Do You Love James Lee Burke?

[silk_noir]

Okay, the man cannot write more than one kind of sex scene, and he's hopelessly sentimental. He trots out macho gingerbread paragraphs like Homer did epithets, but with hella more punctuation than Cormac McCarty. Yet when I started writing 'for real,' he was a revelation. The novel of his I read before I got into the Robicheaux series was The

Comments

[silk_noir]

I only just found out about it last night.

And hey, how the hell are you? Haven't heard from you in a while!

[danima]

On the topic of literary depictions of New Orleans, did you ever read Jitterbug Perfume? I've been wanting to ask someone with first-hand experience of the city whether Robbins got his characterization of the city even remotely right, or if he was just writing out of his ass.

[silk_noir]

I'll have to give it a look.

[markteppo]

OMFG is right. That might be pitch-perfect casting.

[silk_noir]

I think so.

Except there is always the nagging thought in the bakc of my head, as Streak battles his way through another violent violet night that Dayumn, isn't he a little long in the tooth for this shit now? He's always rhapsodizing (and rightly, don't get me wrong) about Louisiana in the depression and post-war era--he grows up in New Iberia in the '40s. So let's say he's 12 in 1949. Whch makes him born in 1937. So by the time he and Cletus Purcell are bashing around as "the Bobbsey Twins of Homocide" when The Neon Rain comes out, in 1987, he's about 50. By the time he's on his 3rd wife, he's goddamn near 70. And still beating the crap out of people.

The real burning question is, who's gonna play Cletus Purcell? Oh, nobody, because they don't include him in the movie.

Maybe he's just unplayable.

[st_writes]

I do love James Lee Burke. But I've stopped reading his books because I can't take the violence. They have given me nightmares. Certain scenes just never leave my head. So, I have cut myself off.