This is the first part of a two-part interview.

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite mystery writers. I've long been a fan of his books, especially his Dave Robicheaux series that you should sample if you haven't already. Furthermore, you know relations are going great with a publisher's publicist when she sends you, unsolicited, two books by an author you greatly admire without you even requesting it. I thanked her and asked if I can interview him and she said sure. So this here is the result, two books, one interview, with a theme running through the books of Katrina and Rita.

Burke, who, among other jobs, worked as a reporter and social worker before becoming a best-selling author, has twice received the Edgar Award for Best Novel, for Black Cherry Blues in 1990, and Cimarron Rose in 1998. He has two new books coming out. First out, this week in fact, is Jesus Out To Series, a collection of short stories. We talk more about that in the interview.

The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Novel will be published on July 17, and follows Detective Robicheaux and his department as they are ordered to investigate the shooting of two looters in a rich neighborhood. The looters had ransacked the residence of New Orleans' most powerful mobster. This is the 16th book in the series, with the character of Robicheaux having been portrayed in major motion pictures by Alec Baldwin, in Heaven's Prisoners from 1996, and by Tommy Lee Jones in this year's In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.

There is something very, well, Southern about Burke's books, and not just that they take place near New Orleans. The pacing seems more slow, but in a good way, and Burke tackles the racial issues that still are a major part of life down there, maybe more on the surface where up here in the North it's, I think, dealt with less directly, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on your perspective.

I do these interviews, when possible, in two parts. For the first part I ask general biographical-type questions about the author, his style, his opinions on writing, etc. Then I finish the book(s) and ask a second set of questions as well as including follow-up questions to anything that needed, well, following up on from the first part.

Here then is the first part.

Scott Butki: How would you describe to your readers your two upcoming books, Jesus Out To Sea and Tin Roof Blowdown?

James Lee Burke: Jesus Out to Sea is a collection of stories based in one fashion or another on my experience growing up and spending a large part of my life on the southern rim of the United States. I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."