Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke’s  latest novel, Rain Gods, finds the crime master at the top of his game. Burke, best known as the author of numerous books starring his Southern sleuths Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, has also crafted other works of fiction that transcend the mystery genre, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Lost Get-Back Boogie. Burke is that rare thriller writer who can combine gritty plotting with colorful characters and poetic descriptions of physical settings, while also managing to neatly circumscribe the action with a noirish sense of the sociopolitical American landscape.

Rain Gods is set into motion when the dead bodies of nine young Thai women—human “mules” in a heroin smuggling scheme—are discovered in a remote South Texas churchyard. Sheriff Hackberry Holland—Korean War vet, former ACLU lawyer, and reformed drinker and contrite ex-womanizer—takes on the investigation, which reaches into many sleazy worlds but mainly pits him against a formidable yet strangely compelling madman named Preacher Collins. The strong narrative offers a starkly realized Texas backdrop with occasional echoes of his beloved Louisiana, a healthy amount of violence and suspense, and a continuously intriguing whodunit feel that will satisfy his many fans. Burke took the time to answer a few questions about the new novel from his home in Montana.

Your protagonist, Sheriff Hackberry Holland, is 74, has chronic back pain, night terrors about his Korean War POW experience, has sworn off drink, and now doggedly chases bad guys in a wide-open—some might say godforsaken—Texas landscape. What inspired you to develop this character, and can we expect to see him as the star of future novels?
Hack first appears in my work in three short stories contained in the collection titled The Convict. He is also the narrator of my third published novel, Lay Down my Sword and Shield. I think he's one of most intriguing characters I have written about, and I suspect I will be writing more about him as well as the rest of the Holland family.

In the course of Rain Gods, it is suggested that Holland and his nemesis, Preacher Collins, are “two sides of the same coin.” Does either one bear any resemblance to the coin that is James Lee Burke?
My own life is an enormous yawn. I think that's the reason I'm often invited to speak before groups of insomniacs.

Two current events are referenced in Rain Gods that seem crucial to the narrative and character development: Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. How do you think these events have affected American society?
The antagonist in the novel is a man known as Preacher Jack Collins. He's narcissistic, messianic, and convinced that he is the left hand of god. Needless to say, he's an extremely dangerous man. The novel has many symbolic overtones. We live in a time when men who in my view are absolutely ruthless have hijacked Christianity and used it for their own agenda.

With its South Texas setting, Rain Gods automatically conjures a strong sense of border politics and the issue of Hispanic immigration. Holland’s investigation directly—and often uneasily—involves the FBI and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Do you have a personal view on the immigration issue or any cynicism regarding the related work of federal agencies?
I think the people who serve in federal law enforcement do the best they can with what they have. I used to work for the United States Forest Service and the Job Corps, and I was always impressed with the quality of men and women who serve our government. I think the immigration difficulties we are experiencing today are directly related to our policies in Latin America, and also the wish on the part of many business interests to see an end to labor unions.

Your treatment of women in Rain Gods might be viewed as extreme. Juxtaposed with the dead Thai drug mules and strippers and escorts are tremendously strong figures like Holland’s devoted deputy Pam Tibbs, the defiantly combative strip-club owner’s wife Esther Dolan and the feisty country singer Vicki Gaddis.
The three women you mention are among the strongest characters in my work. The victims of the sex trade are not dealt with individually because they are not central players in the story. However, my experience has been, as Orwell once said, that people are always much better than we think they are, no matter what roles they occupy.

Deputy Tibbs, though young enough to be Holland’s daughter, has romantic designs on him. The age difference bothers him, yet we’re tantalizingly left hanging about exactly what happens between the two of them. Any hints about what happens between the two of them?
I never know what lies next in the story. I believe the story is written in the unconscious and the artist is its incremental discoverer rather than its creator. At least, that is the way it has always been for me.

Three of your previous books—In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Two for Texas and Heaven's Prisoners—have been adapted for the screen, and Rain Gods would also seem to be a logical candidate for a film. Have you been satisfied with Hollywood’s treatment of your work?
My experience with the film industry has always been a good one. In each instance, the creative people involved in the project treated the work with respect and did the best job they could. A writer shouldn't ask for more.

