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It may be because of his Catholicism that James Lee Burke believes in evil as a characteristic of both criminals and law enforcers, and as a primordial force in the landscape. In any event, what distinguishes him as a crime writer is the biblical correspondence he creates between Man and his environment. His sadists, psychopaths, pimps and detectives are all imbued with the spirit of place.

Swamp-infested Louisiana, where his detective Dave Robicheaux operates, and the mountainous and unforgiving Montana, home turf for the defence lawyer Billy Bob Holland, are Burke's subjective territories. If he is regionally predisposed, it's because such parochialism helps him to generate realism.

Like many crime writers of the 1950s he has an impeccable industrial background. Born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, the son of a gas-pipe fitter, Burke himself worked as a land surveyor for Sinclair Oil in Texas and Colorado. Along with his experiences while a social worker among LA gangs, these things inform his fiction.

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Burke is one of the most lyrical of crime writers, his Cajun voice both seductive and brutal. If his books are violent, then so is America - in the form of its war machine and arms-dealing. Burke deals with how the big Washington acts affect lives. The Iran-Contras clandestine arms deal story of 1981 had not yet broken but was in the air when he wrote The Neon Rain. More recently, he has written about the bureaucratic indifference in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in The Tin Roof Blowdown. Inside a morally and physically ruined New Orleans, Robicheaux is on the tail of a rapist and thief, but always with one eye on his redemption.

Burke's world view may be bleak, but the potential for spiritual redemption makes that bleakness bearable. One to read: The Neon Rain (1987)

Russell Celyn Jones is Professor of Creative Writing at Birkbeck College and author of several acclaimed novels

Archive of information on the James Lee Burke

The Times’s review of Lee Burke’s new collection of short stories, Jesus Out to Sea

Audio: Ian Rankin speaks to James Lee Burke about music in crime fiction

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