Library Limelights 192

James Lee Burke. The New Iberia Blues. USA: Simon & Schuster, 2019.

Anticipating a new Dave Robicheaux novel must come to terms with the character's increased sense of mortality. Dave's inner longings for Louisiana's lush but diminishing beauty and old way of life are overruled by the presence of graphic, violent crimes. A movie production company ‒ led by Desmond Cormier, a renowned film director with New Iberia roots ‒ moves into the area at the same time as bizarre murders begin mounting up. I counted eight bodies eventually. Cormier and his companions / sycophants, Antoine Butterworth and Lou Wexler, are under suspicion even though Dave combs the low end of the food chain, as he puts it, for connections and evidence. Filled with many, many characters, the story embraces Burke's familiarity with lowlife prison and bar culture as well as his flights of pure prose poetry. It doesn't help Dave that Wexler is making moves on his daughter Alafair, and the enigmatic assassin Smiley, of previous acquaintance, joins the disturbing chaos. It also doesn't help him that he falls hard for Bailey Ribbons, his new partner.

Funding for the movie comes from dubious sources; Bailey is able to interpret the odd tarot signs that seem to accompany each dead body, but the killer's motivation is unfathomable. As ever, Dave's best buddy Clete Purcel has his back. But Dave's habits of striking off alone or ignoring procedure finally earn him a suspension from Sheriff Helen Soileau. He struggles with occasional hallucinations verging on the supernatural; grateful for every moment of joy that nature provides, he nevertheless indulges in social commentary that exposes the sadness or evil in his world. All in all, it's immersive, it's intimate. I thought the previous novel (Robicheaux) signalled the end of the series. Now, I'm thinking the same of this one.

One-liners:

▪ I was his confessor, his cure-all, his bottle of aspirin and vitamin B, his hit of vodka Collins to sweep the spiders back into their nest. (15)

▪ The night was sliding into the hours when the psychological metabolism in certain people shifts into reverse and the worst in them comes out and they feed fires that warp and reconfigure who they are. (85)

▪ Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane. (182)

▪ There was a hurt on her face that made me want to paint my brains on the ceiling. (202)

Multi-liners:

▪ I reached down and picked up the burning cigarette Butterworth had thrown in the flower bed. I mashed it out on the horn button of the Subaru and stuck it in Butterworth's shirt pocket. (29)

▪ "Louisiana is America's answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum." (39)

▪ I didn't want to leave. I wanted to be decades younger. I wanted to be everything except what I was. (83)

▪ "How you doing with the program?"

"I haven't slept since the fall of Saigon," he replied. "Thanks for bringing it up." (183)

▪ Evil has a smell like copper coins on a hot stove, like offal burning on a winter day, like a gangrenous-soaked bandage at a battalion aid station in a tropical country. It violates your glands and your senses. (343-4)

A bartender:

"Did he come in with anyone? Make any friends, female or otherwise?" 

"I didn't pay that much attention," he said. "My regulars keep me busy, know what I mean?" 

"You've had some bad dudes in?" I asked. 

"Are you kidding?" 

"The Aryan Brotherhood?" 

"Who knows? Everybody's got sleeves these days, all blue, wrist to the pits, lots of swastikas. Race-baiting is back in style." 

"This isn't about race." 

"In this place everything is about race." (75)

Cajuns:

We had little money but didn't think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn't travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. ... Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. (141-2)

Hard to resist:

"I know about the loss of your wives," she said. "I don't know how you lived through all that." 

I didn't answer. She stood in the silence until my eyes found hers. "I don't care about age differences," she said. 

"The woman pays the price, Bailey. Men skate. The scarlet letter didn't die out with the Puritans." 

She looked up into my face. She touched my cheek. "You won't give in, will you?" she said. 

"Give in to what?" 

"Principle, vanity, whatever you call it. You and your friend Clete pretend to be rebels, but you're traditionalists. You know what a traditionalist is, don't you? Someone who lets dead people rule his life." (201)

Reconciliation:

When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn't have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn't have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realize finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we're already inside eternity and need not fear any longer. (299)

Greg Iles. Cemetery Road. USA: HarperCollins, 2019.