You’ve been referred to as “a Faulkner of crime writing.” How do you feel about that designation? And, since you began your career as a writer of “serious” fiction, has your work in the crime genre fulfilled your literary ambitions?
The comparison with William Faulker is very complimentary, but Faulkner's work is on a level with the work of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and Keats. The only change that has taken place in my work is the fact that with the writing of The Neon Rain, some of my novels were narrated by a police officer, namely Dave Robicheaux. The themes, the settings, the type of people I write about are the same as the ones we encounter in my first novel, Half of Paradise.

Rain Gods is chock-full of details on myriad topics—the Korean War, the drug trade, seedy night clubs, firearms, federal law enforcement, all manner of Texas geography and flora and fauna, etc. How much research do you do, or is it all second nature by now?
I do little if any research. Most of the people I write about are composites of people I have known. Hemingway once said that once the author knows his characters, he can place them in any setting or era he wishes.

Holland’s antagonists in Rain Gods are a motley bunch of lowlifes, all fit for a Tarantino film. Have you known many people like this in the course of your life?
I was a social worker in California and handled the cases of many parolees and mental patients, some of whom were among the most interesting people I have ever known. I also made recordings of the inmates in the work camps and what was called "the block" at Angola Penitentiary in 1961. I was occasionally a police reporter and worked a bit in the oil patch, and lived in an urban slum and the poorest part of the southern mountains. I may have had few other talents, but I was always a good listener. The great stories are in the air, all around us, everyday, no matter where we're located. All we have to do is listen.

What the heck is creosote?
It's a viscous oil produced by the creosote bush. It's often used to treat wood, particularly railroad ties.

You were born in Houston but have a home in Louisiana, which one would assume is your spiritual literary base given your many Robicheaux novels. Still, you’ve written about Texas in the Holland stories. Which locale do you prefer to bring to life in fiction, and is there another Robicheaux tale on the horizon?
To me, the South and the American West represent the entirety of our experience as a nation, for good or bad. The challenge for the artist is to see the larger story in its smallest component, like coming to know a beach through a grain of sand. I'm writing another novel narrated by Dave Robicheaux now. I hope to write many more stories before I catch the train. In fact, when the latter event occurs, I'm taking my notebook and pen with me.

RELATED CONTENT

Read all our reviews featuring the novels of James Lee Burke.
 

Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, hits bookstores this month, having garnered pre-release acclaim from every quarter. It is Connelly’s first novel to feature reporter Jack McEvoy since the runaway bestseller The Poet in 1996. Of all of the characters in Connelly books over the years, McEvoy has the trajectory that most closely resembles Connelly’s own: reporter for a small-town newspaper, a move to the Los Angeles Times, a successful book deal, fame and fortune; analogous events, albeit in a slightly different order.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Connelly via a crackly Tokyo-to-Florida cell phone connection. In addition to having read most of his books over the years, I did some research and learned that Connelly once lived in Raymond Chandler’s old apartment, a factoid I thought worth pursuing.

“Ah, you must have visited Wikipedia,” Connelly begins, with a knowing chuckle. “As so often happens with the Internet, they got the germ of the story right, but they missed out on the details.” Connelly says he was inspired to start writing mysteries after seeing Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye, in which Elliott Gould stars as the Chandler detective Philip Marlowe. “When I moved to L.A., I thought it would be cool to live in the apartment where Marlowe/Gould had lived in the movie,” he says. The apartment wasn’t available at the time, but years later it became vacant and Connelly moved in. “On the plus side, it had a great view overlooking L.A., and I could walk to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Rolling Stones. On, the minus side, it wasn’t air-conditioned, and it always smelled a bit like a gas leak,” Connelly recalls.

