The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

From Jules Brenner

     If there's anything sheriff detective Dave Robicheaux values strongly besides bringing criminals to justice they are his relationships, which are his treasures. From his new wife Molly, to his adopted daughter Alafair and all the creatures in residence in his home, to bounty hunter and partner in arms Clete Purcell, to his boss Helen Soileau who calls him "Pops," "Bwana" and "Streak" according to her mood — these people are in his heart and mind as he pursues depraved criminals amidst the roiling chaos of an historic blast of nature—Hurricane Katrina.

     In its aftermath, crime is as rampant as the breakdown of law and order allows, providing a river of plunder for opportunists of every description — those who, according to Dave, bring to mind "simian ancestry in the human gene pool." And, with the NOPD virtually wiped out, it falls to Helen's department in New Iberia parish to furnish some primary law enforcement in the city of New Orleans. Which brings Dave's attention to a pernicious strain of human debasement.

     The case starts with Natalia Ramos, an ex-prostitute shacking up with addict Father Jude LeBlanc whom she can't find and is desperately looking for. But the agreement of witness accounts indicates that her stiff-collared lover was accosted by four black men as he was breaking a hole in the roof of his church in the Lower 9th ward as an escape hatch when the rising river threatened the lives of the people who sought refuge with him. Compounding tragedy, however, the attack caused his drowning, along with his parishioners. As for the four black men, they were only after the priest's motorboat.
     Brothers Eddy and Bertrand Melancon, Andre Rochon and his young nephew Kevin comprise a team whose specialty in life is house robbery, with a minor in bail jumping. Now seeing the storm "as a gift from God," and having no need to "crowd into the stink at the Superdome," they happen upon Thelma Baylor, a young white girl, and rape and torture her. Afterward, "...sharing drinks from a silver flask and happy as hogs rolling in shit" they troll the uptown area of the city for some more payback against the white man. It is at this point in their predatory journey that they wind up in the mansion of one Sidney Kovick, a local mobster, and discover a hiding place with a .38 snub, a ziploc bag of blood diamonds, and five bundles of hundred dollar bills.

     What they don't know is that they've been spotted by the residents of the only mansion on the street with lights burning, where Otis Baylor, wife Melanie and daughter Thelma reside — yes, Thelma Baylor, the girl they raped. Their night of plunder will come to an end when, upon the quartet's return to the Kovick house for what they might have missed, a single bullet bursts Eddy's throat and tears Kevin's skull apart.
     Who pulled that trigger is one of the primary mysteries for Dave to solve, but it's not the only problem on the overworked detective's plate. Trumping everything is the appearance of Ronald Bledsoe, an independent opportunist whom Dave recognizes as a man of sociopathic ammorality and great cruelty whose presence multiplies the tension fourfold. As Dave describes him, he's a man whose "head and face look like the end of a dildo." Bledsoe now takes pre-eminence in Dave's playbook of worries because, from the way the man talks and behaves, Dave knows he's no mere lowlife. Dave recognizes this smooth operator as a mortal danger, and that he's after Alafair, who has profoundly and publically subjected Bledsoe to the full weight of her contempt. (This character may be based to some degree on Burke's real daughter Alafair, the author of Dead Connection)

     From the residents of New Orleans who lived through the storm devastation to the millions who read about it from a distance with a mixture of awe and sympathy, the picture they have of the city is incomplete without a reading of Burke's horror-steeped journey through "New Orlean's long night of the soul." He inserts his fictional characters into the mother of all storms and it reads like a deep wound felt at first hand. Burke, himself a resident of New Iberia, describes a milieu of mayhem in which crime and revenge is as mental as it is physical, and where the central character has the capacity to weigh guilt against remorse like few other dedicated guardians of the law are disposed to do.

     Burke's literary power is in the meticulous creation of exemplars of mankind across the spectrum of good and evil. His overriding need for justice is urgent; his rage at the bestial and the unconcerned is equally palpable; the hope he maintains for a positive outcome is redemptive; and his irony is penetrating. The processes Burke uses amount to the most emotion-soaked, three-dimensional literature in the field, poetic and tough.

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