Crusader’s Cross by James Lee Burke.
Simon & Schuster, 2005. $25.95 — 336 pp.

It is always a pleasure to watch a writer we love, whose work is good and who builds his talent bravely and skillfully, produce a book that makes us realize once again just how ample his gifts truly are. It’s like watching a ballplayer whose career you’ve followed for several years and who can be counted on as a short hitter come back after spring training, step to the plate, and slap the ball out of the park.

With the recent publication of Crusader’s Cross, James Lee Burke hits the long ball. In terms of suspense, plot, characterization, and language, Burke shows himself to be a master not only of the detective novel, but of the novel.

In Crusader’s Cross, Burke leads us back to the familiar ground of Dave Robicheaux’s Louisiana, to New Orleans and New Iberia. Haunted by ghosts from his past — his dead wife, his time in Vietnam, the criminals and cops who have filled his life for 30 years, his tangled friendships — Robicheaux finds himself investigating a girl who disappeared in his youth, but whose affairs now seems strangely tied to certain people in the present. Searching for Ida Durbin, Robicheaux becomes entangled in the lives of the Chalons family, particularly Valentine Chalons, a prominent television personality, and his mentally ill, artistic sister, Honoria. Meanwhile, Robicheaux also begins falling in love with a woman just on the verge of professing her final vows as a nun. To help him sort out these various messes, Robicheaux enlists the services of his best friend, Clete Purcel, the hardnosed ex-cop and private detective whose wild ways have endeared him to fans of these books.

So what makes Burke a fine writer? First, his descriptions of places and people: he can make you feel a bayou, taste the salt tang of the air, as if you were suddenly transported to Lake Pontchartrain instead of sitting in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Often Burke’s ability to create a landscape and its climate is what his readers will note when discussing the books. What makes Crusader’s Cross so interesting in this regard, however, is that Burke brings his talent to bear on all sorts of places. Here, for instance, is a fine, thumbnail sketch of a jail:

A jail is not a geographical place. A jail is a condition. It rings with the sounds of steel clanging against steel, people yelling down stone corridors, toilets flushing, a screw losing it after an inmate throws feces through the bars into his face ... Jails are a short-stop way of separating aberrant and undesirable people from the rest of us and rendering them as invisible as possible. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there ...

Burke also has an ear for dialogue, and for the accents and dialects of New Orleans and the Cajun country. Here Clete Purcel and Robicheaux are discussing the next step in looking for the missing Ida:

“This guy Troy was working with pimps?” he (Clete) said.

“The uncle was a cop on a pad. Troy was evidently a tagalong,” I said.

“But he believed they killed the girl?”

“He didn’t say that,” I replied.

“House girls are full-time cash on the hoof. Their pimps usually don’t kill them.”

Burke always remembers to push the story forward with his dialogue, to notch up the tension, to twist the plot. He also tightens the suspense by running several plots at once, laying out the cases in which Robicheaux is involved — tracking down the missing Ida, trying to solve the murders of a serial killer, attacking the problems with the Chalons family — and then showing us how that public life impacts on Robicheaux’s private life, his drinking, his involvement with his brother and a new lover. By putting together Robicheaux this way, Burke gives us a personality as rich as a Bourbon Street bowl of gumbo. Lying on his bed in jail, where he is briefly incarcerated as a murder suspect, Robicheaux contemplates these facets of his life:

... My nemesis was not jail, the unraveling of my career, or even the machinations of Val Chalons. It was me. I remembered a line by Billy Joe Shaver: “The first time the devil made me do it/The second time I done it on my own.” I had stoked my resentments, fed my sense of loss over Bootsie, and turned my depression into a wardrobe of sackcloth and ashes in order to get drunk again.

I felt like a man who had set fire to his own home in order to warm up an unappetizing dinner.

Finally, Burke is something of a philosopher in his books. He’s very aware that he’s writing novels and has more than enough sense of pacing to keep the story moving and alive, yet he manages to put many other thoughtful observations into his book. Here Robicheaux listens to Molly Boyle, the woman who is on the verge of professing her vows:

She told me about her missionary years in Nicaragua and Guatemala. But without being told I already knew that the nature of her experience there, in the same way you intuitively know when people have seen organized murder on a large scale, or have stood with hundreds of others inside a barbed-wire compound or languished in a cell run by individuals who are probably not made from the same glue as the rest of us. Their eyes contain memories they seldom share; they seem to exemplify Herodotus’ depiction of man’s greatest burden, namely, that foreknowledge of human folly never saves us from its consequences.

Whenever my acquaintances begin to lament the dearth of good fiction these days — and sometimes I think they may be right — I need to remember to give them the name James Lee Burke. Read him, I should say. Read Crusader’s Cross.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)