Connelly’s character, Jack McEvoy, lives in a Craftsman home south of Sunset, and does his writing from the pressroom of the Los Angeles Times. This is a room with which Connelly is intimately familiar from his years as a crime reporter, and one of his aims in writing The Scarecrow was to focus on the sad decline of newspapers like the Times. The real-life closing in February of the Rocky Mountain News, the site of McEvoy’s previous posting, forced the recall of The Scarecrow manuscript so Connelly could make last-minute changes to the book. As more newspapers around the country shut down, Connelly says, “I think what is lost is a community center, a place of news and ideas and debate. It will be splintered among websites and blogs. Perhaps more important is the loss of a watchdog. Who will keep an eye on the small stuff? Who will uncover the small corruptions that lead to the big ones? Will the bloggers do it? Will websites do it? I’m not sure.”

As The Scarecrow opens, McEvoy’s career is in flux: thanks to the double whammy of his large paycheck and the L.A. Times’ plummeting fortunes, he is about to be given the heave-ho. Asked to stay on for a brief period to train his replacement, Mc-Evoy faces a conundrum: on the one hand, he would love to leave his boss twisting in the wind, but he is working on an article that might well garner him the Pulitzer Prize, and he’d really like to stick around long enough to see it in print. His story focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old journeyman felon charged with rape and murder. It takes McEvoy next to no time to deduce that Winslow’s so-called confession is bogus, which begs the bigger question: if this fledgling thug isn’t the killer, then who is the Scarecrow? And how can one write about this stuff without giving real-life villains usable ideas?

“I think you always have to have some responsibility when you write up the bad guys,” Connelly says. “For example, I never give every step in a crime because I don’t want the books to be a primer for anybody. Most of the time, unfortunately, I am not plowing new ground. The bad guy in The Scarecrow may be unique, but the use of the Internet for nefarious deeds is nothing new. This so-called Craigslist Killer would be a case in point. The real thing is always much worse in reality than anything I put into fiction.”

A longtime cinema fan, Connelly has had only one of his books made into a movie thus far, the 2002 Clint Eastwood adaptation of Blood Work. It makes one wonder how Hollywood can pass over such intelligent and action-packed novels in favor of, say, a remake of Bewitched. “Hey, I liked Bewitched,” Connelly says with a laugh. “Seriously, though, I don’t think my books lend themselves to being made into movies, because so much of what happens in the book is in the head of the protagonist. You could do it with voice-overs, but Hollywood doesn’t like voice-overs.”

Asked if he has ever considered doing a Hitchcockian cameo role in a film of his work, Connelly says, “I visited the set of Blood Work a couple of times, but Clint Eastwood never offered me a role as an extra, and I never really thought much about it. Then Eastwood directed Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, and toward the end of the movie, Dennis was in a great cameo in the parade scene, alongside the mayor, no less! Dennis is a friend of mine, and I have given him a good deal of grief about that.”

Speaking of cameo appearances, the McEvoy character has made several, in books featuring longtime Connelly stalwarts Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. “The idea was that all my books would be part of one big mosaic of time and place. So I consciously look for places to cross-pollinate,” Connelly says. “I needed to have a reporter in The Brass Verdict so I made him Jack McEvoy because I knew I would be writing about him next and it sort of set the table for the next book. I wish there was a device for tracking all of this. I could use one.”

Connelly is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, it seems he is not one to rest at all; his next book, 9 Dragons, featuring L.A. cop Harry Bosch, is due out in the fall.
 

For almost 20 years Stephen L. Carter has been carrying a powerful character around in his imagination.

"He was a cold, distant person of enormously strong political views," Carter says during a call to his office at Yale University Law School, "the patriarch of his family, pretty conservative in the sense that a lot of old, traditional black families are conservative. A judge."

While he struggled and experimented with ways to free this character to tell his story, while bits and pieces of novels accumulated in a trunk in his basement, Carter pursued his career as a professor of law and a public intellectual. He wrote such widely praised nonfiction books as The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He appeared frequently as an expert commentator on Nightline and Face the Nation. He wrote often in the popular press and legal journals. He was named William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale.

Finally, about five years ago, Carter, who has known since childhood that he wanted to write novels, discovered the fictional vehicle that would allow the judge—and all the other characters associated with this powerful, controversial personality—to come alive. Well, almost alive. Because one of the intriguing things about The Emperor of Ocean Park is that the dominant personality of the novel—Judge Oliver Garland—dies at home in his study in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the story.

