The Best American Noir of the Century

James Lee Burke (1936-) was born in Houston but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana coast, where so much of his fiction is based. After attending the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he received his BA and MA from the University of Missouri at Columbia. After three critically praised mainstream novels, his fourth received more than a hundred rejections over more than a decade, until the University of Louisiana Press published The Lost Get-Back Boogie in 1986; it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

His first crime novel, The Neon Rain (1987), featured David Robicheaux, a Vietnam veteran and homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. He has been described by his creator as “Everyman from the morality plays of the Renaissance. He tries to give voice to those who have none.” After stepping on too many toes in that first book, Robicheaux leaves to work on the police force in New Iberia Parish. Always present is a sidekick, Clete Purcel, also a former NOPD officer, who is now a private eye. The second novel in the series, Heaven’s Prisoners (1988), was filmed in 1996, starring Eric Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Lynch, and Teri Hatcher. The third book, Black Cherry Blues (1989), won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best novel of the year. Burke won a second Edgar for Cimarron Rose (1997), which introduced Billy Bob Holland, a Texas Ranger turned lawyer in Missoula, Montana. MWA named Burke a Grand Master for lifetime achievement in 2009.

“Texas City, 1947,” often described as Burke’s finest short work of fiction, is a dark coming-of-age story that was first published in the Southern Review in 1991. It’s first book appearance was in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best (1992). It was later collected in the author’s Jesus Out to Sea (2007).

Right after World War II everybody in southern Louisiana thought he was going to get rich in the oil business. My father convinced himself that all his marginal jobs in the oil fields would one day give him the capital to become an independent wildcatter, perhaps even a legendary figure like Houston’s Glenn McCarthy, and he would successfully hammer together a drilling operation out of wooden towers and rusted junk, punch through the top of a geological dome, and blow salt water, sand, chains, pipe casing, and oil into the next parish.

So he worked on as a roughneck on drilling rigs and as a jug-hustler with a seismograph outfit, then began contracting to build board roads in the marsh for the Texaco company. By mid-1946, he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya Basin and over in East Texas. But that was also the year that I developed rheumatic fever and he drove my mother off and brought Mattie home to live with us.