Crusader’s Cross first dives back into past, and the abduction of a girl in 1958 by an older generation of well-connected monsters. The juxtaposition seems almost contrived, like a set in a Marxist documentary”.Burke has been giving us the inside story on his patch for years, his books sustained by lush Southern-Gothic prose, fast-swerving plots, deep roots in history, and an intensity of character that any novelist might envy. In Robicheaux’s world, “memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue”. At home in the Bayou, he sees, just across a bridge from gorgeous antebellum mansions, “a trailer slum that probably has no equivalent outside the Third World.

Burke shows through his plots about buried secrets and concealed crimes that the stage-set charm of New Orleans, and the laid-back grace of the Gulf shores, rests on a history of bondage and brutality. They may find it (as I did) eerie beyond measure to pick up a new novel in which, early on, Robicheaux drives into New Orleans to find “the streets were flooded, and thunder was booming over the Gulf”, while at the climax “The radio said the hurricane churning out in the Gulf might make landfall between New Orleans and Mobile”.Yet the cultural climate matters more than the weather reports. Or, since each title in some way tells the recovering-alcoholic cop’s back-story, they could just as well start with the latest book: Crusader’s Cross (Orion, £12.99). Together, they compose a matchless portrait of the ragged America we saw dissolve into chaos and cruelty.Orion has been re-issuing Burke’s Robicheaux novels, so newcomers might want to discover such past glories as Sunset Limited, Cadillac Jukebox and Purple Cane Road. Everyone who knows the genre grasps that his series of books about the Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux has grown into one of the crowning achievements in current US fiction.

Yes, from a mere mystery hack.
Which is not to say that James Lee Burke from New Iberia, La has lacked praise He has a shelf-full of awards and a shedful of sales. So it’s appropriate that the most densely imagined and morally assured novels about Louisiana and its toxic terrain have come in recent years from a crime writer. The Katrina aftermath has inflicted avoidable tragedy on people whose reality stayed silent because they fell into the sort of categories that didn’t count: the black, the poor, the sick and disabled. It’s much too facile, inspecting from afar the drowned world of New Orleans and the Gulf, to reach for the “disaster movie” tag and swamp suffering in a wave of clich?Forget Hollywood catastrophe: I have one extraordinary source of “heart information” to recommend. The most graphic images of human misery and sheer abandonment from the most powerful nation ever to exist have arrived wrapped in well-meaning commentary that told the facts but not the truth. That need for “heart information” has seldom seemed so urgent as in the past ten days. When I interviewed Salman Rushdie, he had some timely things to say about the insight into other lives that fiction alone can deliver, and that factual reporting often shuns.

In an age of 24/7 global news, people might drift back to reading fiction, he suggested, for the understanding about distant worlds “that they’re not getting from the so-called information media: heart information, the information of lived lives”. Cue the entry of the tormented literary lion Conan Doyle, whose own investigations led to George’s pardon and helped to set up the Court of Appeal William Hill odds: 5/4 fav. Scrupulously sticking to the record, while exploring the boundaries of truth and fiction, Barnes resurrects the case of the half-Indian George Edalji, a Midlands solicitor and vicar’s son falsely imprisoned for mutilating horses. Amber trails plenty of clever, comic energy in her wake, but Smith can never shut the door on self-consciousness. William Hill odds: 12/1 Julian Barnes, Arthur & George A faultlessly crafted documentary novel. An alluring stranger arrives to wreck the lives of a smug but screwy family in a Norfolk cottage.