When Carter finally completed his first novel, its mix of character and action so thrilled those in the publishing world that they clamored to buy the whopping doorstop of a book. Knopf outbid 11 other publishers with a $4 million, two-book deal, and movie makers fell in line soon thereafter, offering a hefty sum for the film rights. The competition garnered newspaper headlines and predictions that the book would be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Adding to the hoopla is Knopf’s decision to launch The Emperor of Ocean Park with a staggering 500,000 first printing.

It’s a hefty gamble on a first-time fiction author, but the publisher is confident readers will flock to this complex literary thriller. Carter deftly weaves together several strands, from the relationships of fathers and sons and husbands and wives to the politics of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

At the center of it all is the recently deceased Judge Garland, who had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, then forced to withdraw because of his association with a shadowy figure named Jack Ziegler.

Embittered by his treatment by liberals in the Senate, Judge Garland became a darling of the Republican Right and grew increasingly distant from his three surviving children. One of the three, Mariah, does not believe the judge has died of natural causes. She inveigles her brother Talcott, a law professor at a fictional Ivy League law school in an equally fictional town called Elm Harbor, Connecticut, to join her in an investigation of her father’s death. Talcott—Misha to his friends—is the narrator of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

And Talcott has problems of his own. He struggles to hold together his marriage with his disloyal wife, Kimmer, an ambitious attorney on the president’s short-list for the federal bench. As he tries to unravel the clues his father left him in the form of chess problems, he grows increasingly alienated from his colleagues at the law school. His relationship with his young son worsens. He is pursued by a maddening array of people who demand to know about his father’s "arrangements." And, finally, he must contend with the awesome task of discovering who his father really was.

One of the most interesting threads of the book is Carter’s portrayal of the black upper class and black professionals.

"I didn’t grow up around that kind of wealth in the black community, but many people do," Carter says. "Many of these professional families, with their big houses, imported cars and vacation homes, have had money for generations. That is something we don’t hear about very much, and I wanted to talk about that experience a little bit. Another thing I wanted to talk about are some of the day-to-day perceptions of black professionals who work in predominately white places."

Carter says that much of the novel is about perceptions. And he cautions, "It’s not a book of opinion. These things emerged as I began to let my characters tell their stories. In fact, there are things in the book that I don’t agree with. The point was not to persuade the reader but to provoke the reader, to put in these asides, these subtleties, these themes that people don’t think about so much. The different ways in which people very often see the same event is important. What fascinates me in relationships between people is how so much of life is misunderstanding."

Asked about the surface similarities between his character Talcott, a professor of law at an Ivy League school, and himself, Carter is quick to remind his reader that this is a work of fiction, of imagination.

"Talcott is a deeply obsessive person who is constantly interrogating the world," Carter says. "I have a much more laid-back view of the world. And I think I have a greater acceptance of human frailty than Talcott does. It’s very important for me to portray people in ways that they are not a captive of their weaknesses. What is of real interest to me about life— and therefore was of interest to me in writing this novel—is the notion that people succeed not because they undergo fundamental changes of character, but because they transcend their weaknesses."

Continuing in that vein, Carter says, "I’m interested in constancy. I’m interested in how people stay the same. Indeed, I’m interested in the virtue of staying the same sometimes when the world is changing around you. That’s why so much of the book is about love and loyalty," he says. "Talcott’s attitude about love in the book is an old notion in Christianity and Judaism and a lot of traditional societies. It’s the idea that love is an activity, an act of will, rather than a feeling or desire. Talcott and other characters . . . cling to decisions to be loyal or loving, as opposed to simply being moved by what they happen to be feeling. Love is something you decide to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, Caifornia.

Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly, who summarily argued her way onto the bestseller lists. They chose the pen name Perri by combining their first names, with a nod to a certain fictional barrister.