Another powerhouse Mississippi novel from Iles who never disappoints. The story's mild beginning — Marshall McEwan interrupts a highly successful journalism career in DC to help his dying father back home — belies the rat's nest of sordid events and old memories he encounters. Bienville is where he saw his brother die; this is where Jet, his first love, lives. Suddenly his old friend and mentor Buck Ferris is found dead, a murder cover-up. Buck's archaeological discoveries were about to affect every business transaction in town, particularly the proposed new paper mill. The McEwan family's debt-ridden newspaper, the need for new industry, the wealthy, ruthless Bienville Poker Club members, past family tragedies, all underlie Marshall's struggle to find the killer. Jet is in his life again as his lover; how long can they conceal it from her husband Paul and everyone else? Marshall and Paul grew up together and had shared many a hair-raising experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the pace accelerates, Marshall uncovers lies, bribes, blackmail, and unhealthy obsessions; some twisted sex has far-reaching consequences for numerous townspeople. Most of the characters are volatile and unpredictable, many with a motive to make Marshall disappear if a deal isn't negotiated ... considering his own secret affair, will he publish his findings or not? The danger to him is as serious as his own growing ambivalence about the value of principles vs. expedience. Humanity's best and worst slide, stumble, or careen through the stormy vortex of Bienville, Mississippi. Exaggerated or not, it's an enveloping experience that would make Tennessee Williams proud.

One-liners:

▪ I was in Mississippi, which from Washington looks like a fourth-world country. (71)

▪ The toughest acting job in the world is behaving normally in the presence of someone with whom you're having illicit sex. (77)

▪ "Those guys are rich enough to take a licking and keep on ticking." (200)

▪ I've been plunged into the most Kafkaesque nightmare imaginable: being killed for information I don't have. (420)

Multi-liners:

▪ For three months we've been gliding under the radar, knowing there was danger yet somehow feeling invulnerable. That changed today. (135)

▪ "That water ran downstream twenty years ago. You can't being it back. Water don't flow uphill. You need to bury your daddy and get your ass back to Washington, where you fit in." (266)

▪ Before he leaves, Arthur gives me what I can only describe as a smile of grudging respect. He's screwed enough people to appreciate a good fucking when he's on the receiving end. (473)

Bedrock sorrow:

The death of my son piled onto the death of my brother gave me a psychological burden—or perhaps a soul burden—that requires much of my fortitude to carry through each day. "My two Adams," I sometimes call them. I've had countless nightmares about both tragedies, my brother's more than my son's, which may seem odd. But recently, it's my little boy I see in the long watches of my restless nights. (70)

Summoned by the Poker Club:

Stripped of their names, I'm facing a predatory banker, an old-time oil tycoon, a newly minted U.S. senator, an entrepreneur with ties to the U.S. military, and a sleazy lawyer. What could possibly go wrong? 

"Greetings, Mr. McEwan," Claude Buckman says. "Come up and have a seat with us. There, beside Mr. Pine. I believe you know him." 

"I do." I walk up the other side of the table and sit beside Wyatt Cash. ... 

"I'd appreciate you taking out your cell phone, switching it off, and leaving it on the table." He waves a hand at his colleagues. All their phones lie before them on the polished wood, all apparently switched off. 

Shrugging my shoulders, I partly comply with his request by laying my iPhone on the table. 

"Thank you," says Buckman. "Now, Mr. McEwan. I detest pointless talk. So I'm going to be as straightforward as I can. We exist to earn profits, expand our businesses, and consolidate our power. We create wealth. If the lot of others happens to improve while we do that, that's fine, but it's not our concern." The banker pauses as if to be sure I'm following his lecture on capitalism. "You, on the other hand, are a journalist. Some have characterized you as a crusader. A do-gooder. An optimist, even." 

"I'd contest that last assertion. I don't know a veteran reporter who's not a cynic." (304-5)

His father's truth:

"I read your story about Buck Ferris being killed. And I believe he was. But here's the hard truth, son. Corruption is a part of capitalism. It's a by-product of the system. A necessary lubricant to make the machine work. Given human nature, I mean. Because that's the motive force of capitalism: greed. It's the most pragmatic system there is." (313)

Waterboarding:

The prospect of even temporary cessation of the pain and terror filled me with shameful gratitude. In less than two minutes I'd learned that I would betray anything I knew, everyone I loved. How could it be so easy to break a man? How could it be that some men had held out for days or weeks or months against torture? The only answer I could imagine was that there are degrees of torture. Pain is one thing, terror is another. Pain can be isolated by the mind, objectified, distanced, even befriended. Terror is a wild animal trying to claw its way out of your chest. 

