Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409270060
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Most fictional series begin to slow down in the fourth or fifth installment as the author settles into a pattern. That's not happening with James Lee Burke.
If anything, he has gone in the opposite direction, using the structure of the detective novel as a premise to explore dark extremities of the soul and of society. This, his seventh book featuring sometimes-cop Dave Robicheaux, is as crazed and compelling and imaginative as his first. If the plot is sometimes problematic, well, carefully constructed plots are less important than characters, and this bunch may be the most vivid and bizarre Burke has ever collected. Like his last novel, "In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead," "Dixie City Jam" revolves around ghosts and sins of the past reborn in the present.
The story has to do with a sunken Nazi submarine somewhere in the Gulf near New Orleans. Years before, Dave saw it when he was scuba diving. Now he has been hired by Hippo Bimstine, a local Democratic pol, to find the sub. Exactly why Hippo wants the U-boat is unclear, but others are interested, too. There are the Calucci brothers, Italian gangsters, and Tommy Bobalouba, their Irish counterpart.
To keep things interesting, there's also a vigilante who's killing dope dealers in particularly gruesome ways; several cops who are working both sides of the law; and Oswald Flat, the travelling Appalachian evangelist who's out to save New Orleans from itself. But the central figure in the novel is Will Buchalter, the neo-Nazi villain who loves vintage jazz. Even in Burke's world of full-tilt crazies and lost souls, Buchalter stands out as a memorable and fearsome creation.
Through him, Burke is trying to deal with the horror of Nazism. That's a large task for this kind of novel to undertake, and, to my mind, it's successful. Burke's prose is still as surprising and sharp as it's ever been. It's more than enough to pull the novel through those sections where the narrative line is hard to follow.
And the ending could not be better. The last two sentences of the Epilogue give the novel an unexpected hopeful turn.
For the uninitiated, "Dixie City Jam" is probably not the best place to enter the series. Go back to the first three novels - "The Neon Rain," "Heaven's Prisoners" and "Black Cherry Blues" - to understand what Burke is up to in this one.
by CNB