James Lee Burke: Burning Angel

 

John Updike—that late, great genius of the short story–once wrote that he reads other writers only for one reason: to plunder.  When I taught Creative Writing, this is one of the quotes I’d trot out for the kids.  And this little nugget would upset my students very much because they had just learned that plagiarism was bad—really bad.  “Isn’t that cheating?” someone always asked.

Plagiarism is terrible.  But this is not what Updike meant by his colorful term “plunder”:  he wanted to see how sentences were constructed, plots arranged, characters developed.  And then he took something away from it—and this take-away is what he lived for.  It was the treasure that he pirated, pillaged, plundered.  Every writer is at heart a pirate.

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I am reading James Lee Burke’s amazing novel Burning Angel—the story of a Louisiana detective caught up in a paramilitary intrigue and I’m doing so because I want to learn…ummm, I mean….plunder.  It’s got colorful characters in a cool setting.  And a first person narration in a distinctive regional voice.  So, when I picked up the book, I was a pirate who had my sights set on a certain type of booty.  I thought that’s what I’m going to plunder.  How does that man get a sense of time and place?  How does he keep his voice interesting?

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But the glimmering treasure I was after was not what I took away.  What did I plunder….umm learn?  Well, every male character in this yarn is sexy.  The main character, the villain—both all around hotties.  Hell, even when the villain meets up with the protagonist while jogging, the main character notes his sexiness in a decidedly appreciative non-gay way—checking out his rippling muscles and even the firm buttocks which, he observes, a woman might squeeze in the throes of sexual congress.

The men  in James Lee Burke’s novel ooze testosterone.  They’re not GQ pretty-boys.  They’re real men who train at boxing and have chest hair and are damaged by war and sweat buckets of musky man-scent, so powerful it could be harvested to make a thermonuclear cologne.  They have real scars and tattoos and women can’t resist that.  So, that’s my take-away:  the treasure that I hauled back onto my galleon.  My character is going to be sexy.  And he’s going to have more sex.  It makes for good action.  It gets him into places and situations that move the narrative.  A healthy sex life, I’ve discovered, translates into a page-turner.

 

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6 thoughts on “James Lee Burke: Burning Angel

  1. Hi Khanh…
    Interesting post on “plundering” from a professor.
    Just a thought. Will this be a guys’ book or a girls’ book or a unisex book? Women like mooshiness under that armoured exterior. So, in addition to the hot bod and the strong silence, you’ll need vulnerability too.

    • Hi Audrey, Great question. I’m hoping that my book appeals both to men and women, so I haven’t written for one particular audience…but my guy is kinda sensitive. He’s got a hurt in his past that makes him an obsessed sleuth…

  2. Khanah – I know just what you mean about plundering. I’ve learned a lot from other writers too. And I’m all for characters being ‘all man’ (or ‘all woman for the matter of that) if that’s who they really are as people. But I believe the best books contain unique characters that aren’t necessarily affected by what other people write – or at least not very much so. That’s because the best characters are the author’s own. That’s one of the many things that make it such a pleasure to read all sorts of characters. They are all different.

    • Thanks Margot. You definitely have to be true to your own artistic vision and, I guess, when the dust settles you end up writing the stuff you were always meant to write. So, you’ve got a point there. You should write the stuff that comes out of your true proclivities–your obsessions and hobbyhorses!

  3. Every writer is at heart a pirate? Well said, Cap’n, well said. Course, that means whenever two writers meet, there’s a chance one of them will get run through with a cutlass…

    • Touche…and ahoy…when two writers meet, there can only be mayhem and spilled blood! We are a savage lot: misfits the whole lot of us!

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