On the novelist James Lee Burke
Read an article today on Burke, a U.S. popular novelist of detective fiction also interested in theology from America magazine. The article notes theology can come from different sources: Sacred Scripture, Church decrees, papal statements, writings of saints, or, as Burke says, St. Augustine or Samuel Beckett.
Burke, now in his mid-80s, has written 37 novels and two short-story collections mainly dealing with David Robicheaux, a law officer and private detective who also served in the Vietnam War. He starts off on the New Orleans police force and in later works moves to Montana for a spell. The villains in the works tend to be drug kingpins and others in organized crime. The article notes the novelist decries a police or legal official “sworn to serve but who deliberately aids a molester and condemns a victim to a lifetime of resentment and self-mortification.”
He writes in one novel that “God does slay Himself with every leaf that flies and that indeed there is no greater thief than that of time.” As with many crime novelists, he has a gritty sense of reality despite having a religious background in many works: “we want bad guys smoked, dried, fried, and plowed under with bulldozers.” And he writes of “theological questions to us that psychologists cannot answer.” He speaks of Louisiana Jesuit priests who “underneath it all are the Catholic equivalent of jarheads [Marines].” At one point another character says of the main character, “Under it all, you’re a priest, Dave.”