The 2005 storm that submerged large areas of the poorest parts of New Orleans was the costliest in American history and exposed scandalous government neglect. The collection of short stories, Jesus Out to Sea, and the new Robicheaux novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, both deal with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. So it's all the more remarkable that his latest works have again excited a sense of fevered anticipation. Burke, now into his 70s, was increasingly seen as a safe pair of hands. However, while Burke has produced a bestseller most years since the early 90s, there is a sense that some of the more recent novels have been received rather more respectfully than ecstatically. Both have brought Burke Edgar awards for the best crime novel of the year - Robicheaux in Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Holland in Cimarron Rose (1998) - and both have topped the bestseller lists while simultaneously attracting critical acclaim.

Throughout the 90s the cognoscenti's vote consistently went to James Lee Burke, whose darkly moralistic evocations of crime and punishment in Louisiana and Montana probed the shifting boundaries between the powerful and powerless, past and present, and, especially, good and evil in modern America.īurke has created two complex and absorbing protagonists: Sheriff's deputy Dave Robicheaux, like Burke from New Iberia, Louisiana - and also like Burke a practising Catholic and former alcoholic - and Billy Bob Holland, a Texas Ranger turned defence lawyer who relocated his practice, and the crippling baggage of his own past, to the small town in Montana where Burke now spends most of the year. In the 1970s it was Elmore Leonard and in the 80s James Ellroy. A t any one time crime fiction will usually boast a writer, most often someone just below the level of the best known or biggest seller, who is hailed by insiders as the best in the business.

The tin roof blowdown