Customer Reviews

Cimarron Rose Hb

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having read several of James Lee Burke's novels now, I have come to see that his approach to weaving together a story is intriguingly unorthodox. His narrative is choppy and at times almost disjointed; short vignettes, encounters, and episodes are cobbled together, and change-of-voice digressions and flashbacks are not unusual. Readers accustomed to a smoother ride will find Burke's approach difficult in places.

At the same time, Burke can positively hypnotize readers through the beauty of the language he employs and his ability to capture a thought, a moment, a mood, or a concept in a few well-chosen words or phrases. This combination of organizational looseness and powerful, evocative writing makes reading Burke a truly distinctive literary experience.

In *Cimarron Rose*, Burke has taken a break from his Dave Robacheaux series and has introduced a new protagonist, Billy Bob Holland in a new setting, Deaf Smith County, Texas. Still, the overall tone and style of the story will be familiar to readers of previous Burke novels. Holland is another fallen lawman-type haunted by his past, and his similarity to Robacheaux in terms of his patterns of action and thinking are hardly surprising. The story itself is populated by desperate criminal types, fallen women, drunkards, corrupt "leading citizens," a demented maniac, and in fact, a entire cast of typical denizens of Burke's stories.

With its loosely woven whodunit plot line and its accompanying quota of broken noses and gunshot wounds, the story is a kind of classic combination of police mystery and violent pulp fiction novella. Added to this are some interesting added elements, including recurring reference to Billy Bob's great-grandaddy's journal and the regular appearance of the ghost of Billy Bob's ex-best friend and partner. Combined with a rather weird ... ending, the whole mish-mash makes for interesting reading but doesn't constitute a satisfactorily well-woven novel overall.

Despite its flaws, *Cimarron Rose* is worthwhile not only because of Burke's talents as a wordsmith, but also because of his astute eye for social and class interactions and conflict in his small-town southern setting. His descriptions of the myriad ways in which the affluent "East enders" dominate the small Texas community in which events unfold in this book shows Burke's keen understanding of the sociological and economic as well as psychological aspects of his human subject matter. Clearly, his own sympathies are with the lower classes, the downtrodden, the underprivileged, and the way he skewers the powerful and hypocritical in this book is impressive, indeed.

If you have never read a Burke novel then you may like this. If you are familiar with the Robicheaux novels, then pass this one up. I like James Lee Burke's novels, but this book is just the same story and same characters with different names and in Texas instead of New Iberia, LA. Billy Bob is just Dave Robicheaux except as a small town lawyer rather than a small town cop. He has a woman partner, has semi-adopted a young ethnic child, talks to a ghost, defends the down-trodden and his father was killed in an oil company accident just like Robicheaux's father. He deals with sketchy characters from his past and has to deal with the "psychic scars" of his past as the NY Book Review put it. Sound familiar? If you have read the Robicheaux series then, of course it does. I found myself missing the antics of Clete Purcel. Same idea here: the rich and powerful screw with the down and out. Guess who wins in the end?

I liked part two (Bitterroot) of James Lee Burke’s Billy Bob Holland saga so well that I gave this first part a listen on unabridged audio. Boy howdy, Billy Bob gets better with age!

Cimarron Rose is our introduction Billy Bob Holland, an attorney/former Texas Ranger (the Law Enforcement kind – not G.W.’s former baseball team) and his friends and relatives, including his dead ranger partner, L.Q. Navarro, for whose death Billy Bob, a “river-baptized” Baptist turned Roman Catholic, feels all the guilt that the latter can impose.

The plot exposes small-town caste sociology to the light - without proselytizing - like Stephen King did in the horror venue with “Carrie.” But what’s up with Great-grandpa’s journal? This reader doesn’t see the point - except to exploit the extreme predjudices of the period against Native Americans. The author’s forays (via excerpts from an old journal) into Billy Bob’s outlaw/preacher great-grandfather’s lust for the “savage” Cimarron Rose, and concomitant self-hatred, seem superfluous and gratuitous.

Burke’s writing is superb. At one point I just had to stop and write down a quote. Billy Bob (the tale is written in the first-person) is telling us about his Daddy, who had gone nearly blind as a welder. Then, “Clarity of sight” came only when he was welding “and saw again the flame that was as pure to him as the cathedrals bells were to the deaf bell-ringer Quasimodo.”

This tour of Burke’s Deaf Smith County, Texas is well worth the trip. Stay on board for Bitterroot, Montana!

