James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux crime/ Southern noir novels are one of Bob Moyer’s favorite series. Here’s his take on the latest.
Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer
THE HADACOL BOOGIE: A Dave Robicheaux Novel. By James Lee Burke. Atlantic Crime. 477 pages. $30, hardcover.
This is a big book, but then it takes a big book to hold the larger-than-life characters of Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel. Vietnam grunts, The Bobbsey Twins French Quarter patrol, and now residing in New Iberia, La., Dave is a deputy sheriff, and Clete, a private eye.
They still do what they’ve always done — battle evil in its many forms. In this latest installment, evil shows up when a shaggy man drops a bag with a body in it on Dave’s back yard. It’s Clemmie Benoit, a waitress/hostess at Jerry Carlucci’s bar/brothel. She’ was a “…girl with the resources of a leaf blowing across the continent,” who stumbled upon something that got her killed, and that takes the rest of the book to uncover.
Something is going on at Carlucci’s Landing. A native of New Iberia like Dave, and also a Vietnam vet, Carlucci came back from Nam dirty. And stayed that way. He’s tied up with the Mafia, led by Ludow, a man “…evil like a tarantula, the kind who wraps its legs around the heart of its victim.” Dave and Clete keep digging away at the connections between the Mafia and Carlucci.
Of course, Dave has smaller outbursts of evil to deal with. His new partner, Valerie Benoit, gets hassled by another deputy. Dave still does the Hadacol Boogie every now and then. He’s a dry drunk who can’t keep from taking it out on the bad guys, like the deputy and Carlucci. It’s always been a problem for him, but now it’s intensified.
The invasion of evil into the Louisiana Bayous also intensifies, growing stronger each day, infusing the very atmosphere with the clash of good versus evil. Burke does here what he does so well, bringing the human and natural worlds into sync. As the evil inexorably moves in, accompanied by a Vietnam era helicopter with a pilot from Dave’s past, the scenery resonates with the battle: “…the Gulf seemed to sink under the land, then swell suddenly and become a huge purple wave traveling froth-capped inland, ripping the roots of the entire environment like wet newspaper.”
Everyone in Dave’s life is threatened here, including his daughter Alafair, the sheriff, his partner, and “the saddest man” Dave’s ever known, the handyman Mr. Hinch. This is a series of course, so Dave is still around at the end, and the bayou has returned to its natural calm. Although Dave’s future, and that of this series, is unsettled, we leave him unlike ever before, loved and at peace.