Black Cherry Blues was published by Little, Brown in 1989, and it won the Edgar Award for Best Novel — recognition that Burke’s Robicheaux novels represented something new in American crime fiction: books that combined the narrative drive of the thriller with prose of genuine literary distinction.
The novel takes Robicheaux out of Louisiana to Montana, where Dixie Lee Pugh — an old oil-field friend now involved in land fraud on a Blackfoot reservation — pulls Dave into a world of corporate corruption, organized crime, and environmental destruction. The displacement from Louisiana sharpens Burke’s social criticism: in Montana, the exploitation of land and indigenous people by oil companies serves as a microcosm of American capitalism’s relationship to the natural world.
Burke’s prose in this novel reaches its full maturity — passages describing the Montana landscape rival anything in American nature writing, and the action sequences have a visceral power that genre conventions cannot contain. A chase through the mountains, a confrontation in a bar, a moment of violence in a parking lot: each is rendered with the same attention to sensory detail that Burke brings to his descriptions of dawn over Bayou Teche.
The Edgar Award brought Burke a wider readership and confirmed that the Robicheaux novels were not merely good crime fiction but important American literature — books that used the detective novel’s structure to explore questions of moral responsibility, environmental stewardship, and the American capacity for self-destruction.
Collecting Black Cherry Blues
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in fine jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first edition: $200–$500
- Reading copy without jacket: $10–$25