| ||||||||||
 
Dr. Ronald P. Rogers CHIROPRACTOR Support for your body's natural healing capabilities 270-384-5554 Click here for details 
  
Columbia Gas Dept. GAS LEAK or GAS SMELL Contact Numbers 24 hrs/ 365 days 270-384-2006 or 9-1-1 Call before you dig 
Visit ColumbiaMagazine's Directory of Churches Addresses, times, phone numbers and more for churches in Adair County Find Great Stuff in ColumbiaMagazine's Classified Ads Antiques, Help Wanted, Autos, Real Estate, Legal Notices, More... 
|
Tom Chaney: James Lee Burke Of Writers And Their Books: James Lee Burke. Tom says character for Burke is more like gazing into a pool of water -- first still and clear, then roiling and cloudy. This column first appeared 9 August 2009. The next earlier Tom Chaney column: "There Is No God and We Are His Prophets" By Tom Chaney James Lee Burke If you have been paying attention for the last couple of years, you will have observed that I am wary of the categorization of writers and their work. History leads into fiction. Fiction is transformed into poetry. Mystery becomes adventure which becomes romance which becomes science fiction, and so it goes. Good plot is important because movement is important. But what happens along the way is interesting only because it happens to people we either care for or hate or are intrigued by. Setting is important. Perhaps we read Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time because the names echo place names we know from our neighborhood or from our state's history. But his characters strike that place in our psyche containing our fondest hopes and our deepest fears. Let the plot be too contrived; let the place become sentimentalized; and we have drifted into local color. Read that kind of novel and be sure to stay away from sweet tea for fear of diabetes. But it is character which matters. Some time back I became enamored of the writing of James Lee Burke. At first I called him a mystery writer with stories set in south Louisiana and Montana. But to pin Burke down by the category 'mystery' just because his hero detective Dave Robicheaux ferrets the identity of a murderer is akin to calling the Bible 'erotica' just because a couple of verses from 'Song of Songs' titillate. Pegasus Descending, Burke's 2006 novel featuring Robicheaux begins with Robicheaux speaking, "In the early 1980's, when I was still going steady with Jim Beam straight-up and a beer back. . ." That tells us much about Dave, his occupation, and the addiction which he combats on a daily basis. That opening scene describes a mob-related bank heist in Florida in which a Vietnam era friend of his, policeman Dallas Klein, is gunned down. Dave was drunk at the time and knows he could have saved his friend and stopped the robbery had he been sober. This scene is replayed over and over in his mind and is another layer in the multi-layered demonology with which he must deal. Pegasus Descending takes place in the early years of this decade. It is an account of three murders -- three stories and more entwined inextricably -- in south Louisiana. Trish Klein, the daughter of the murdered friend, is involved in cheating casinos in south Louisiana owned by the mob that killed her father for revenge years ago in Florida. A young girl is either murdered or commits suicide after being the victim of a gang rape at a local fraternity; a derelict is victim of a hit-and-run accident and a brutal beating; and the son of a local mobster is murdered. The strains of the tale are an intricate mare's nest of threads that run over and around one another in a world where local events are no more clear than the hazy vision of Confederate soldiers shrouded in the mist of the twenty-first century bayou. And the texture of that bayou is one of the finest elements of Burke's prose. His description thereof is multidimensional in space and time. Race and class hatreds exist whose multigenerational sources are entwined in the very roots of time. But the finest element of his prose is the complex character of Dave Robicheaux. Booklist got it right when it called him "probably the most fascinating protagonist in contemporary crime fiction." Burke's Robicheaux is not layered like an onion where one layer is peeled back to reveal another. Character for Burke is more like gazing into a pool of water -- first still and clear, then roiling and cloudy. When the turgidity abates and the turbidity fades from time to time complex depths become partially clear. I have not yet read all the thirty-some books Burke has written since 1965, but I'm working on it. Each is self-contained. Once in a while you may be transported to his other favorite land, Montana. In fact in Swan Peak, published in 2008, Dave Robicheaux and his colleague Clete Purcel head for the Big Sky Country. I'm looking forward to that. Tom Chaney can be found telling stories, planning his next meal, and occasionally selling books at THE BOOKSTORE Box 73 / 111 Water Street Horse Cave, Kentucky 42749 270-786-3084 Email: Tom Chaney http://www.alibris.com/stores/horscave This story was posted on 2014-08-10 06:28:03
Printable: this page is now automatically formatted for printing.
Have comments or corrections for this story? Use our contact form and let us know. More articles from topic Tom Chaney: Of Writers and Their Books:
Tom Chaney: There Is No God and We Are His Prophets Tom Chaney: Early Visitors to the Horse Cave Tom Chaney: Ice Cold Thriller Tom Chaney: Chicken Necks and Gizzards Tom Chaney: Not As Seen By God Looking Down Tom Chaney: Kudzu and Thistles Tom Chaney: A Lincoln Friendship Transformed Tom Chaney: A Snell Wind and Occasional Smirr Tom Chaney: 1876 Tom Chaney: What we need is here View even more articles in topic Tom Chaney: Of Writers and Their Books |
 
115 Jamestown St. Columbia, KY. 270-384-2496 
  
   
 Provided by the Adair Co Fiscal Court and the Adair Co. Emergency Mgt. Agency 
|
||||||||
|
| ||||||||||
|
Quick Links to Popular Features
Looking for a story or picture? Try our Photo Archive or our Stories Archive for all the information that's appeared on ColumbiaMagazine.com. | ||||||||||
|
Contact us: Columbia Magazine and columbiamagazine.com are published by Linda Waggener and Pen Waggener, PO Box 906, Columbia, KY 42728. Please use our contact page, or send questions about technical issues with this site to webmaster@columbiamagazine.com. All logos and trademarks used on this site are property of their respective owners. All comments remain the property and responsibility of their posters, all articles and photos remain the property of their creators, and all the rest is copyright 1995-Present by Columbia Magazine. Privacy policy: use of this site requires no sharing of information. Voluntarily shared information may be published and made available to the public on this site and/or stored electronically. Anonymous submissions will be subject to additional verification. Cookies are not required to use our site. However, if you have cookies enabled in your web browser, some of our advertisers may use cookies for interest-based advertising across multiple domains. For more information about third-party advertising, visit the NAI web privacy site.
| ||||||||||
