Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306130002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIke Mayo Book page editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Readers unfamiliar with James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels probably should not begin with this one.
"In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead" breaks so many of the traditional "rules" of crime fiction that it could be a bit off-putting. For openers, that wonderful title is literal. Burke's protagonist Dave Robicheaux spends several significant moments in an electric mist with the ghost of Gen. John Bell Hood and his troops. This is his first meeting:
"I walked up out of the shallows into the edge of the clearing dripping water, hyacinth vines stringing from my legs. The men around the fire paid me little notice, as though, perhaps, I had been expected. They were cooking tripe in an iron pot, and they had hung their haversacks and wooden canteens in the trees and stacked their rifle-muskets in pyramids of fives. Their gray and butternut-brown uniforms were sun-bleached and stiff with dried salt, and their unshaved faces had the lean and hungry look of a rifle company that had been in the field a long time."
Hood appears to Dave to warn of an evil that has come to his Louisiana bayou parish. But which evil is it? It might have something to do with the film company that's shooting a Civil War movie there. The picture's star, Elrod Sykes, has a serious drinking problem, but he also has troubling visions of the past.
One of the film's backers is Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni, a half-mad New Orleans gangster who grew up with Dave. He and some of his "associates" are in town and up to no good. Then there's the matter of the young women who are being murdered. And if Dave doesn't have enough on his plate with all of those, there's the appearance of the body of a black man Dave saw murdered in 1957.
All of those elements make for a rich stew of a novel, one that could be a disorganized mess. But Burke is a solid craftsman. He knows what his readers want and he's never confusing. And his writing has never been stronger. The supernatural scenes in particular are brilliant pieces of prose, combining hallucination, history and reality.
Mystery purists may say that an essentially naturalistic form should not include the supernatural, but Burke has used ghosts and visions before, though they haven't been so prominent. Within Burke's fictional world, it really makes little difference what these ghosts are. They could be "real" or they might be drug-induced apparitions, or some sort of flashback to Dave's days as an alcoholic, or they might be his own subconscious speaking to him, warning him.
Whatever the case, James Lee Burke makes them a logical part of Dave's world where the all-too-real violence of America in the 1990s meets the history of the South.
"In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead" is an accomplished and readable entry in this remarkable series.
by CNB