A blues-ribbon book

Black Cherry Blues, by James Lee Burke, 1989.

This was the third in the Dave Robicheaux detective series and the first of Burke's books to win the coveted Edgar prize for best mystery novel of the year. By now there are twenty or more titles in the series, and while I have read many of them, oddly I had never read this one before. I found it to be an outstanding representative of the series and certainly deserving of the honor it received. The writing is as deeply felt and vivid and memorable as anything in Burke's oeuvre.

If you have not experienced Burke's prose before, any of his books will do. His models were the great American writers like Hemingway and Steinback, and not so much the genre of mystery fiction. His whole object is to sear you with blazing prose that makes you feel into the recesses of the heart and uncover the true mysteries there that can never be totally solved.

However, the Robicheaux series is special, and if you are approaching it for the first time, I would recommend the first two books of the series, The Neon Rain and Heaven's Prisoners, before you read Black Cherry Blues, as your understanding of the main characters will build consecutively. Still, every title in the series stands alone and it is not necessary to read them in order. This is especially true of the later titles.

In this book, Dave, who has become an ex-cop living in a Louisiana bayou, finds himself accused of a murder he didn't commit, and has to travel to Montana to clear his name. These contrasting milieus provide a canvas for descriptive master Burke to pull out all the stops. This is Louisiana: "Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen." And Montana: "There were lakes surrounded by cattails set back against the mountain range, and high up on the cliffs long stretches of waterfall were frozen solid in the sunlight like enormous white teeth."

Somehow the shift in scene lets some air into the oppressiveness of the initial chapters and symbolically gives Dave space to redeem himself, at least for this novel. There will be many other opportunities for redemption in the books that follow, for Dave Robicheaux is a mysterious soul whose integrity and self-control dance dangerously on the edge with his propensity for violence. It's a compelling brew which make the reading of these books a compulsive addiction.

A couple of cases

The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl, by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1933. Perry Mason is an iconic figure whose relevance, eighty years after his creation, is perhaps even greater than ever. We need a lawyer-hero, dammit, to help us safely negotiate our course through the shark-infested waters in these parlous times. These were the first two of ninety Perry Mason books by Gardner, and it is interesting to see the sprouting of the nascent character. In the first story, The Case of the Velvet Claws, which never even makes it into the courtroom, Mason is more like a private eye than a lawyer. Think Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, and all the detective pulp fiction of the 1930s, which is a good distance from the urbane Raymond Burr of the TV series. By the second book, however, Mason has fully developed into the legal wizard who has probably done more to resuscitate public faith in the judicial process than all the actual lawyers out there. He is more restrained, less of an overt tough guy, but inwardly as tough as they come.

In these books it is abundantly clear that the beautiful Della Street, Mason's secretary, is majorly in love with the dashing attorney. She even gets to plant a kiss on him at the end of Velvet Claws, leaving some very visible lipstick behind. This is an element that never evolves much through the book and TV series, unfortunately for her; Mason is much too preoccupied with whatever his current case is to stoop to notice any form of wood at hand other than a gavel.

Somehow these books seem timeless. There is very little description that fixes them in their time period. We are completely pulled into the mystery itself, which exists in a world of its own. The discovery of a whole other layer of truth underneath the apparent one, the status quo obviousness of guilt and innocence pulled back by the superior man. Perry Mason represents the truth. That is his ultimate client.

Support your local sociopath

Pop. 1280, by Jim Thompson, 1964.

As one of the writers who defines literary noir, Jim Thompson found the perfect balance of black comedy and bleak irony with this novel. If you have read his best known book The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280 is also a variation on the theme of a small-town sheriff who ends up presiding over a murderous roundup of most of the story's other characters. In the case of this book, the carnage is accompanied with a leavening dose of low comedy and a feast of sociopolical satire from the point of view of the sociopathic Nick Corey, High Sheriff of Pottsdale.

This comic tale is something that might be produced by an unholy union of Mark Twain and Jack the Ripper's mother. The sheriff juggles three women, possessed of insatiable sex drives, who are amusingly offset by his attempts to accommodate all of them without getting caught and while not missing breakfast. The passions that fuel the characters have escalated to the level of mini-religious apocalypse by novel's end. Only then do we realize Nick's comic objectivity conceals a frightening psychosis. This is also seen when as the only character with sympathetic feelings for the downtrodden Negroes, he dispatches a loyal old black servant with a shotgun practically on principle.

It is interesting to consider this work in light of the influence that Texas has had in terms of national politics over the last fifty years since it was written. We are still a killer nation and Texas, which is the evident setting of the book, epitomizes this. The annual number of gun murders in Texas (1246 in 2010) is approximately the population of the small town where this novel is set. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has nothing on the more efficient bloodbath that greets us daily from the "red" states.

Winning the Cool War

Live and Let Die, by Ian Fleming, 1955.

Despite the fact that this, the second James Bond novel, does for racism what the previous one did for misogyny, Ian Fleming achieves complete mastery over the spy thriller genre. This book revels in the exoticism of America (with its many "negroes") and Jamaica (whose waters teem with dangerous sharks, barracuda, and octopi)--and a major supervillain called Mr. Big, a black gangster with artistic sensibilities, particularly in the way he kills. Bond, like a modern knight-errant, carries the standard of the British Empire into these out of the way places, aided by his highly cultivated taste for wines, women, and weaponry.

