Looking for Clues

Rick Henderson from the December 1994 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

"New Orleans was a wonderful place to be on a late evening in August."

Burke's secondary characters -- Cletus Purcel, Robicheaux's hilariously demented former homicide partner, and Will Buchalter, the sadistic Nazi Dave must destroy -- are so compelling they could be flesh and blood. Burke combines the elements of Chandler's best work: sparkling dialogue, marvelous descriptive writing, quirky but believable characters, and a heroic message set among ordinary people.

Though he was writing nearly a half-century ago, Chandler described a society that is only too familiar to us today: "a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge."

The superior hard-boiled writers recognize that this world -- our world -- cries out for heroic individuals who can live up to Chandler's ideal: "He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."