A Morning for Flamingos

In A Morning for Flamingos (the fourth Dave Robicheaux mystery), James Lee Burke really hits his stride. This is the best book yet of the six that I've read.

Since Black Cherry Blues, Robicheaux is once again working for the Iberia Sheriff's Department. After fighting a murder charge in book three, he needs to pay off his debts. On a routine transfer of two death row inmates, one of the inmates, Jimmie Lee Boggs, plans an escape. Robicheaux is shot and another detective is killed. At the end of a three month recovery, a DEA agent from a former book, Minor Dautrieve, calls Robicheaux with a proposal. Dautrieve wants Robicheaux to go undercover in New Orleans for the DEA. They will tell everyone he's been fired from law enforcement and are hoping that Robicheaux will lead them to a major mobster in town, Tony Cardo. Robicheaux is reluctant at first, but takes the job in an effort to find Jimmie Lee Boggs (who has been seen in New Orleans).

As the book progresses, Robicheaux gets to know Cardo and the closer he gets, the more conflicted he becomes. Cardo may be a Mafioso, but he's also a loving father to a handicapped son, a tortured Viet Nam vet and a loyal friend. His feelings for Cardo become a major complication with the potential to jeopardize the entire undercover operation. One other complication is the introduction of Bootsie-an old girlfriend whose former husband had mob ties.

In A Morning for Flamingos, Burke is running on all cylinders. His writing is always first rate, but the plot is more inventive and gets away from the formula we've come to expect. While Dautrieve tells Robicheaux "we can't have Wyatt Earp on the payroll," Robicheaux actually shows a little restraint for once. It is Cletus Purcel who starts behaving like a rogue cowboy. Robicheaux operates within the law, while Purcel functions on the fringe. The dynamics of this relationship will continue to develop in future books. But where Burke really excels is his character development. Tony Cardo may coordinate mob activities and drug dealing in southern Louisiana, but Burke portrays him as a tortured and conflicted man. For probably the first time in his 50 years, Robicheaux starts seeing things in other than black and white. And the shades of gray start clouding his vision and his judgment. Burke also shows us how it is possible to love a city and hate it at the same time. Robicheaux as a cop has certainly seen the grimmer side of The Big Easy including the welfare projects that produced prostitution, "rats, cockroaches, incest, rape, child molestation, narcotics and sadistic street gangs," as well as murder. Ironically, Hurricane Katrina has given that steamier side of New Orleans a national audience.

After Heavenly Prisoners, I decided to read two more Robicheaux and then take a break. But after the last two books, I'm not going to be able to wait too long for book number five!

This is, without a doubt, one of the better of the Dave Robicheaux novels. As always, James Lee Burke writes with a lyrical grace that should awe the average reader. And this early novel was written before he started plagiarizing himself wholesale, stealing plots, characters and even entire paragraphs in order to flesh out his balletic swamp-songs.

A black mark on this otherwise fine novel is the odd decision to have Dave go undercover in the home of Mobster Tony Cardo, a razor-edged freak of a man living on the outlines of his own criminal organization. Personally, if I were a crook, I'd never accept an ex-cop into my home, but maybe that's just me - the fact is that tony does and that's how this rollicking book gets going.

It's not important that there's any more plot than that - in a Burkle novel, the setting is the most important element. As always, Burke paints pictures and only incidentally places characters and action within them, with the exception of Dave Robicheaux himself. I have always admired Dave - he is morally ambiguous and righteously angry, which causes him to behave in ways that are almost as freakish as Tony Cardo's ways. An example is dave's heroism at the climax of this novel - it's both awe-inspiring and breathtaking, but it's probably not what I wold have done in the same situation.

Burke is an amazing writer and a good story-teller. He's not a bad painter, either.

In this installment of the Dave Robicheaux series, James Lee Burke again paints a rich tapastry of the failings and triumphs of the human spirit set against the backdrop of southern Louisiana. As is true in his other novels, Burke uses his standard plot woven around career criminals, the disenfranchised,and the poor with a violent psychopath or two thrown in for good measure, to explore the complexity of human relationships and how and why past experiences can motivate us, even subconsicously, to behave in certain ways. All of Burke's characters are fully formed, three dimensional people that I felt like I knew by the end of the book. There wasn't a card board cutout among them. No body is ever really quite as good, or bad, as they initially seem( well, except for Jimmie Lee Boggs). I have read his books out of chronological order, and I do think there has been some drop off in recent years. Maybe this is due to building too many stories around the same basic plot of gangsters, low lifes, and crazed hitmen, or maybe now that Dave is married to Bootsie and has been in the same job for several novels, there hasn't been any room for any major new plot twists. Hopefully, Burke can explore Robicheaux's relationship with his daughter Alafair more as she becomes a young adult.

James Lee Burke didn't write "A Morning for Flamingos" in black and white ­ everything is in shades of gray. Yet what emerges is a richly textured mystery filled with a cast of characters as colorful as their Bayou surroundings.
It starts when Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux rejoins the New Iberia police department to pay off a few thousand dollars of debt and is nearly killed when a routine convict transport goes bad. And it ends with him in a $500,000 drug deal facing off against the same escaped murderer who nearly kills him at the beginning.
In between, Robicheaux fades to the background, becoming the eyes for the reader to see and evaluate everyone he encounters. There's his ex cop partner who now runs a bar, his old high school sweetheart who married into the mob and then couldn't break free, the top mob boss in New Orleans with a tender spot for his handicapped son, an illiterate "Negro" convicted of a crime he didn't commit but didn't stop and a bayou juju who has everyone scared of her.
Yet unlike many mysteries where characters like these would be eccentrics to provide comic relief, this one brings them to life. They're real people with real-life struggles, fears and hopes.
Burke accomplishes this feat with his masterful use of dialogue, proving once again that few, if any, mystery authors can convey personality, region and nuances better than he can.
As a result, the reader will struggle with Robicheaux to decide what's moral, what's legal and what's just the right thing to do. Because this is not about rules and regulations ­ it's about people. And that's what makes this so good -- and Burke so special.

I'm reading the Dave Robicheaux series in order. The Dave Robicheaux of A Morning For Flamingoes is very different and a bit more likable than the one we me in Heaven's Prisoners. He is also one of the most complex characters I've ever encountered in a book.

The book gets you hooked right from the start and introduces most of the books significant characters. As in the first two books, Dave finds himself being drawn into a world he doesn't really want to visit. Disturbingly, he doesn't seem to try to hard to get out, which is just another aspect of his character.

Speaking of character, this book is fulled with fascinating characters, with Tony Cardo being the most interesting. It makes you hope that some of these characters will return in future volumes.

I'm eagerly looking forward to A Stained White Radiance.