Spending time with James Lee Burke – America's greatest living mystery writer, and one of the finest modern American novelists – is not a typical interview experience. For a start, at 83 years old he's long ago figured out how to avoid any questions he doesn't care to answer, albeit in the politest way possible. Call it the prerogative of the pantheon. The best of his contemporaries – Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Robert B Parker, Sue Grafton, Ed McBain – have all predeceased him, but Burke endures, his work a riposte to anyone who might be inclined to dismiss genre writing as the poor relative of literary fiction.
But seated with him in the kitchen of his home in Lolo, Montana, his daughter Pamala alternately bustling in the background or good-naturedly chiding him, there's also a sense of briefly being made privy to Burke's ongoing dialogue with himself, one that is reflected in his books, the 40th of which, A Private Cathedral, has just been published. It's a conversation that embraces social injustice, racial inequality, American neo-colonialism, and his own complex, sometimes ambivalent, feelings about the state of Louisiana, the setting for most of his books and, to Burke, a microcosm of the US.
In A Private Cathedral, these meditations are reframed as gripping narrative, an account of the generational conflict between two Louisiana families, the Balangies and the Shondells, and the impossibility of escaping retribution for unacknowledged sins. It's one of his strangest books, reading like a fever dream. A killer named Gideon Richetti may exist simultaneously in different eras. Leslie Rosenberg, the lover of Burke's recurring central character, Dave Robicheaux, has memories of being burned at the stake. Conventional mystery fiction this is not.
Almost everything I’ve learned as a novelist, I’ve learned from Burke: not only that one’s work should aspire to the condition of art, but also how to behave as a writer. At signings, he would shake the hand of everyone who brought a book to him, and introduce himself to them by name, as though unwilling to presume on their knowledge of him. In the mystery community, his courtesy, humility, and critical intelligence are legendary.
Now, the sun shining through his window, lighting the lovely valley beyond, he is already musing on F Scott Fitzgerald as a Gothic writer before I've even managed to take off my coat, and I'm still searching for my notebook when he progresses to Ernest Hemingway's apparent compulsion to fictionalise his own existence, despite having lived a life so extraordinary that it really required no fictionalising at all.
“I guess,” Burke concludes, “it’s because of the vacuum of experience in my life that I have to write all these lurid tales . . .”
This, it's safe to say, is understatement of a high order. Before finding success as a writer of "lurid tales", Burke worked as a truck driver, a reporter, a social worker, a pipe fitter in the oil industry, a land surveyor, and a teacher. His Chinese wife of six decades, Pearl Pai Chu, escaped her homeland under gunfire in 1949. Burke published two novels before he was 35, but his life and creativity were blighted by alcoholism. He hit rock bottom in 1977, but embracing sobriety was a struggle. ("It's worse than drinking," he later attested. "You sweat blood. I was willing to be lobotomised.")
His first Robicheaux novel, The Neon Rain, was published in 1987, but it was the third, 1989’s Black Cherry Blues, that brought him both critical and commercial success, finally enabling him, at the age of 53, to quit his teaching job at the University of Montana and write full time. Acclaim was hard-earned, and a long time coming.
The Burke roots are, unsurprisingly, Irish. His ancestors emigrated from Waterford in the early 19th century, eventually settling in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1836. His great-uncle, William Burke, found himself caught up in the civil war, and his experiences became the subject of his great-grandnephew's 2001 novel White Doves at Morning.
"He was on Beauregard's left flank at Shiloh," says Burke. "His outfit, the 18th Louisiana, was ordered to attack up a hill into Yankee artillery. The guys that were supposed to be on the flank were under the command of Samuel James, and he didn't show up. He didn't show up! In 15 minutes, over 40 per cent of the 18th Louisiana had become casualties. They got cut to pieces. It was at Owl Creek, and Willie Burke was there."
As with much of Burke's discourse during our meeting, what at first seems incidental is actually of relevance to the book at hand. Samuel James owned a huge Louisiana plantation named Angola, farmed by convicts leased to him as workers. This later became the infamous "Angola" penitentiary, America's largest maximum-security prison. "Samuel James was a terrible guy," remarks Burke. "Everything about him was awful."
