August 1997
A new character leaves
Cajun country behind
Good and evil duke it out in James Lee Burke's heartstopping new novel
Interview by Alden Mudge
"No doubt about it," novelist James Lee Burke says during a call to his summer home in Montana. "'Cimarron Rose' is my best book yet."
That's an amazing statement coming from the writer whose three most recent crime novels featuring Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux have made it to the top of the bestseller list. But Burke is likely right: the heartstopping action and powerful descriptions of "Cimarron Rose" kept this reader turning pages until just before dawn -- against his better judgment -- on a work night.
Naturally, Dave Robicheaux fans will find much that is familiar in "Cimarron Rose." The book is packed with the same high voltage dialogue, barbed profusion of plot, hard-eyed stare into the cold heart of criminality, shocking eruptions of violence, and evocative summoning of the natural world that have proved so potent in Burke's previous novels. But what these fans won't find are Dave Robicheaux and New Iberia, Louisiana.
That's right. The big news about "Cimarron Rose" is that it launches a new main character in what is sure to be a powerful new series of novels. Billy Bob Holland is a former Texas Ranger who now practices law in Deaf Smith, Texas, and carries an almost paralyzing load of regret for deeds done in the past. According to James Lee Burke, Billy Bob Holland and Dave Robicheaux are similar because "both have the characteristics of the knight errant. But Billy Bob's dilemma is coming to terms with the past."
That past rises up to smack Billy Bob in the face when his illegitimate and unacknowledged teenage son, Lucas Smothers, is arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. Called upon to defend Lucas, Billy Bob sets out to find the truth about the murder. The quest leads him into the hidden life of his Texas community, where the wealthy silkily victimize the less fortunate, and psychopathic murderers like the wonderfully drawn Garland T. Moon are pawns in a much larger game. Holland's search also puts him in conflict with federal authorities, whose drive to win the war against border drug smugglers leads them to bargain with the likes of Felix Ringo, a graduate of the U.S. government's school for assassins and a man who has his own questionable past.
"'Cimarron Rose' is about redemption," Burke says. "All of us have mistakes in our past we need to address. In Billy Bob's case it's that fact that he killed his best friend, L.Q. Navarro. It was an accident, but it is the reason Billy Bob is where he is when the book begins.
"Billy Bob is born with a legacy of violence," Burke adds. And that legacy -- and violence itself -- becomes a character all its own in the book, and that makes 'Cimarron Rose' ring with implications about larger facets of American life and history. "All art is morality play. Every great piece of literature is about the struggle between good and evil and goes back in some way to the medieval romance," Burke says. "The United States has always been a violent place. We've been at war since our inception, with only brief periods of peace."
Which is not to say Burke is an advocate of violence. A soft-spoken, exceptionally polite and strikingly thoughtful conversationalist, Burke says, "Any time that violence is employed by a protagonist in my novels, it is always made clear that violence is the recourse of the frightened and the cowardly."
In Burke's new novel, "the progenitor of that legacy of violence is Billy Bob's great-grandfather, Sam Morgan Holland, a drover and gunfighter on the Chisholm trail who is eventually ordained into preaching." As Billy Bob struggles to make amends for his past, he reads Sam Morgan Holland's diary, an account of his pursuit of the Rose of Cimarron, the legendary beauty who was a member of the Dalton-Doolin gang, and his struggles to remain true to his ordination and to control his own wildly violent tendencies.
Amazingly enough, Billy Bob's great-grandfather is based on James Lee Burke's own great-grandfather, Sam Morgan Hollan, who also left behind a diary. "This is a fictionalized account," Burke says, "but the reality is that my great-grandfather was a fellow who lived a very violent life. He was in the Confederate Army and lived through Reconstruction, which was a very violent era. He shot five or six men. He was a drover on the Chisholm Trail and he wrote a diary about his life on the trail, his struggles with whiskey, and his ordination as a Baptist preacher.
"This is the most biographical book I've ever written," Burke continues. "I've waited 40 years to write it. Most of the characters here are in one way or another based on real people. I don't mold them to serve my purposes. They just sort of take on another life.
"What I like best about 'Cimarron Rose' is the range of story, the way the historical story parallels the contemporary story, the way Texas is a historical setting and a modern setting. Texas is a wonderful literary stage. Its history over the last 150 years is like the history of the early American Republic. Texas heroes had both the qualities and defects of our forefathers. Some were opportunists, some were drunkards, womanizers, slavers, and almost every one of them was running from a bad past.
Nonetheless they were remarkable people. It seems apocryphal today, but 188 of them held out against 6,000 of Santa Ana's men and left 1,500 of those men dead on the field of battle. That was bravery. That was heroism."
Yet for all the obvious excitement he has about the advent of "Cimarron Rose" and despite his astonishing past successes, James Lee Burke is a man who seems remarkably untouched by vanity and arrogance, a fact that dimly suggests the spiritual quest that often percolates beneath the surface of a good many of his novels.
"Humility is not an acquired spiritual value or virtue for an artist," Burke says. "It is a matter of fact and truth. The moment that a character takes over your mind or a scene grows in a way that you never foresaw, you are having an experience that you did not earn. It has to do with the gift of creativity that comes from outside of yourself. If a person becomes vain or arrogant about the gift and claims credit for it, it will go away in the blink of an eye. Creativity is presented to a person for a reason. To make the world a better place."
Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California. He may be reached at alden_mudge@bookpage.com.
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