I read a lot of speculative fiction, but sometimes foray into detective/mystery/suspense. In these genres, one of my favorite writers is James Lee Burke.
When you pick a great book up, you can’t set it down. The other day, on our library’s new arrivals shelf, I stumbled on Burke’s latest, Wayfaring Stranger. I opened the book to glance at it, and that’s all it took; I was hooked. Once you start, you might as well reserve a day. You won’t be able to put it down.
Weldon Holland, the grandson of an old-time Texas tough lawman, at age sixteen survives an encounter with Bonny and Clyde. As a young WWII lieutenant he survives the Battle of the Bulge with his sergeant, Hershel Pine. Later they’re trapped behind enemy lines, where he meets his true love and future wife, Rosita, the camp’s sole survivor.
After the war Weldon and Rosita return to Houston, where he and Hershel form a company and enter the mid-century Texas oil business, adapting German WWII welding technology to laying pipelines. It’s not until then that he faces greed and cruelty comparable the Nazis. It’s an evil in the form of people with wealth and power so vast, insular, and arrogant, that they capriciously and indifferently use infidelity, anti-Communist witch hunts, antisemitism, corrupt police and medical institutions, arson and murder as weapons.
Someone once described Burke this way: ‘He’s a poet, dropped by God into the body of a Master Mystery Writer.’ I second that. His lush descriptions are delights. Here’s a bit of the book’s opening paragraph, describing dust bowl Texas, at the time of Weldon’s encounter with Bonny and Clyde:
It was the year none of the seasons followed their own dictates. The days were warm and the air hard to breathe without a kerchief, and the nights cold and damp, the web burlap we nailed over the windows stiff with grit that blew in clouds out of the west amid sounds like a train grinding across the prairie.
He’s also a master storyteller. Any story or novel is largely composed of scenes strung together like beads. In Burke’s case, the beads are pearls. His scenes are often pitch-perfect. One example is the last scene in Chapter 13, in which Weldon Holland visits Roy Wiseheart at his home. Wiseheart is charmer and socialite whose father, vicious oil baron Dalton, is trying to extort Holland and Pine’s business. Roy is also the philandering husband of Clara, a venomous anti-Semitic snob who aims to destroy Holland’s wife because she’s a Jewess. The scene nails Roy Wiseneart’s moral ambiguity.
A few chapters later, Weldon again visits the Wisenheart house, seeking leverage against Dalton Wiseheart, but this time speaks to Clara Wisenheart. Clara’s nasty response marks her as another enemy. These scenes are masterful in the way they unfold the twisted characters of the Wisehearts, and situate the novel as a true contest between good and evil.
Recommended.