ames Lee Burke published his first novel, “Half of Paradise,” in 1965. Early in his career he accumulated rejections aplenty. Publishers actually allowed some early works to go out of print. He never ...

Burke’s career has been long and his output prolific, not to mention varied. There are his westerns and epic novels of the Civil War. There are his novels featuring former Texas Ranger-turned-attorney ...

In August 2019, America ran a cover story headlined “The God-Haunted Characters of James Lee Burke.” Written by a senior editor, Edward Schmidt, S.J., the profile discussed a “theology” of Burke, the ...

Twenty-two years ago, James Lee Burke published a standalone novel, “White Doves at Morning,” set in Louisiana during the height of the Civil War. That book is one of my favorites. When it came out, I ...

It had the makings of a tense, knotty neo-noir, a kind of gumbo-flavored No Country for Old Men: two Academy Award-winning actors in an adaptation of one of James Lee Burke’s critically acclaimed ...

James Lee Burke has published three novels spotlighting other characters over the four years it’s been since we last had a mystery featuring his signature character, Dave Robicheaux. That book was ...

In 20 novels since 1987, we’ve seen James Lee Burke’s most popular character, Dave Robicheaux, not only grow older, but also more jaundiced, more philosophical, more introspective. “I didn’t like to ...

In a previous column, I asked James Lee Burke if his Cajun cop character Dave Robicheaux, the first-person narrator of the Robicheaux series, was in any way autobiographical. “The character defects ...