In A Private Cathedral, Robicheaux attempts to intervene in the affairs of a troubled former prison inmate named Marcel LaForchette, with horrendous consequences for all concerned. As a social worker in the 1960s, Burke visited Angola penitentiary to record interviews with some of the convicts, and the experience clearly continues to haunt him, with many of his memories of that time being given to Robicheaux in the novel.
"Recording the inmates in Angola, I never had any doubt that, if the opportunity presented itself, we have people who would jump at the chance to serve the systems we saw working in Nazi Germany and imperial Japan," says Burke. "I've been around people in uniform who wear badges and are the sickest, most sadistic, misogynistic, depraved individuals on Earth, and there's no other term for them. I was a police reporter, and heard cops joke about cutting a Negro in half, drowning him with chains, humiliating women. I put it in this new book. I saw and heard it all."
At Angola, beatings were administered to inmates with three-foot lengths of hose pipe, a fact that the gunbull – the prison guard escorting Burke – made no attempt to hide. “‘Making a Christian out of a n****r, that’s what he called it,’” says Burke. Another punishment was to be staked out on an anthill. One of Burke’s interviewees, to avoid being worked to death on the levees for a failed escape attempt, convinced a fellow inmate to chop off four of his fingers with an axe. The maimed prisoner would go on to spend 42 years behind bars, 22 in Angola. His worst crime was robbing a launderette at gunpoint.
“One guy told me, when we were standing on the levee, ‘Mr Burke, you’re standing on a hundred dead men.’ It was a cruel place. The inhumanity was the defining condition of the system.”
The inhumanity of the system is a recurring theme in Burke’s work, and with it comes an awareness of class still rare in American culture, which often appears content to perpetuate the myth of America as a classless society.
"It's not left and right," says Burke, quoting the journalist Molly Ivins, "it's up and down. But this fellow we have running things now" – at no point in our interview can Burke even bring himself to refer to the current US president by name – "is a casino operator and knows his constituency. He's soaked them for 20 years. He's a master at capitalising on what is worst in people, and he starts from fear."
Burke's southern roots – born in Houston, Texas, he spent much of his childhood in New Iberia, although Montana is now his home – give him a distinctive perspective on recent incidents in the US, particularly the controversy over the removal of statues.
"Many northerners don't understand the events that occurred in the south during the civil war. [Gen William] Sherman, on his March to the Sea, just turned his soldiers loose on a civilian population. It was a lesson in terror. They methodically raped black women, and they burned homes, ransacked them, terrorised people.
"This pulling down of Confederate statues, people's hearts are in the right place, but they do not understand the gift they are giving to men like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, because people in New Orleans and the south still remember all this."
Finally, we're done – possibly, I suspect, to Burke's relief. There are his three cherished horses to be fed in the paddock down the road from his home, land through which Chief Joseph and his 700 Nez Perce once travelled as they attempted to fight their way to sanctuary in Canada in 1877. As he forks hay in his valley, everything he can see is his, and he takes his duties as a steward seriously: hunting is prohibited on his property.
“One of our greatest sins is against animals,” he says. “To hunt an animal, to shoot at it and call it sport, is disgusting. It’s a torture. I used to hunt, and I feel ashamed about it today. I just don’t want to hurt things anymore.”
He has his land, his writing, his family, and his deep Catholic faith. He strikes me as largely content with his place in the world.
“I’ve learned this with age,” he concludes, “which is that I’ve learned nothing, and I’ve never figured out any of the mysteries. But it’s my belief that if a person has faith in the teachings of Jesus, he’ll do just fine, and life is a splendid gift. The Earth’s a grand place . . .”
And so this piece should have ended, with Jim Burke at peace in the Edenic splendour of his valley home, Covid-19 as yet only a shadow on the horizon. But as I was adding the finishing touches to the interview last weekend, word came through that Burke’s daughter Pamala – his publicist, problem-solver, and gentle right hand – had passed away suddenly at the age of 56.
It was Pamala who had arranged the visit to the Burke home, and she who drove me there from Missoula, worried that I might fail to find the property unaided.
“In young life she was hurt in ways that would have destroyed others,” her father wrote in her death notice. “But she forgave those who had done great evil to her ...”
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.
A Private Cathedral has just been published by Orion
