A Bond With the Bayou : Author James Lee Burke struggled to make ends meet. Then he tapped into the land of his youth and created his Cajun hero.

San Francisco is James Lee Burke’s kind of city. His novels evoke grimacing bottleneck blues guitar or reckless washboard Cajun. But the solo sax haunting Union Square suits him too.

So do the city’s eccentrics: a sidewalk beggar whose gimmick is a gray cat in a green sweater; a homeless man venting his voices into the night; a surf dude cabby who turns a five-minute fare into a manic diatribe.

Burke exits the cab wearing a grin that suggests he just absorbed another character. But something else in his face--common decency?--hints at a reason more and more readers wait patiently to see how the author might re-create such men.

It’s the sort of expression that might cross the face of Dave Robicheaux, the fictional “Cajun existentialist” detective who resurrected Burke’s career and stirs a growing sense that the author or his creation or perhaps a composite of the two is emerging as a bona fide literary icon.

The morning after a spate of San Francisco book signings, Burke is on the road again, heading for Los Angeles on a 12-city tour to promote his new novel, “Cadillac Jukebox” (Hyperion). His wife, Pearl, navigates from a cardboard box of AAA maps.

At first, the author resisted the idea of a reporter tagging along. No wonder. Burke is a compulsive storyteller, and when he talks, he disappears into the yarn.

Before we clear Oakland he has missed three turnoffs.

“I’m not going to talk,” he says resolutely, his eyes scanning a confusion of freeway signs. But then some thought hitchhikes across his cortex, and he’s off again, his life blending into his fiction, his fiction into politics and history and music and American literature in a gracious, nonstop conversational stream.

Burke was born 59 years ago in Houston, and was reared there and along the coast nearby, in Louisiana’s bayou country. He wrote his first novel, “Half of Paradise,” when he was 23--the same year he married Pearl, a Chinese-born flight attendant for a Flying Tiger Airlines affiliate whom he met in a graduate seminar on Wordsworth at the University of Missouri.

The New York Times praised that first bleak book’s trio of characters--a black boxer, a white aspiring bootlegger and a young country singer turned cocaine addict--and called Burke “a writer to be taken absolutely seriously.”

He went on to publish two more novels, one about a 16-year-old Kentucky coal miner, the other about a Texas oilman turned politician and the United Farm Workers.

Then he began collecting rejection slips. By the time he published another hardback, 13 years later, he had four children and a resume that reflected his determination to support them: surveyor in Texas and Colorado; U.S. Forest Service driver in Kentucky; social worker on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, along with college teaching stints in Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, Florida, Kansas and Montana.

Burke’s literary reputation began to rekindle in 1986 with “The Lost Get Back Boogie.” That novel, about an ex-con songwriter caught up in a Montana environmental battle, had been rejected more than 100 times in nine years. It received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

It was the year before, though, that Burke nudged his finances onto a slow road to fortune by publishing his first crime novel, “The Neon Rain.”

Burke had never read crime fiction. “I still don’t know diddly squat about it,” he says.

But he was sufficiently fond of his new protagonist, the recovering alcoholic and soon-to-be bait-shop owner Dave Robicheaux, that he has produced eight more books so far.

The latest Robicheaux tale, “Cadillac Jukebox,” is typical of the series. Robicheaux pokes around in a crime that somehow connects to a whopping societal woe--in this case, the long past murder of an African American civil rights hero and the pervasive effects of historical racism and political corruption.

Robicheaux, says Burke, is “the egalitarian knight-errant, the Jeffersonian man. Decent. Kind. He is always on the side of those who have no voice or power.”

Along the way, the detective grapples with a variety of cretinous characters and with cantankerous demons of his own, proving, again, that life apportions evil in abundance throughout the human family.

Such ambition in genre fiction does not go unnoticed.

Two years ago, a Time magazine critic sniffed that Burke “suffers from a terrible and mostly undeserved reputation for fine writing.”

Meanwhile, the series is sufficiently popular, and has attracted enough movie-option action, that the Burkes now divide their time between a big cedar house outside Missoula, Mont., and New Iberia, La., where they are building a home on Bayou Teche--the childhood stomping grounds of both Burke and Robicheaux.