James Lee Burke continues to produce thought-provoking and thoroughly readable fiction. Cimarron Rose weaves a fine tale with strong characters, good plotting and excellent first person narration. Drawing from his usual themes, Burke reflects on how the past informs the present, how men like hero Billy Bob Holland, (an ex-Texas Ranger) reconciles the violence in his life whilst trying to be decent as he raises a surrogate son in the form of a young mexican boy, (echoes here of Dave Robicheaux's adopted daughter Alafair). Cimarron Rose begins well and continues to grip the reader as a gallery of typical Burke villians(revolting pyscopaths, obnoxious federal agents, crooked law enforcement officers and rich spoilt, vicious brats) give hero Holland grief. Varying in style only slightly from Burke's earlier books, those who have enjoyed his work before should enjoy this book too.

Fans of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux/cajun cop series now have a new series with Texas lawyer Billy Bob Holland. If this had been the first Burke book for me, I would have rated it higher.

The main plot involves Billy Bob defending his illegitimate son against a murder charge in a fishy-smelling situation involving a rich kid deviant with fetal alcohol syndrome and speed on the brain, a former football hero, DEA officers, and a sociopath named Garland T. Moon.

The inner plot involves Billy Bob wrestling with ghosts and demons from his past, namely private conversations he has with his old partner from their Texas Ranger days. There is also some mystery surrounding the death of Billy Bob's father in 1965.

Burke does an excellent job weaving all of the plot threads together, and the characters are believable. His descriptions are spare and elegant, and he has the ability provide sensory detail in a few short sentences.

One word of warning is that the cast is a rogue's gallery, like other Burke novels, and features a very flawed protaganist, but one we can root for just the same. Still, we're in some dark territory here, and Burke's writing is edgy, graphic and not for everyone.

While the book was well-written, I didn't get enough distance between Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, who are essentially the same character. Both are men in their forties who stay in good shape, have father issues, and share similar demons in their past. The same self-righteous attitude was evident in both men. I hope that Billy Bob's voice takes a different shape in future novels of this series.

The other problem is that Burke is starting to recycle some of his details. The wealthy southerners always hold glasses wrapped with paper napkins secured with a rubber band. He's used this one a lot. There's also one where the night smells of fish spawning that's been used multiple times.

Still, this was a gripping read filled with tension on every page that made me want to know what was going to happen next.

All right, for some reason I haven't been familiar with Burke's writing up to now. Nobody e-mailed me about him. I was surfing the Mystery Writers' Association website and I noticed that Burke has this habit of winning Edgar awards over and over, so I thought I'd check him out.

This is one of the Edgar winners, and it supports my previously-expressed hypothesis that they don't give out the award by drawing names out of a hat. This is a very strong novel with a West Texas small-city/rural voice, with currents of Ross MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett, a touch of Larry McMurtry, and highlights of raspberry, chocolate, and tobacco. I'm sorry about the 'highlights', I realized I sounded as if I was describing wine and couldn't resist.

I mean the other stuff, though, and it's all complimentary. By referring to MacDonald, I mean that Burke displays the same sense of complexity: of setting, of interaction. I mean, everyone has a history, everyone has secrets, and not just every major and minor character, but every place, every barn and lot and stream. And all of these secrets are liable to bubble up and confuse everyone at any moment and knock the plot into a new and surprising direction. Nobody is carrying out any one plan. Everyone has a lot of things on his/her mind. It's the exact opposite of the sense that you get with one of these serial-killer novels where the villain is omnipotent and single-minded and supremely organized and does nothing all day except perfect his serial killing plan. Here most of the people are at least somewhat friendly and at least somewhat dangerous, and the tensions seldom get resolved.

However, Burke's style is not MacDonald's brooding tapestry of similes; it's much more like Hammett, spare, brisk, and violent; for example:

"... [I] rode my Morgan up on the porch and through the doorway, ducking down on his withers to get under the jamb. ..

"'I hope you brung your own dustpan and whisk broom,' the bartender said.

"I rode the Morgan between a cluster of tables and chairs and across a small dance floor toward the pool table. The man eating from a paper plate looked at me, smiling, a spoonful of chili half-way to his mouth ... I whipped the loop three times over my head and flung it at the man with the blond beard ... He tried to rise from the chair and free himself, but I wound the rope tightly around the pommel, brought my left spur into the Morgan's side, and catapulted the blond man off his feet and dragged him caroming through tables and bar stools and splintering chairs, into an oak post and the legs of a pinball machine and the side of the jukebox, tearing a huge plastic divot out of the casing."