"Take that blindfold off," said the genteel voice. (417)

Philip Kerr. The Other Side of Silence. Large Print. USA: Thorndike Press, 2016.

Long-time series favourite Bernie Gunther is now, in 1956, working as a concierge at a grand hotel on the Riviera. The job is tame for his talents, but the quiet life suits him as he approaches the age of sixty under the name of Walter Wolf. Kerr has cleverly woven a conceit into the essential fabric: Bernie meets Somerset Maugham who lived out the end of his life at Cap Ferrat. He asks Bernie to handle a personal matter; Maugham's openly gay lifestyle in those days was an easy target for egregious blackmailers. With Bernie, we know it won't be that straightforward. Especially since a despised man from his wartime past, Harold Hennig, appears as a guest at the hotel. And our hero, seeking solace from his suicidal feelings, becomes involved with another guest, the lovely Englishwoman Anne French.

The depicted Maugham character (and his household) are true to the man's acerbic nature, and one is reminded that he had been very active in a First World War spy network. Britain is still reeling from recent treachery within its ranks — Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt also play parts here, as events in Bernie's past come to the fore. Even the fate of the Amber Room is included. Stories within a story, so many dazing department and sub-department acronyms among German, Russian, and English authorities; but Bernie musters up his usual wit and turns the tables against an intricate plot. It's a thinking person's exercise rather than an action tale. Quite fascinating, the blend of historic reality with Bernie's situation at hand.

One-liners:

▪ In her matching black gloves and shoes, she looked every bit as fine as Christian Dior's bank balance. (31)

▪ Experience has taught me that it's better to be serious, and I should know; I've tried and failed to be serious on thousands of occasions. (180)

▪ Defeat was staring us in the face like the inscription on a new headstone. (201)

▪ "I was what they call a beefsteak Nazi: brown on the outside but red in the middle." (426)

Multi-liners:

▪ "This is Villefranche. There are more bars in this town than mailboxes. Which probably explains why the post is so slow." (38)

▪ I caught a strong smell of cologne, noted the expensive Cartier gold watch on the tanned wrist of the arm resting on the desk, and found myself wanting to cut the limb off and make him eat it. It was with this pleasing image that I entertained myself while we spoke. (120)

▪ Besides, I was bored. That's the thing about the British, even when they're spies they're so very boring. (344)

▪ "You might say I was a kind of troubleshooter. If I saw any trouble, I shot it." (426)

Forced socializing:

"I've not often been heard to say no to a glass of schnapps," I said. "And it's Lieutenant Gunther now."

"Yes, of course, you had a difference of opinion with Dr. Goebbels, didn't you?" 

"I was wrong about something. Made a mistake. I'm probably quite lucky to be a lieutenant, sir." 

"That's all right." Koch grinned and poured us a glass of schnapps. "The doctor and I have never exactly seen things eye to eye. Prior to my appointment as the East Prussian governor I'm afraid he rather suspected me of having been implicated in the publication of a newspaper article that made fun of his physical handicaps." 

There was only one handicap that I recalled, but it seemed foolish to disagree when all I really wanted was to get out of that place as soon as possible. (205-6)

His best life:

I went to the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat, slipped on my black morning coat, and immediately felt as if proper order had been restored to the world. It was as if I'd become a decent man again; polished and humanized, civil and courteous, and without any time for the darker shadows of feelings that pass for thoughts. Helping guests with their trivial problems, finding room keys, exchanging money, organizing porters, answering the telephone, fixing staff rotas ― it was all a reassuringly long way from the tawdry world of homosexual blackmail and Soviet spies. It's easy to believe civilization still has a bright future when you're behind the front desk of an expensive hotel. (285)

Courtship:

"And what would my horoscope say?" 

"That there's going to be a handsome man in your life. You just met him. He's a little older than you're used to, perhaps, but you're going to want to see a lot more of him. Hopefully naked. Just as soon as you've told him exactly what's bothering you." 

"You're good. You should write for a magazine. As a matter of fact, there is something bothering me. I haven't been entirely honest with you, Walter." 

"I read that in your horoscope, too." (303-4)