Back when Burke reemerged in print, he and Pearl began a ritual, packing up their Chevy Chevette and driving cross-country to readings and book signings they’d set up themselves.

The short version of why Burke still drives on tour (putting 12,000 miles on the car during last year’s 30 city swing) is simple: “I don’t like to fly.”

But other reasons become evident as Burke finds his way onto I-5 and shifts the conversation onto cruise control.

On one of his early tours, while he was teaching at the University of Kansas at Wichita, he and Pearl revisited Los Angeles, where he had done social work in 1964.

“Los Angeles,” he says, “is crowded, congested and a very aggressive town. We left there and drove straight through to Kansas.”

With his hands on the steering wheel, his eyes straight ahead, Burke continues with the memory:

They pulled into Garden City at 11 at night, at the tail end of wheat harvest. A big yellow moon floated overhead and the wind blew breathlessly hot and all the farmhands had gathered near a corner market.

“They were sitting on their tractors drinking 3.2 beer,” Burke says.

“Where you been?”

“California.”

“Oooh, man. You been all the way to California? I’d love to go there someday,” Burke says, his face radiating the innocence of a young man leaning forward on a hot summer night, eager for a glimpse of another world.

“They were so tickled just to hear about it,” Burke says, shifting back into his own soft drawl.

*

In Burke’s first book, the cocaine-ravaged singer lets loose a Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness ramble on American populist heroes, including Woody Guthrie, “who . . . drifted across the nation from the West to the East Coast and all the time he was writing and singing songs about the things he saw.”

Thirty years later, as fields stained red by the tomato harvest roll by on I-5, Burke is still ruminating on Guthrie.

“Remember ol’ Woody?” he asks, and then he recites a snatch of a song about the message poor Dust Bowl Okies learned upon entering the Golden State:

California is a Garden of Eden;

It’s a Paradise to live in or see

But believe it or not

You won’t find it so hot

If you ain’t got the do-re-mi.

Liberals, Burke says, have been co-opted by “Hollywood elitists.” They’ve forgotten their mission and lost touch with their constituency--the sort of people who picked those tomatoes, who built America, who live in the San Joaquin Valley’s little towns.

But he has faith, he says, that his liberal brethren will soon remember that they have their roots “in Jefferson, Twain, Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie. . . . That it’s based on protecting the rights of people who have no voice.”

Burke still strums an old Gibson himself, but it might be argued that he gives voice to all those unheard characters he collects in the populist art form of crime fiction.

Author Joyce Carol Oates, one of the few reviewers to connect Burke’s “literary” novels and short stories with the genre fare, writes of “the luminosity of his writerly voice.”

Oddly, but characteristically, Burke defers on such matters to his fictional detective: “Dave talks about the world in a way I was never able to. He has the voice I should have had.”

Like Robicheaux, Burke waged a hard fight with alcoholism. He has been sober for 19 years, and, like Robicheaux, he attributes his recovery to the 12-step program--an approach that emphasizes humility and surrender to a person’s “higher power.”

He hints at a connection. “Characters seem to have origins of their own. I hear their voices. Hear dialogue. . . . The story is already written. I’ve never understood it,” he says.

“Tell this to a psychiatrist, that you hear voices, people walking around in your head, you’ll be a candidate for lobotomy.”

Then he laughs, and, as often happens when he tells a joke or story, the laughter takes over his psyche like a joyful seizure, carrying him off for half a minute or more, to some spiritual hide-out.

When he recovers, his face again becomes an intricate web of laugh and frown lines, making him look as if the world’s woes are weighing down the musculature, while some inner spirit asserts a determined counterforce.

His eyes on the road, Burke smiles and offers up a quote from beat author Jack Kerouac: “Art is the holy spirit blowing through your soul.”

A yellow school bus passes. Farm workers look out. In the distance, complex heaps of cumulous storm clouds hang on the Sierra to the east and the Diablo range to the West, but the sky overhead is blue.

“I think what I’m doing is art,” Burke says. “I wouldn’t work that hard for any other reason. . . . I believe these are the books I was intended to write.”

* Times researcher Paul Singleton contributed to this story.