Black Cherry Blues
by James Lee Burke
Summary
Dave Robicheaux is a widower now, running a bait dock south of New Iberia, raising the little Salvadoran girl he pulled from a drowned plane and named Alafair, and holding his sobriety and his sanity in the same two hands, when his past ambles up grinning: Dixie Lee Pugh, his old college roommate, once nearly Elvis, now a burned out rockabilly legend leasing oil rights in Montana for men worse than he understands. Dixie has overheard two of his colleagues discussing bodies buried on Blackfeet land, and made the mistake of saying so.
What follows drags Robicheaux out of Louisiana and into the Bitterroots: a leaseman's frame job leaves a corpse with Robicheaux's name attached, and to clear himself, and to keep Alafair, whom the state now has reasons to remove, he moves them both to Montana and takes apart the intersection of the oil business, the mob money behind it, resident gangster Sally Dio's lakeside court, and the murdered oil men on the reservation. Burke's prose is the genre's most sensuous instrument, pecan trees and thunderheads, the electric shimmer of Robicheaux's rage and dreams, his dead wife visiting in the night rain, and the violence, when the book releases it, has the moral weight of a man who fears what he can do.
The ending on the lake pays every account, at the usual Robicheaux price: another layer of scar.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want crime fiction at full literary pressure, the bayou baroque style carrying a story about grief, custody and the men who buy land out from under the dead.
Historical Context & Significance
Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1990, the third Robicheaux novel completing the series' arrival: James Lee Burke had spent two decades as a mid list literary novelist, The Lost Get-Back Boogie famously rejected over a hundred times before a university press published it toward a Pulitzer nomination, and the Robicheaux books converted that voice into the most acclaimed franchise in American crime fiction, this Edgar its first official crown.
Burke would win a second with Cimarron Rose, take the Grand Master title, and carry Robicheaux across four decades and two dozen volumes, Louisiana's tides and traumas, Katrina included, entering the series in real time; the critics' phrase for him, the Faulkner of crime fiction, hardened into standard packaging.
Alafair, the rescued daughter introduced in the previous book and defended in this one, grew up inside the series and outside it: Alafair Burke, the author's actual daughter and the character's namesake, became a bestselling crime novelist herself, the family trade continuing.