Interview with James Lee Burke

Hurricanes, violence, and the craft of writing in an interview with a great Southern writer.

Acclaimed writer James Lee Burke’s novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, took a long, fictional look at the real horrors of Hurricane Katrina – one of the first – through the eyes of one of his most well-known characters, a detective named Dave Robicheaux. In late 2008, the film version of Burke’s novel, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead, hits theaters, starring Tommy Lee Jones and John Goodman. In 1986, his book, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Burke answered my phone call to his summer home just outside of Missoula, Montana to discuss the 17th book in his Robicheaux series, Swan’s Peak, which comes out July 8.

Photograph by Robert Clark, courtesy of Simon & Schuster

16B: Your last book, The Tin Roof Blowdown, took the reader into the eye of Hurricane Katrina. Your description of those days was apocalyptic, and nearly read like the book of Revelations. Where were you during the storm, and was it more difficult to write this book due to the immense amount of loss that took place?

JLB: We happened to be in Montana. We live part of the year up here, and part of the year in Louisiana, so we were in Montana when the storm hit, and were back in Louisiana later.

Well, it’s depressing. It’s truly depressing. I grew up on the Gulf Coast and have been in other hurricanes and have seen killer hurricanes, and they’re terrifying, the waste that they can lay to an exposed coastal area like Louisiana that doesn’t have any barrier islands…

Inside the narration of The Tin Roof Blowdown, Dave Robicheaux said that it was difficult for him to describe. He’s standing on a highway of a two-lane road pointing south. They’re around Abbeville or Vermillion Parish, Louisiana. It’s a spot on which my wife and I stood looking at the desolation, and I’ve seen some bad ones... It looked like the aftermath of a nuclear weapon. This is a fact: looking south to the coastline there was not a living thing. The earth was encrusted with salt and saline. This is all sugarcane and rice acreage. Every house was uninhabitable. Every one of them, as far as your eye could see was marked with spray-paint. Marked for the bulldozer’s blade. The trees in the spring were totally bare: they looked like broken fingers, gnarled fingers sticking out of the encrusted mud that was everywhere. The road was impassable. The mud had dried with all the waste inside of it. I think probably oil seepage had become glued. It looked like someone put up a Dali painting. You could not see a bird anywhere in the sky, not a living creature…

It was really sad. Those people went through enormous suffering. They died for three days. I think it will remain the worst scandal in American political history. I know of nothing like it in my lifetime…Sickening. There’s no other term, just sickening. I’m 71, and I never saw an instance of political cynicism that could be compared to what occurred there, but others will have to make the judgment. I don’t think history will look back in a kind way at the leadership of this country.

16B: We’re an arts and culture magazine, and I’m a big fan of your descriptive writing. Your stories are rich with accurate metaphors for how things look, smell, sound and feel. What would you say to writers who are attempting to sharpen their powers of description?

JLB: I think it’s important to read good writers, to avoid bad prose. Never read bad prose. It’s like tennis or basketball: most people that play it well always say, don’t watch the guys who play badly, it messes up your head. Same with writing, find writers whom you admire and who are genuinely invested in their craft. You read those guys. You may not write like them, you may have a different mindset. But you quickly begin to learn how it’s done. How do you use adjectives in the predicate, rather than as a direct modifer… Sherwood Anderson for example, Mark Twain, Eudora Welty just wrote beautiful sentences, and it was the spartan quality of their prose, the leanness of it, the fact they never used adjectives unless they were imperative. They wrote short declarative sentences for example that everyone imitates. Many of them learned their craft being journalists.

16B: Speaking of learning your craft, you were 29 when you published your first book. You also weathered a ten-year publishing drought that began in your mid-30s. How was your confidence affected and how did you mange to persist?

JLB: That’s a good question. [Great big laugh] I wrote that first book when I was 23, finished by 24; I published two more after that. During the middle of my career after I published three novels with some degree of success, I was a young guy, I was 34 and had published three books with good houses. Then I went 15 years without being able to sell anything in hardback. I could not publish many short stories and I amassed hundreds of rejections. My novel, The Lost Get Back Boogie, was rejected by 111 editors. It was under constant submission for 9 years. That’s a fact. Then LSU press put me back in business, and that same novel, I cut it 85 pages, it was nominated for a Pulitzer prize and has been published all over the world…

I had to relearn an old lesson about rejection which is you do it a day at time, write a day at a time. You write for the pleasure of writing, do as well as you can each day with your prose, and then you let God be the measure of it and the only critic you have. You turn it over to your higher power.

I had another rule: I learned it myself working offshore, 20 years old. I worked ten days on, five days off, and when I went back to the quarter boat on the water, I’d put my manuscripts in the mail, send ‘em off, and when I’d come back to the shore, my rejections would be in my rented post office box. I had a rule for myself: I kept ‘em 36 hours at home, a day and a half, and then I would have the manuscript back in the mail. Nothing I ever write stays at home for more than a day and a half. I call it Richard M. Nixon syndrome, you just keep hanging around, and finally they give you the White House. That’s the only way to do it.

A guy put it like this to me: you don’t keep score; the score takes care of itself. Bear down on the batter one pitch at a time. And toward that bottom of the ninth, look over your shoulder and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the arithmetic on the scoreboard. I never forgot those words.

16B: That’s lovely. One pitch at a time.

Any news on the status of In the Electric Mist, the movie?

JLB: Yeah, I just saw the last cut. It was shown to me four or five days ago and it looks really good, and the music is a fit with the filmography. The music was done by this composer, Marco Beltrami. He’s very good and was up for an Academy award earlier this year. I liked him very much. Anyway, it’s supposed to be with a distributor directly. I think the plan is for it to come out late fall, or early 2009. Everyone gave it his all. All very talented people, great cast. Goodman plays the villain, oh Jeez.

16B: One last question, thanks for taking the time…

JLB: I’m sorry I talked your arm off.

16B: Not so much - I’m used to it. It’s my pleasure as well.

I’ve really become a fan of the books since I took a detective fiction class years ago. In closing, for those who are familiar with the Dave Robicheaux series or not, could you give a look into the new book, Swan Peak?

JLB: Well, it deals in part with the hijacking of Christianity for genuinely evil motives… When there’s trouble amongst human beings, it involves money, sex, and power, sometimes all three. And there’s terrible guys in here. The book is the sequel to Black Cherry Blues, which is the novel that won me the Edgar award in 1989. It deals with a pristine environment that’s almost endemic with nefarious and very powerful people.

It also has some characters in there who are some of the most unusual I have ever written. One’s an escaped convict and a country singer. He escapes from a contract prison in Texas and his pursuer is one of the gunbulls who comes after him. The gunbull [Ed: prison guard] was kicked out of the army for abusing prisoners in Iraq. It’s an unusual story about redemption. I think it’s a very strong book, I think it’s as strong as The Tin Roof Blowdown.

In this novel I try to tell the stories through the eyes of the people I find -- what’s the word for it? -- the people who are the real gladiators. Invariably, they turn out to be of the most humble origins. They’re nondescript. They’re 90 pounds soaking wet. Five minutes after they leave the room you barely remember what they look like. It’s always they, in my experience, that turn out to be the Herculean warriors, and unlike the gladiators that rattle their armor and drag their swords across the stone, they’re not people who actually reveal themselves…. It’s always been in my experience that when you’re really under the gun and in bad straits, the person that will bail you out comes out of nowhere, somebody totally self sacrificed, totally dedicated, and who thinks nothing at all of the sacrifice he makes for you, and then he disappears, St Paul talks about this, of angels in our midst. Hence we should be very careful how we treat other people [laughs]. Don’t mess with the wrong guy.