The Seductive Swamp

CRUSADER'S CROSS

By James Lee Burke

Simon & Schuster. 325 pp. $25.95

James Lee Burke's fine new Dave Robicheaux novel opens in July 1958, when Dave and his half-brother Jimmie are working on the Texas coast before going off to college. While relaxing in Galveston they meet a young woman named Ida Durbin. Jimmie falls hard for her, only to learn that she works in one of the houses on Post Office Street, an infamous red-light district. Jimmie persuades Ida to run off to Mexico with him, but before that can happen, her pimp and two crooked cops spirit her away to an unknown fate. That's where things stand for more than 40 years, until a dying cop tells Dave about the kidnapping and says Ida may still be alive. Dave and Jimmie, long tormented by Ida's memory, set out to find her, whereupon people start trying to kill them.

The Dave Robicheaux we encounter here, in his sixties -- and have known in 12 previous installments of this outstanding series -- is haunted by more than Ida Durbin. He's haunted by memories of men he killed in Vietnam and others he killed as a police officer; by a wife and mother who died violently and another wife's recent death from natural causes; by evil he has seen that is too horrible to speak of; and by a lifetime of "deeds you confessed only to God, because no one else would believe them," deeds that have left him clinging desperately to sobriety. And because Burke is the most lyrical of crime writers, he carries us deep inside Dave's haunted heart. Burke's strength has long been his ability to convey both the exceptional beauty and the exceptional violence of the American South. Both are on vivid display in "Crusader's Cross," along with an autumnal quality that has Dave seeking love, seeking peace, seeking salvation, even as his violent nature continues to endanger him and everyone he cares about.

Dave has retired from his job as a detective with the New Iberia, La., sheriff's department, but the sheriff rehires him because a serial killer is at large. He runs afoul of the wealthy, corrupt Chalons family who are somehow connected to the missing Ida. He finds time to win the heart of an ex-nun named Molly, even as he fends off the half-mad, doomed daughter of the Chalonses. All these threads, although jumbled at times, are resolved in the end, but one reads the book less for plot than for the beauty of the writing and for scenes and images that continually shock and delight.

There is one idyllic interlude when Dave and his friend Clete Purcel go fishing: "That night the wind came up and blew the mosquitoes back into the marsh. Then at sunrise it rained hard for thirty minutes and the air was sweet and cool as we headed south through groundswells that burst on the bow in ropes of green and white foam. . . . The mist-covered Louisiana coastline fell away behind us, and we left the westward alluvial flow of the Mississippi and entered the smoky green, rain-dimpled roll of the Gulf, flying fish sailing across our bow like sleek, salmon-colored birds." Abruptly, a professional killer invades their fishing camp, intending to kill both men, but he underestimates the two Vietnam veterans.

Burke paints a memorable portrait of a drunken weekend and a near-terminal hangover, its guilt-ridden aftermath intensified by Dave's fear that he may have killed someone while he was blacked out.

There are digressions on the local mores: "In the state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state's culture, mind-set, religious attitudes, and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation." There is a sweet glimpse of Dave's 82-year-old neighbor, Miss Ellen Deschamps, who "every afternoon at three served tea on her upstairs veranda for herself and her older sister or friends who were invited by written invitation."

In a nostalgic moment, Dave looks back to the 1950s: "It has been my experience that age brings few gifts, but one of them is the acceptance that the past is the past, for good or bad, and if you are fortunate enough to have lived in an era that was truly exceptional, characterized by music, chopped-down Fords with chrome-plated engines roaring full out against purple sunsets, and drive-in restaurants where kids jitterbugged and did the dirty bop and knew they would never die, then those moments are forever inviolate, never to be shared or explained, and, like images on a Grecian urn, never subject to time and decay."

Throughout the novel, and all of Burke's writing, lyrical moments alternate with terrible violence. One wonders what impact this fierce juxtaposition has had on Burke's popularity.

Readers who love beautiful prose do not always enjoy violence, and those who relish violence may grow impatient with Burke's poetry. But if you believe, as he does, that beauty and horror go hand in hand in this life, he can touch you in ways few writers can.

Burke will turn 70 next year. Of the living American crime writers his age or older, there were, until last week, three masters: Burke, Elmore Leonard and Ed McBain. Now, with the death of McBain (or, if you prefer, Evan Hunter), there are two.