James Lee Burke, Jolie Blon’s Bounce (2002)

            James Lee Burke’s detective is Dave Robicheaux, who used to be a New Orleans cop but in Jolie Blon’s Bounce, the twelfth of the series about him, is a deputy sheriff in New Iberia, Louisiana. Robicheaux is a rule-breaker, full of suppressed violence from his time in Vietnam, who frequently takes the law into his own hands.

            In New Iberia, a girl is raped and murdered and a luckless black musician, a drug-addicted kid named Tee Bobby Hulin is found to have been at the scene of the crime. Dave Robicheaux doesn’t think he’s guilty and begins to investigate. He finds a sleazy club owner who seems to be exploiting Tee Bobby but who may be trying to protect him and his family. Then Robicheaux begins to explore that family itself, and he finds a Faulknerian tangle of black and white mischief, with a paternal plantation owner and a cruel overseer who starts out looking like a cliché and ends up convincing some New Iberians that he is the devil himself.

            Another murder up Bayou Teche in St. Martinville complicates matters. The murdered girl is the runaway daughter of a retired mafia hit man who not only begins to thrown his own weight around but brings in his formidable, private-investigator niece. The plantation owner’s son is the lawyer defending Tee Bobby, but Robicheaux gets less help from him than he does from the woman who is prosecuting the boy. She, by the way, is sleeping with Robicheaux’s ex-partner from his days as a New Orleans cop. Are you confused yet, or have we merely entered southern Louisiana?

            Dave Robicheaux is a man who feels out of place, even in his own skin. Detectives who know their territory but don’t quite fit in it are what’s needed to find the murderers, the greatest misfits of all. Murderers and detectives form a complementary pair, and the two of them are the only ones who can fully appreciate each other’s craft and sullen art.

            Jolie Blon’s Bounce gets its name from Tee Bobby’s own version, or “bounce,” of a Cajun song, “Jolie Blon.” This classic, often called the Cajun national anthem, is perhaps best known in the 1946 recording by the fiddler Harry Choates, who died in a Houston jail at the age of 29. But the song has had many bounces, notably by accordion player Nathan Abshire, by Doug Kershaw and Jimmy Newman, by Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly, and by Bruce Springsteen. The wailing of the deserted lover for his pretty but unfaithful blonde is an apt theme song for the sad and violent tale that James Lee Burke tells.