The Tin Roof Blowdown

<$z$>(Simon & Schuster, 373 pages)

by James Lee Burke

DAVE Robicheaux, the hero of a brilliant series of crime novels by James Lee Burke, has always been an angry lawman, but rarely have we seen him in such a murderous rage.The city he loves has been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and for this he blames both “the homegrown parasites that have sucked the life out of Louisiana for generations” and the callous indifference of every president of the United States since Ronald Reagan.

The government’s efforts to rescue the victims were not just venal and incompetent, but “an American watershed in the history of political cynicism”. And the “Herculean” job of rebuilding has been compounded “by a level of corporate theft and government incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside of the Third World”.

Lest the reader is tempted to think that these are the views of his fictional character alone, Burke has been telling interviewers that President Bush’s response to Katrina was so loathsome that it fell into “a category that has no name”.

The true villains of this story are beyond Robicheaux’s reach, and his impotence in the face of their power only deepens his fury. He turns it full force upon the perpetrators of several related crimes he is called upon to investigate in the wake of the disaster:

[obox] A priest trying to rescue people from a flooded church was murdered for his boat.

[obox] A band of teenagers broke into a mobster’s house to steal his guns and blood diamonds.

[obox] Someone is hunting the boys down to torture and kill them.

[obox] Vigilantes are indiscriminately opening fire on looters.

Robicheaux’s wife Molly, an ex-nun, senses her husband’s black mood.

“You aren’t going crazy on me, are you?” she asks him.

“I don’t have your degree of spiritual conviction, Molly,” he replies. “I remember events that happened either yesterday or years ago, and I remember the bastards who caused them, and I want to go back in time and do them great injury. That’s not honest. I want to paint the walls with them.”

Just when you think Robicheaux can’t get any angrier, his family is threatened by one of the book’s most frightening villains, a clever psychopath named Ronald Bledsoe.

“I didn’t want revenge against Ronald Bledsoe,” Robicheaux confesses. “I wanted to kill him. I wanted to do it close up, with a .45, one loaded with 230-grain, brass-jacketed hollow-points. I wanted to empty the whole magazine into him. I wanted to smell the good, clean, head-reeling odour of burnt gunpowder and feel the jackhammer recoil of the steel frame in my wrist. I wanted to see Ronald Bledsoe translated into wallpaper.”

The Tin Roof Blowdown is the 16th book in a series that began when Burke introduced Robicheaun Neon Rain <$>in 1987. Each has been set in New Orleans and the surrounding area, including New Iberia, Louisiana, where the author lives part of the year. Each book has been characterised by a deep mistrust of the wealthy and powerful, vivid depictions of violence, and poetic descriptions of New Orleans and its surrounding parishes.

But this time, there are no descriptions of breakers smacking a beach, of pelicans cruising a chemical green sky, of sun filtering through trees to light a broad avenue. Instead, Burke has turned his powers of observation and description to sights like this:

“I saw a black baby hung in the branches of a tree, its tiny hands trailing in the current, its plastic diaper immaculate in the moonlight. I saw people eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a cafe, dividing what they had among themselves. Ten feet from them a dead cow matted with flies lay in the back of a wrecked pickup, a lead rope twisted around its neck.”

Burke’s many fans know how much he loves New Orleans. Ever since Katrina, they knew something like this was coming.

Early reviews have proclaimed The Tin Roof Blown <$>as Burke’s finest novel, but that requires that we forget the sheer brilliance of In Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (199and Crusader’s Cross (2005). This time, the prose is as superb as ever but the plot is convoluted and at times difficult to follow.

Nevertheless, this novel stands as a stunning elegy to a great city and a ferocious indictment of those who did little or nothing to save it. Its hero, Dave Robicheaux, is at once a uniquely original character and an archetypal American hero. Towards the end of the novel, Burke tells us why:

“According to our self-manufactured mythos, we revere Jesus and Mother Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi. But I think the truth is otherwise. When we feel collectively threatened, or when we are collectively injured, we want the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on the job and we want the bad guys smoked, dried, fried and plowed under with bulldozers.”

Robicheaux is just the man for the job.