Note how he uses the rhythm of the clauses to pace the action, short and simple as the action impends, then exploding along with the action into a sprawling run-on sentence. The action leaps along; the average 'scene' is a page or a page and a half long, and since something happens in every 'scene', by the time you are on page 10, things are moving fast and furious. This is also very much like Hammett: think about "Red Harvest", for example.

Later, the county D.A. complains:

"I work in a county that's so corrupt I have to confide in a defense lawyer who rides his horse into barrooms. I grant you, it's a pitiful situation."

That last line is the sort of thing that makes me think of McMurtry - I mean the best McMurtry, "Lonesome Dove" in particular. Isn't that a gem? Can't you imagine Woodrow Call saying that? Or maybe it isn't McMurtry at all, maybe they just really talk like that all the time in West Texas, and Burke and McMurtry are just reporting it. Whichever, it's an attractive feature.

The narrator, Billy Bob Holland, is a former Texas Ranger who has retreated into criminal defense work in self-imposed penance for accidentally shooting his partner and best friend, L. Q. Navarro, in a chaotic battle with drug smugglers down in Coahuila. He sees Navarro everywhere and talks with him, but these dialogues don't hurt the plot much. He is also re-reading his great-grandfather's journals, which are the stuff of a novel in themselves, in an attempt (I guess) to explore the question of whether and how you can get out of the rut of living in a violent and self-destructive culture. You can either treat this as an interesting interlude, or skip over it, or try to tie it in convincingly with the main action. I never really managed this last, but it doesn't bother me much.

The plot starts off with Holland being summoned to defend a young man on charges of rape and murder, and the trial winds up near the end of the book, but to say that the book is 'about' the trial is to ignore the 15 other subplots that turn the narrative structure into a 'bush' rather than a 'ladder'. I guess the book is mainly about trying to do what's right even if you live in a really corrupt county and have a great burden of shame of your own. Unless you argue that the style itself is the content, as if it were a work of instrumental music. Whichever. Anyway, I recommend this book very highly.

Cimarron Rose is a typically offbeat James Lee Burke tale, set in the small town of Deaf Smith, Texas. Defense attorney, Billy Bob Holland, is asked to take on the cases of two young men, and soon finds himself in the middle of a complex set of corrupt relationships that will not be sorted out unless he does it. The book has a fascinating story within a story delivered in the form of a journal inherited from his Great-grandpa Sam that Billy Bob reads almost daily while pursuing the case. The book has fascinating characters whose evil, blindness, and carelessness make the story develop in unexpected ways. Although the book has much violence in it, there is a genuine attempt to keep the violence within some sort of limits that makes the book more appealing.

I like books that feature significant character development, and this one does an exemplary job with Billy Bob and Lucas Smothers, who is accused of a rape and murder. These two men are very complicated but in a way that will draw you in, and cause you to root for them to keep following their ideals and dreams.

The backdrop is a crooked town, in a corrupt county, with lots of bent government types running around. Although probably no worse than a lot of other places, this book is about a sort of Texas Sodom and Gomorrah. There is a need for someone to do more than what is required, and Billy Bob takes on that role. You will find those who are satisfied with their wealthy lives just as culpable as those who are totally corrupt.

Fans of the Dave Robicheaux novels will find this one follows the general approach of those rich, complex stories.

Clearly, Billy Bob is a fellow who operates well outside the law, a sort of modern day Lone Ranger. At the same time, he can barely keep himself from going off the deep end mentally. As a result, he is sort of like a ticking time bomb, and you keep expecting him to go off. And he does.

The plot culminates in a trial that presents the kind of unexpected developments that you will recognize from Perry Mason stories.

After you finish reading this novel, you should think about when you should follow God's law, when men's laws, and when your own conscience. How would you have handled the dilemmas presented here for Billy Bob and Lucas? How could they have handled them better?

Live in the present and make a pathway for good!

Defense attorney Billy Bob Holland is an ex-Texas Ranger who has taken a murder case where the chief suspect is his illegitimate son. But this isn't a simple plot; it involves his father and his great grandfather's diary as well. The past also haunts him literally-in the form of L.Q. Navarro. As a Ranger, Billy Bob accidentally killed his partner and friend. Periodically L.Q. appears to Billy Bob and offers him advice. The intricate plot and fluid writing definitely draw you into the Billy Bob's world in Deaf Smith. For instance, there isn't just one villain; the novel is full of unsavory characters. I fell in love with the lyric images floating from the pages and atmosphere, but I have to admit the ending was a bit confusing.