"We were inspired by the Perry Mason series to have a lawyer who continued through a lot of different cases," Mary says. "But he never changed; he was suave, urbane, he had his little martinis and his calm relationships that were just suggested and never really fulfilled. Nina's not like that; she's much more a character in transition." Indeed. Between running her business, juggling her love life with Carmel private investigator Paul van Wagoner, keeping her teenage son Bob out of trouble with his cyber-punk girlfriend Nikki and maintaining ties to her ex-husband, San Francisco attorney Jack McIntyre, Nina is one lawyer who has little time for happy hour.

In the new thriller Unfit to Practice, Nina's career takes a dramatic turn when her truck is stolen with three sensitive case files inside. Slowly and with sinister intent, someone begins to leak information from the confidential files to sabotage Nina's cases. When her own clients complain to the California State Bar, Nina faces disbarment and turns to the best defense lawyer she knows, ex-husband Jack. The O'Shaughnessys grew up imagining gripping crime scenarios together as kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Pam went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and worked for 16 years as a trial lawyer in private practice in the very Lake Tahoe Starlake Building where Counselor Reilly now resides. Mary took her English degree east to Boston, where she worked on multimedia projects in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.

Somewhere in mid-career, each reached a personal crossroads. For Pam, raising a toddler sparked dreams of a more creative life. For Mary, the prospect of returning to work with three children under the age of five seemed unimaginable.

Both had been writing independently, pecking away late at night after the kids were in bed. Mary had a book with no plot, Pam a plot with no ending. Why not try collaborating and see what might happen? The idea was terrific, but the collaborative process proved a bit more challenging than it had in childhood, particularly since the two now live in different states. Pam has homes in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe, while Mary lives south of San Francisco. Eight books into their long-distance partnership, they're still working out the kinks of their admittedly idiosyncratic method of writing together.

As a rule, the one who comes up with the premise takes the lead role for that book; the two tend to alternate. The arrangement serves to break creative deadlocks.

"It doesn't mean that we don't each put in equal amounts of work on the draft, we do," says Mary. "But one person has the ultimate say. What that means is they get to do the final draft, so at a certain point you just have to let go, there's no point in arguing." The title comes early on in the story's development, and yes, as a matter of fact, it's getting harder and harder to find suitable three-word legal terms. (Previous titles in the series include Writ of Execution, Invasion of Privacy and Obstruction of Justice.) "We try to choose a legal term that says something about the plot," says Pam. "We seem to be locked into three words, and we're trying to convey some movement, some force of action. It's really difficult." "We look them up to make sure they haven't been used, at least in the last five minutes!" Mary adds.

Next, the sisters draft and submit a detailed outline to their publishers. No problem there? "Just that we throw it out after about the first eight chapters!" quips Pam. In their 1995 debut, Motion to Suppress, they even changed the killer in the fourth draft.

Each writer enjoys the surprises she has come to expect from the other.

"Actually, we're usually very amused," says Mary. "We both love seeing the characters brought to life again. Certainly, the first time you read what the other person has written it's a thrill. Then you begin to look at the nitty gritty and see all of the horrible things they've done, all the mistakes they've made. I think that's just part of the process, to build it up and then tear it down again." The two take turns with the actual writing; generally they will draft eight chapters then pass it to the other to draft the next eight and so on. Pam is the procrastinator, Mary the voice on the phone barking for pages.

"We are real perfectionists and we do have different styles so the book has to go back and forth quite a bit before we're both satisfied," says Mary.

In subsequent drafts (they generally do three complete rewrites before submitting the manuscript to their publisher), the two have learned to correct for each other's blind spots: Pam tends to slip into a passive voice, while Mary's more intricate style and fondness for compound sentences sometimes gets her "buried in language." The O'Shaughnessys say their decision to stay away from graphic sex and violence has been key to the success of the series. "We have some strict standards because we are mothers," says Pam. "We see the books as entertainment, something fun for people, excitement, vicarious adventure. It's important for us to keep the books fun." To keep the writing fun, they've allowed their central character wide berth.

"We're not sure even to this day who that character is in many ways," Mary admits. "She's a little mysterious; she's very impulsive and does things that we did not put in the proposal at any point. She's always changing and always growing, kind of like a real person to us. I'm not sure we always know what she's going to do, and that's always a lot of fun."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a freelance writer in Naples, Florida.