Summer Reading Suggestion: Anything By James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke's most recent (35^th) novel — Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel — went on sale on July 15, 2014. This blogger has read most of JLB's work and it is uncommonly good. (An H/T to a friend Up North for calling attention to Burke's crime fiction.) If this is a (fair & balanced) guide to good reading, so be it.

[x Esquire]
James Lee Burke: What I've Learned
By Cal Fussman

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accept anything around believe books burke chinese convention create crime dave deaths earth guy happened humor jackson laugh learn lot louisiana marginalized maybe nature people police problem reason rejected robicheaux sense sixty somebody something sometimes state stay suffer survived tension things think thoroughly understand violence wife women work writing written

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Burke has been writing crime novels since the 1970s and has been short-listed for the Pulitzer. He also has worked as an oilman, a land surveyor, and a social worker on skid row.

Interviewed October 25, 2012

There's no such thing as bad food in south Louisiana. It's on a level with heroin.

My father used to say, "If everybody agrees on it, it's wrong." Or, as Dave Robicheaux, the protagonist in some of my books, says, "Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?"

The boos always come from the cheap seats.

I was teaching back in the sixties. I remember a lot of kids had this in-your-face attitude, as though it were a testimony to liberation from convention. Well, there's a reason for convention. We use signals to people to indicate emotions that we can't verbally state or express. There's a reason you take off your hat when you walk into somebody's house.

I'm not a historical admirer of Andrew Jackson because of the things he did to the Indians, but I have to concede that Jackson put a pistol ball in a guy after he insulted his wife. Can you imagine somebody in — what was it, 1806? — making ugly remarks about Jackson's wife the way people do about Michelle Obama? Jackson would be on the guy's doorstep the next day with a blunderbuss.

If you learn anything with age, it's that ultimately you don't solve the great mysteries. I don't know why the good suffer. I'm a believer, but I don't understand the nature of God. I don't understand the nature of evil. I sometimes look around and think maybe we're not gonna make it as a species. I sometimes wonder if there isn't some active force that is intent on destroying the earth.

Deep-fried crawfish has got enough cholesterol in it to clog a sewer main.

Pearl and I met in a graduate seminar, British Romantic Poetry. She didn't have a textbook. I lent her mine. We'll be married fifty-three years in January.

Maybe there are younger people today who find it's just easier to dissolve a marriage rather than work through the problem, but I'm not judging them for that. I mean, it's better than waking up with someone's throat cut.

There's no substitute for loyalty.

Respect involves accepting people for what they are without revising or marginalizing or objectifying them — or even elevating them.

The great lines are in the dialogue that's around us all the time; it's just a matter of hearing it.

We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others.

My book The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times before it was eventually published by Louisiana State University Press. When you get thoroughly rejected — and I mean thoroughly rejected — you realize you do it for the love of the work. And you stay out of the consequences. I developed one rule for myself: Never leave a manuscript at home more than thirty-six hours. Everything stays under submission. Never accept defeat.

Every guy who covers the police beat knows the reality of what goes on in these southern police stations. You learn this as a reporter: If you ever see in a police story written in the passive voice "The subject was subdued," that means he got a baton upside the head or he was thrown down an iron fire escape.

People talk about the violence in my work. I've never written anything that I don't believe I can defend. The last couple of books in the Dave Robicheaux series deal with the abduction and the abuse of women. Those things happened. And part of the theme of the books was the indifference toward the deaths of these women. They were all killed in one little area, about sixty miles from New Iberia, and that's the point. Everyone thinks it's just something a crime writer made up. No. It happened. There was just no news follow-up at all on the deaths of these young girls. They were all marginalized people.

Let me tell you something about violence: I turn on cable TV, and the stuff I see there is unbelievable. I can't even watch it.

America is the most creative place on earth because of the dynamic mix of ethnicity and cultural backgrounds, and the tensions those create. Tension is always created by opposition. Standardization is the enemy of invention.

My wife is Chinese, and she says one of the surviving graces of the Chinese peasantry, the working class, was always their sense of humor. I knew that, even as a child, about people of color. They had this great sense of humor; otherwise they wouldn't have survived. It's an irony that the people who laugh the most are those who have suffered the most.

A time that I write well but briefly is when I'm really tired. Because that's when things come out naturally. The problem is I just can't stay with it. Fifteen or twenty minutes of that and I'm shot.

If I learned any truths in life, it's this simple: It's family and friends. That's it.

I have to admit I laugh a lot while I'm writing. I just don't know that anyone laughs with me. Ω

[Cal Fussman is a contributing editor for ESPN The Magazine and Esquire, where he has interviewed Jimmy Carter, Robert DeNiro, George Steinbrenner, Rudy Giuliani, and LeBron James, among many others. Fussman received a BJ from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.]

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