Book Review: Pegasus Descending by James Lee Burke

Father Jimmie Dolan closes his part in James Lee Burke’s Last Car to Elysian Fields by confronting Detective Dave Robicheaux on his moral blind spots, comparing him with the detective’s tortured and obsessed antagonist in the story, the Irish assassin Max Coll: “Don’t deceive yourself. You’re a violent and driven man, Dave, just like Max Coll.”

Violent and driven. Over the course of 14 novels, Louisiana author James Lee Burke has carefully evolved the crime procedural character Detective Dave Robicheaux from his drunk and fractured genesis as a New Orleans Police Department Homicide detective in Neon Rain to his struggling, AA-reformed, Vietnam-damaged New Iberia Sheriff’s Detective /bait shop owner in In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. He then moved on to his increasingly violent, almost-spinning-out-of-control deranged late-middle age presence in Last Car to Elysian Fields and Crusader’s Cross.

In Burke’s newest tale, Pegasus Descending, Dave Robicheaux readily describes himself in his account of his NOPD partner Clete Purcel, “He was hated and feared both by the Mob and many of his old colleagues at NOPD. His detractors tried to dismiss him as a drunk and an addict and a whoremonger, but in truth Clete Purcel was one of the most intelligent and decent men I ever knew, complex in ways I could not guess at.”

…complex in ways I could not guess at.

Burke’s Robicheaux is one of the most compelling procedural characters in popular fiction. He is more densely flawed and multidimensional than Michael Connelly’s Hieronymus Bosch or Patricia Cornwell’s Pete Marino in the later Kay Scarpetta novels. Robicheaux lives in the shadow of his past and that past is an almost tangible and temporal entity to him.

Early in Pegasus Descending, Robicheaux summons that famous Faulknerian phrase, “…the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past…” For the troubled Robicheaux, this is certainly true. Burke perfectly captures the emotional landscape of the alcoholic and the alcoholic’s possession by the past. Son of an oil rig roughneck and a mother of questionable scruples (who was mysteriously murdered), Robicheaux has a past to be possessed by. Add to a challenged childhood a soundly horrific experience in Vietnam mixed with a deluge of alcohol and one has the makings for quite the dysfunctional cocktail.

Robicheaux’s post-Vietnam experience is littered with ex-wives, friends, burned bridges, lost jobs, and empty bottles. His recovery is littered with broken bluebloods, mobsters, and miscreants who crossed the detective’s idea of his junkie honor. Once sober, the universe that is Robicheaux’s anger blossoms into a contempt for the decadent well-heeled society that he feels puts itself above all else.

Article Author: C. Michael Bailey

Arkansas son C. Michael Bailey has been in hiding since he revealed his family's abolitionist position prior to the War Between the States. He is a Senior Reviewer for All About Jazz and publisher of the webblog Kultur. Michael’s day job is spent as a clinical data analyst.
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