The Neon Rain was published by Henry Holt in 1987, and it introduced Dave Robicheaux — the character who would occupy Burke through more than twenty novels and who stands alongside Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as one of the great detective-protagonists in American fiction. Robicheaux is a Vietnam veteran, a recovering alcoholic, a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana, and a man whose moral seriousness is inseparable from his love of the Louisiana landscape.
Burke’s prose is unlike anything else in crime fiction. His sentences are long, rhythmic, richly sensory, filled with the colors, smells, and textures of the bayou country — moss-hung oaks, shrimp boats at dawn, the smell of boiled crawfish, thunderstorms rolling across the Gulf. This is not decorative writing; the landscape is integral to the novel’s moral vision. For Robicheaux, the beauty of the natural world is evidence that creation is good, even when human beings persistently corrupt it.
The plot of The Neon Rain involves drug trafficking, corrupt officials, and Central American dirty wars — but the plot is less important than the character it reveals. Robicheaux is a man who has seen terrible things (in Vietnam, in the interrogation rooms of the NOPD) and who fights the impulse toward violence that these experiences planted in him. His alcoholism is not a character quirk but a direct consequence of moral damage: he drinks because he cannot bear what he knows about human nature, including his own.
Burke’s achievement in the Robicheaux novels is to write crime fiction that operates at the level of serious literature without sacrificing the genre’s narrative energy. The books are page-turners — but they are also profound meditations on guilt, redemption, and the possibility of goodness in a fallen world.
Collecting The Neon Rain
First edition (Henry Holt, New York, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in fine jacket: $200–$600
- Signed first edition: $400–$1,000
- Reading copy without jacket: $15–$40