Dave Robicheaux
Created by James Lee Burke
"I wanted to wake to the great, gold-green, sun-spangled promise of the South Louisiana in which I had grown up. I didn't want to be part of the history taking place in our state."
(Dave muses on post-Katrina New Orleans in The Tin Roof Blowdown)
New
Orleans Police Department detective screw-up turned New Iberia,
LA Police Detective DAVE ROBICHEAUX is the Great Lost P.I
, no matter whether he wears a badge or not. For all the attention
he pays to the regulations, it's a wonder he's a cop at all.
The guy just doesn't fit in, doesn't follow the rules, takes the law into his own hands when it suits him, and gets personally involved in every case he's ever worked on, it seems. And he doesn't give a fuck. And yet, somehow, he's still a cop. In one of the latter books, author James Lee Burke even lets him be a private op for a while, teaming him up with his former partner in the NOPD, Cleetus, but then he let it slide. Too bad -- Dave is a natural P.I.
Burke writes like a dream, but the series has at times devolved into almost formula. The number of ex-girlfriends wandering back into his life, desperately needing his help, is staggering, and lately there have been a few too many dead people popping up to offer help. And every book seems to have a scene where Batiste, Dave's handyman, preps the barbeque for the day while Dave slurps an ice-cold Dr. Pepper, and looks out at the mist rising on the bayou from the dock of the boathouse.
Still, when he's on his game, Burke is a powerful writer. No matter how many times he describes that boathouse scene, my mouth still starts to watering, and I swear I vcan almost smell the woodsmoke in the air.
Heaven's Prisoners was made into 1996 film starring Alec Baldwin as Dave, but the results were far from satisfying. All of Burke's sensuous evocation of the bayous is missing -- the film could have been shot in New Jersey. And Baldwin, one of the producers, was just completely miscast. Rumours abound that Tommy Lee Jones has purchased the film rights for two more Burke novels, Dixie City Jam and In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. Now that's casting.
Recently, Burke has created another almost-PI, Deaf Smith, Texas defense lawyer Billy Bob Holland.
UNDER OATH
TRIVIA
NOVELS
...
...
FILMS
ALSO OF INTEREST
Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
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