praise. "He is writing moral allegories. He is interested in good and evil in a larger sense and that's what gives him another dimension beyond genre fiction." The Neon Rain, for which Charles Willeford provided early guidance, was sent out to publishers by Burke's faithful agent, Philip Spitzer, whom Burke had first met while Spitzer was driving a cab in Hell's Kitchen. Three houses received it. All made immediate offers. "I almost fell down," says Burke. "After 14 years of not just being rejected, but of having manuscripts sent back to me on a dung fork, I couldn't believe it." The third Robicheaux novel, 1989's Black Cherry Blues, won Burke an Edgar award and provided him, probably for the first time, with a degree of financial security.
He remains intensely modest about his work. "My feeling is that all these characters live in the unconscious," he says at one point, supporting his view with quotations from Shakespeare and Milton. "All of the great artists have the same view of their art: they see it as something divine. They know it comes from somewhere else and they have that humility. If you find arrogance and pride in an artist, he's at the end of his career, not the beginning."
Burke's latest novel, Heartwood, is the second in a sequence set in modern-day Texas and involving a new central character, Billy Bob Holland. The Hollands, Burke explains, were his mother's people, and they have turned up in some of his previous work.
Heartwood is another fine novel (Burke believes it to be his best so far), reprising Burke's concerns with the links between wealth and moral corruption, social justice, and the vulnerability of the poor, but set against the backdrop of the Mexican gangs of San Antonio and an early love affair in Billy Bob Holland's life.
As Burke talks about Heartwood and his next novel, Purple Cane Road, which concerns the death of Dave Robicheaux's mother and will be published next year, his eyes glow with enthusiasm and he smiles slightly, more to himself than at me. I half-remember some lines from The Lost Get-Back Boogie, and I check them later at my hotel.
The title of the book refers to a song that the singer Iry Paret is trying to write, but can't finish. "I called it The Lost Get-Back Boogie and I wanted it to contain all those private, inviolable things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time," says Iry at one point in the book, but admits that "there was too much of it for one song, or maybe even one book."
Books written, and yet to be written. Like the man says, it's all rock 'n' roll.
Heartwood will be published by Orion on August 19th