Crime writer draws Hurricane Katrina into fiction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two years after Hurricane Katrina broke apart New Orleans, one of the best-known writers in the U.S. South has ushered the storm into fiction.

Mystery writer James Lee Burke, 70, a former reporter whose prose oozes with the dark colors, penetrating smells and dappled light of the Louisiana swamp, sends his former New Orleans policeman, Dave Robicheaux, to save the city from the ravages of Katrina in "The Tin Roof Blowdown."

"The good news man, the good writer, gives voice to those who have none," Burke said in a recent interview, explaining part of the reason he took on the task of building a fictional tale around the inescapable reality of Katrina.

Some 1,500 died along the U.S. Gulf Coast after the August 29, 2005, storm, which drove through New Orleans, bursting its levees to flood the jazz city.

"I didn't plan to write about it. I didn't feel adequate. I thought maybe the story was just simply too big," Burke said. But when Esquire magazine asked him for a story about Katrina, he wrote "Jesus Out To Sea" in March 2006. (The original story is available here and is part of a separate collection of stories under that title.)

Eventually, he turned to Robicheaux and his friends for the recently published novel, the latest in a long series. "It was meant to tell the story as best I could through the eyes of the characters I've come to know," he said. "We remember it when we see it through the eyes of everyman."

Anger at the inadequate government response to the storm bursts from Burke and the pages of his book. Early chapters read like news reports chronicling the thousands trapped in the city, dead bodies floating through the streets, and as a counterpoint, the heroic Coast Guard fliers who rescued thousands.

Robicheaux's drive into post-storm New Orleans may raise goose bumps. "The sun was merciless in the sky, the humidity like lines of ants crawling inside your clothes," the character relates.

The flooded city he found was filled with "rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands. ... The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched."

'TERROR'

The mystery focuses on a few souls that Robicheaux finds as he investigates a Katrina shooting that at first appears to be vigilante justice of the storm but could be linked to a crime of the past.

"If you want to know about a society, look at it from the bottom up," Burke said, calling crime novels one of the most popular ways for society to look at itself.

Burke's own life and experiences haunt the pages. He was not in Louisiana for Katrina, but he lived through earlier storms, including a night on a drill barge on an inland bay in 1957 during deadly Hurricane Audrey. "Anybody who's lived through a hurricane feels as much terror as humanly possible," he said. The memory becomes Robicheaux's in the book.

The new novel also delves into the dark majesty of nature, a natural for a writer who addresses all the senses. Previous books have feasted on local food like boudin sausage and "dirty rice," drawn on the musky smells of decay in the bayou, and repeated in the rhythms of Cajun speech.

Sadly, Burke does not expect the old New Orleans to return. "New Orleans was a song," he said. "I don't think Louisiana will ever be the same. The old Louisiana for good or bad is gone."