In that the novels debuted in the 1950s, and launched the 60s version of the Bond icon epitomized by Sean Connery, we may consider Ian Fleming to have in large part invented the modern era. Not content to win the Cold War, he won the Cool War as well, replacing the anger and depression of the post-World War II heroes with wit, panache, and a sexual killer instinct.

In creating Bond, Fleming also created JFK, whose favorite writer was, of course, Fleming. Let us not underestimate this feat of imagination which has changed the course of history, providing a somewhat more gentlemanly gender stereotype which has enabled us to transition into the 21st century with our homicidal instincts shaken not stirred.

Quantum of bondage

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming, 1953. "Bond--James Bond." This is where it all began, with Ian Fleming's first novel of the series. I read it in high school in the early 60s, along with a couple of other Bond books, loving of course the movie Bond of the era, Sean Connery. Now I return to it having seen and enjoyed the splendid recent entries in the movie series starring Daniel Craig, among them Casino Royale, finally.

Encountering the original Bond in book form is a bit of a shocker, really. He's a stone killer and a sexual beast, chiseled out of Cold War sensibilities and gender stereotypes. Completely politically incorrect. There is considerable power in this persona: huge, coiling energy that is capable of anything. In this sense of latent brutality, Daniel Craig is perhaps a more convincing Bond even than Connery. (Still, Connery has that quintessential core of Bonditude that cannot be denied.)

I was taken aback by the strength of the novel. Fleming's prose is not pretty, but it is authoritatively rough-hewn and terse--not, however, lacking in English flair. I enjoyed Fleming's daring in devoting a good large piece of the book to the description of one card game. I didn't recall the movie allowing such a large block of time to covering the incident. Fleming makes it work. He also goes on for an age about the torture administered to Bond's genitals while he is tied to a chair. The recent movie amply documents that extended pummeling in excruciating fashion. But to turn to Bond's tender side, so to speak, Fleming also shows James as tentative and vulnerable around Vesper Lynd, the "Bond girl" of this book. Before we even have a handle on Bond as a recurring series character, we already see his range of emotion--his ambivalence about women and ability to get his heart broken.

I love the last line of the book: "Yes, dammit, I said 'was'. The bitch is dead now." What a dash of cold water! James nearly lost his testicles trying to save Vesper--and he was betrayed. Something has died here for this newly minted double-0 agent: his last illusions about being able to rely on anything else in life beyond his resilient body and  keen mind and finely honed instincts. As for women--"the bitch is dead now." THE END. That's pretty powerful.

We know of course the women are going to come back, though, again and again, like Ursula Andress in the first Bond film, Dr. No, emerging in her iconic white bikini like Venus from the foam, fetchingly carrying her conch shells. But that's another book for another time. I'll read or reread all of these eventually. They have tied me to the chair!

Sharper than a serpent's tooth

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847. This is one of those books I read in college and probably would not have given another thought to in this life, except that I saw a bit of the recent film adaptation with Reese Witherspoon and became interested to go back and understand more about the background and characters. Now that I have reread the novel, I will return to the movie and see what I think of it. (I doubt from what I have seen so far that it will stand a chance against the classic that inspired it.)

There are two features that really mark Vanity Fair as a work worthy of preservation down the ages, I think. First, Becky Sharp is a fantastic character. She has the extraordinary ability to please people, flatter them, make them fall in love with her, men and women alike. What that means is you too, reader, will be pleased. Unfortunately, like all the others, you will be betrayed. The charisma-dripping Miss Sharp turns out to have nothing on her mind but herself and living in the style to which she has become accustomed, usually at your expense. The amazing feat of characterization here is that at least for the first half of the novel, we are pulling for Becky, even though we know she is a bad 'un, and only when everyone else has finally abandoned her do we also reluctantly set our carriages off in the opposite direction from her. Thackeray got us to love her in spite of ourselves, and finally to taste the bitter ashes of our own foolishness for doing so.

The second salient feature of this book, for me, is the incredibly intrusive narrator, who defines the disillusioned, ironic stance while imposing his view of things on us every other moment. Despite this, we would probably never have any interest in this story if not for the personality of the storyteller, who is so outrageously funny, so piquant yet nonchalant, a self-declared puppet-master for the characters who are trotted out before us, yet without a lot of love for any of them (oh, perhaps Becky, bad as she is) that we are compelled to turn the page.

"Vanity Fair" sees the world as a theatre for people's vanity, and one by one they are defeated by their own attachment to money, beauty, fame, and the eternal comfort of feeling that they are better than somebody else. Some things, unfortunately, have not changed much since 1847.

Under the lash

Whip Hand, by Charles Willeford, Gold Medal Books, 1961. Published under the moniker of W. Franklin Sanders, this early effort by Willeford has never been reprinted but is available now in ebook form. If you want a copy of the first edition, be prepared to shell out a $350 for a collectible copy, a mere 100,000% increase over the original price. This is what we should have been investing our money in in high school.

As lurid as the cover makes the novel seem, this is a serious experiment in multiple narration. You think you're reading flippin' Faulkner when the voice of Junior, comes in. He's just your garden variety psychopath from Oklahoma, doing what he knows best to do when he comes to a strange land like Texas, which is to kill people.

As for the babe with the whip, she's really quite demure and gets all mushy when her big cop boyfriend barges into her mansion with the crook who kidnapped her little sister. Yeah, she can wield that whip, all right, but only because her old man taught her how to use it for self-defense. And she only uses it on Junior, providing the one moment of restraint in the novel.

If you understand the genre, you'll recognize this as a hidden treasure.