Like many of James Lee Burke's legion of devoted fans, I have read all of the Dave Robicheaux novels (in the order in which they were written). Before I added my review for Cimarron Rose I read many of the ones written by fellow fans. It was interesting to see that while JLB still has a loyal following, there are those who were (and are) disappointed by some of his recent efforts. The other thing that truly amazed me has been the quality of the writing in the reviews submitted by other readers. It made me wonder if many of them worked as literary critics or college English professors. Needless to say, there is a surprising lack of consensus on the quality of Cimarron Rose. When the book first came out, I was initially disappointed that Dave, Clete, Batist, Alafair and Bootsie would not appear between the two covers. The move to small-town Texas also did not appeal to me at first but, as I got into the book, I realized here was something new ---James Lee Burke was venturing further afield than New Iberia parish or even his other erstwhile home, Montana.

I am a Northerner who has lived in the South and find Burke's writing evocative but also very unsettling. He knows from whence he writes but for me, he reminds me of everything I saw in Georgia and came to hate. Cimarron Rose, while set in Texas, stresses that there are truly vile, ignorant, bigoted people populating these newly popular Sun Belt States who deserve nothing more than our enmity and vilification. The Billy Bob Hollands and the Dave Robicheauxs of the world notwithstanding, the novels of JLB, while beautifully written, paint a sordid picture of the South (and Southwest)that confirm the rightness of my decision to return to the Northeast.

All of the books JLB has written have stressed a darker side of life. While he has heroes, there is nothing heroic about these books. They are almost always well crafted and yet, they remind me of things I'd thought I'd left behind in the Coastal Empire of SE Georgia. His writing also makes me wonder if his southern readers like him or hate him for showing the rest of the world the darker side of the region they call home. The Robicheaux novels are set in Louisiana and if as it appears, Billy Bob Holland continues as an alternate character in another series, will he make us cringe while he writes about the bigoted half-wits in Deaf Smith, Texas?

I often wonder, is James Lee Burke trying to tell us all how much he despises us? I ask this question because he makes a lot of money from his readership. His single most popular character, Dave Robicheaux is the one that got him noticed as a writer and yet, JLB had at least 6 other novels out years before that barely brought him attention. Almost all of them have been or will be re-released and all because of the popularity of the troubled cop from New Iberia.

Is Billy Bob different from Dave? Not really. Does that change the fact that I really enjoyed the book? Nope. But, some of my fellow reader critics seem to have hit the nail squarely on the head. JLB may just well be starting to turn out novels on a formulaic basis. I say this because I came to that conclusion about John Grisham. I also have wondered if Hyperion has hooked JLB into a multi-book contract and the only way he can fulfill his end of the bargain is to churn out Robicheaux "look-alike, sound-alikes." After all, Grisham, while changing his characters from book to book, is already well past his prime. He should try to enjoy those royalties; he doesn't really need to work anymore.

In any case, I say all of this from a distance but not with malice. After all, James Lee Burke is making a very nice living indeed from doing something I wish I could do and that's write popular fiction that's well received. For that I am grateful, because he keeps me entertained and wanting more. I just hope that he and Dave (and Billy Bob over there in Deaf Smith, Texas) find their voices again. All three of them still have a lot to say.

Cimarron Rose has many of the same elements as the Robicheaux novels, but it's a great leap for Burke. The writing is tighter and more condensed, yet magically evocative of strong characterizations and sense of place and time. More than any of his other books, there are several places where one sentence is simply perfect in its description of a place, scene, or person, bringing the entire picture together in the reader's mind. ( I can't believe the Kirkus reviewer wasn't able to figure this out). The story is satisfyingly complex, with no loose ends or "wait a minute!" suspensions of belief. Yes, Billy Bob is something of a clone of Robicheaux (and Burke might have used a less sterotypical name name for his protagonist). But every author must get sick of writing about the same character time and again. Billy Bob has great potential (no wife or kids) which will allow Burke to take the character into uncharted directions in future books. I especially love what Burke does with descriptions of not only sights but sounds and smells. Within 50 pages, the reader is simply THERE, and feels as though he/she has been there and knows these folks like they were long-lost neighbors, relatives, friends and enemies. Bravo, Mr.Burke