A crime scene after the deluge

“AS we crossed under the elevated highway and headed toward the Convention Center, I saw one image that will never leave me and that will remain emblematic of my experience in New Orleans, La., on Monday, August 29, in the year of Our Lord, 2005. The body of a fat black man was bobbing facedown against a piling. His dress clothes were puffed with air, his arms floating straight out from his sides. A dirty skim of yellow froth from our wake washed over his head. His body would remain there for at least three days.”

That’s James Lee Burke’s protagonist-narrator Dave Robicheaux giving us his hard-eyed view of the remnants of what he considered to be, prior to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, “one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere.”

The destruction of New Orleans and many of its neighboring parishes is very much on Burke’s mind in the new Robicheaux novel, “The Tin Roof Blowdown.” That destruction and the reluctance of our government to rush to the area’s aid emerge as crimes so nightmarishly monumental they make the book’s other criminal activities seem almost inconsequential.

Almost.

Burke’s flair for concocting fictional evil has not been completely compromised by his sadness and anger over the Crescent City’s fate. In a serpentine plot that winds from the drowning of a drug-addicted priest in the flooded Lower 9th Ward through the looting and vandalizing of a crime czar’s deserted uptown McMansion, to a slam-bang conclusion in the lawman’s hometown of New Iberia, La., we’re introduced to an assortment of villains. They include the vindictive czar, Sidney Kovick, a civic-minded, churchgoing florist who, Robicheaux tells us, “could snuff your wick and sip a glass of burgundy while he did it”; Bobby Mack Rydel, an expert in torture; Ronald Bledsoe, a clever and sadistic psychopath who sets his sights on Robicheaux’s daughter, Alafair; an assortment of racists and men and women of bad will; and, finally, Bertrand Melancon, a young black thief, rapist and murderer, who (in the sort of perverse twist favored by the author) takes on a nearly angelic presence before the book ends.

Tying all of these characters together along with Robicheaux and his mighty, loose-cannon comrade in arms, Clete Purcell, are a bagful of blood diamonds that, like the Idol’s Eye or the Maltese Falcon, carry a curse. Just as the gems prompted ghastly mutilation and death during their theft in Africa, they continue to encourage torture and murder in post-Katrina Louisiana.

Like the 15 previous Robicheaux novels, this one is written in an almost hypnotic style, filled with poetic description (“The wind was blowing hard out of the south, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin”), street wisdom (“In any American slum, two enterprises are never torched by urban rioters: the funeral home and the bondsman’s office”), the occasional hard-boiled flourish (“When Rydel bounced off the mirror, Clete hit him again, breaking his lips against his teeth”) and a sort of woozy neo-existentialism (“Like Clete says, going up or coming down, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll”). The unique combination makes for an extraordinarily satisfying reading experience.

Burke usually adds a few otherworldly touches to his novels -- visits from the departed or prophetic signs and portents. Here it’s a witness’ report of glowing lights under the waters of the Lower 9th, where the junkie priest and others perished. Robicheaux searches for the source of the lights but comes up short on solving that mystery.

Those lights also brighten “Mist,” a story that’s part of a new sampling of Burke shorts titled “Jesus Out to Sea.” We learn no more about them except that they remind the storm-tossed protagonist of “broken Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice.” The 10 other short works are a bit more earthbound, the most satisfying of them being the first-person narratives. Three of those, “The Molester,” “The Burning of the Flag” and “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine,” are bittersweet memory tales; their narrator, Charlie, recalls key events that took place while he and his best friend, Nick, were growing up in Texas in the 1940s.

Two of the plot elements in the Charlie and Nick tales -- the narrator’s boyhood marred by a brush with rheumatic fever and the helpful intervention of a brave but troubled nun -- appear also in “Texas City, 1947,” arguably the best of the collection. It too is a memory tale, in which the narrator, Billy Bob, reflects on a painful childhood in 1940s Louisiana during which he and his brothers and sisters suffered physical and mental mistreatment at the hands of a guardian, their father’s addled girlfriend. The year after its publication in the Southern Review, Burke used most of it (with neither the fever nor the nun making the cut) as the back story for a character in his 1992 Robicheaux novel, “A Stained White Radiance.”

Two of the stories in “Jesus Out to Sea” focus on musicians. “The Night Johnny Ace Died,” set in the mid-1950s, follows rockabillies R.B. Benoit (the narrator) and his pal Eddy Ray Holland as they brush up against such legends-in-the-making as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley (whom R.B. refers to only as “the Greaser”) and find their friendship shattered by the arrival of a brassy songstress named Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City. The seriocomic view of that era’s Southern music scene reads like Burke’s idea of a shaggy dog story, which is not to deny either its effectiveness or its entertainment value.

In the story that gives the collection its title, an unnamed musician, trapped by the flood and sharing a rooftop with his partner and friend from childhood, reminisces about the good times playing clubs in the French Quarter. His final wistful memory of NOLA’s golden past clearly was the model for this similar, more polished version, which appears in “The Tin Roof Blowdown”: “New Orleans had been a song, not a city.... When Clete and I walked a beat on Canal, music was everywhere. Sam Butera and Louis Prima played in the Quarter. Old black men knocked out ‘The Tin Roof Blues’ in Preservation Hall. Brass band funerals on Magazine shook the glass in storefront windows. When the sun rose over Jackson Square, the mist hung like cotton candy in the oak trees behind the St. Louis Cathedral. The dawn smelled of ponded water, lichen-stained stone, flowers that bloomed only at night, and freshly baked beignets in the Cafe du Monde. Every day was a party, and everyone was invited and the admission was free.”

For us New Orleanians of a certain age, Burke/Robicheaux’s psalm to the Big Easy will do quite nicely.

Dick Lochte is the author of the comedy-thriller “Croaked!”