Browsing through a charity shop in the town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire the other week, your roving correspondent splurged all of two quid sterling on a doorstep-sized crime compendium containing three James Lee Burke tales. Burke is a legend in the field of crime fiction, and one of Nick Cave’s favourite writers. “I think I’ve read every book that he’s written,” said Cave, who can always be counted on for a sure steer to a good read. “I’ve probably read more pages of James Lee Burke than I’ve read of any other writer in existence. Mostly because there’s just something extraordinarily comforting about going back to these same phrases that he uses over and over again, the same story over and over again, but beautifully executed. His sense of evil and so forth has changed and developed. He’s a great writer.”

The other night I cracked open Dixie City Jam and read one of the finest opening sequences of any novel:
“Not many people believe this, but in the early months of 1942 Nazi submarines used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for the tankers that sailed without naval escort from the oil refineries at Baton Rouge into the Gulf of Mexico.
“It was a shooting gallery. Because of wartime censorship the newspapers and radio carried no accounts of the American ships sunk off the Louisiana coast, but just after sunset people could see the oil fires burning on the southern horizon, like a quickening orange smudge low in the winter sky.”
It got even better.
“As a little boy in New Iberia, I heard shrimpers talk about the burned, oil-coated bodies of four merchant sailors who had been found floating like lumps of coal in an island of kelp, their sightless eyes and poached faces strung with jellyfish. I had nightmares for many years about Nazis, who I imagined as pinch-faced, slit-eyed creatures who lived beneath the waves, not far from my home, and who would eventually impose a diabolical design upon the earth.”
If that little primer doesn’t do the trick, the reader is advised to key the relevant words into YouTube’s search engine and take a look at a clip of Burke, now 73, discussing his short story collection Jesus Out To Sea, set in his native Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
James Lee Burke was first published in 1965. He has since completed some 31 books (In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead has to be one of the greatest book titles of all time), but not without his share of blood, sweat and tears. At one point he weathered a ten-year dry spell in which no publishing house would touch his work.
Now that’s some kind of a writer.