lmost as worthy of praise as a good novel, is the friend who introduces you to it. And it was a good friend indeed who introduced me to Billy Bob Holland, Dave Robicheaux and the novels of James Lee Burke.
At 62, Burke is a cult figure among American crime writers. Texas-born and raised in Louisiana, he studied creative writing at the University of Missouri under Irving Stone, then did a bit of everything. Like his fictional alter-ego, the Cajun cop Dave Robicheaux, he drove trucks, drank his way into Alcoholics Anonymous, surveyed, worked on oil rigs and as a social worker in Los Angeles.
He published his first novel, Half of Paradise in 1972. Despite favorable reviews, his next novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected ninety-three times. Thirteen fallow years later, he would ruefully admit that "success is a fickle companion." Nominated for a Pulitzer and twice awarded the coveted Edgar Award - in 1989 for Cherry Blues and in 1998 for Cimarron Rose, in which he introduced Billy Bob Holland, his books now sell in the millions.
With a prose style that reads like rough poetry, he has been described as the William Faulkner of crime fiction. Crime fiction is, of course, a genre, as highly stylized as a Harlequin romance and not to everyone's taste.
The late Edmund Wilson dismissed it as escapist. "The reading of detective stories," he wrote, "is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles."
But, for every Wilson who growls that he doesn't care who killed Roger Ackroyd, it is easy to find five others who have embraced the genre, praised it or appropriated it for their own purposes. The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, second to none in his devotion to crime fiction, wrote admirably of Poe, Doyle and Chesterton.
Under his editorial direction, a series of detective novels, collectively titled The Seventh Cycle, introduced Latin-American readers to the idea that a detective story could also be literary. "Those books did a lot of good," he said, "because they reminded writers that plots were important. If you read detective novels and if you take up other novels afterwards, the first thing that strikes you - it's unjust of course, but it happens - is to think of them as shapeless.''
Heartwood is anything but shapeless. The second in a series set in Texas and featuring former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland - no cracker despite his name and provenance - is an intriguing, layered novel of crime, character and place. It combines the detective novel's strong story line with a sense of history and landscape in an exploration of classicAmerican themes - the sometimes subtle strains between the haves and have-nots, the collision of past and present and the inequities of the criminal justice system.
The Heartwood is a tree, indigenous to the American south-west, that grows in layers. And as Billy Bob's grandfather told him, you would do well in life by keeping the roots in a clear stream and not letting anyone taint the water. No mean feat in his hometown of Deaf Smith in the hill country north of Austin, a town with streets as mean as those in Dave Robicheaux's New Orleans.
Local worthy, Earl Dietrich, has made a fortune running roughshod and tainting anyone who stands in his way. When Billy Bob comes to the defence of a man accused of stealing an heirloom and three hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds from Dietrich's office, he finds himself up against not only his power and influence, but also a shared past he cannot will away.
He may have problems with Earl Dietrich's callousness, but he cannot shake the legacy of his passion for his wife, the "heart-breakingly beautiful" Peggy Jean. "She lived in our dreams," Billy Bob recalls, "and commanded such respect that the toughest kids in the West End dared not make a loose remark about her less they be punched senseless by their own kind....Earl Dietrich made us realize that our moments on the dance floor with her at high school proms and the romantic fantasies we entertained about her had been the vanity of blue-collar kids who had never been in the running at all.''
Walking on a razor's edge of betrayal and dishonor, Billy Bob sets out to bring Dietrich down. A deeply moral man, a knight-errant in the great romantic tradition of the detective novel, he must first confront the deadly consequences of self-delusion. "Heartwood" is a fully-realized novel about memory, love and betrayal. Incidentally, it"s about crime too.