Fans of author James Lee Burke and, especially, his Hackberry Holland books, will want to pick up Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie, his latest – and the first he’s written from a female perspective. I reviewed this sprawling new novel in the ArtsFuse this week, and I’ve also pasted the review below. I also got to interview the 88-year-old writer via Zoom from his home in Montana.
By Clea Simon
Over the decades, James Lee Burke has built up a distinctive and glorious body of work, and Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie is a notable addition to the canon and possibly his most comprehensive.
Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke. Atlantic Monthly Press, 368 pp., $28.
James Lee Burke knows his demons. A longtime recovering alcoholic, the author often burdens his protagonists with such issues as substance use disorder and post-traumatic stress. But in his latest, Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie, he takes the next step. The 14-year-old Bessie Holland who narrates this new novel may be haunted by an actual haint, or evil spirit. Mr. Slick, as she calls him, is a (possibly) goat-footed creature who accompanies the young teen – and sometimes protects her – as she faces down evil in human form in this sprawling and wonderfully engaging book.
Bessie is the daughter of the onetime Texas Ranger Hackberry Holland, whom Burke fans will know from the short story “Hack.” (He is also the grandfather of the Hackberry Holland who has his own Burke crime fiction series.) Coming of age at the beginning of the 20th century, she will survive violence on the Texas ranch where she was born and during a sojourn to New York City before returning to the land she – and, clearly, the author – loves.
It’s not an easy territory, and Bessie’s journey is not easy either, as we learn early on:
The windmill by the barn was spinning, the hogs grunting in their pen, grit flying, the air blooming with the smell of rain. This was Texas in the dry season. Oh Lordy, I wanted to float away on a cloud. My days were not happy. I longed for my dead mother and my other siblings who found their way to the cities and disappeared into the grind of the twentieth century.
A literary heir of Hemingway and Hammett as much as Faulkner, Burke revels in direct, punchy sentences—though his are cloaked in an old-fashioned formality that delivers a sense of place as effectively as Bessie’s mule, Lancelot, or the outhouse that launches the central drama.
“The Hollands were a violent family but they weren’t bullies. Papa always said you don’t pick a fight with a weakling; it’s unseemly,” Bessie tells us early on. “Sometimes I wanted to flee my family and all their lunatic behavior and live like a normal person, but I have yet to learn what a normal person is.”
Despite her blood-soaked patrimony, it’s normal teenager behavior – a flirtation with Jubal, a young man from a troubled family – that sparks the main conflict in this book, a feud that results in Bessie nearly killing a man. This act links her more closely to her violent heritage, adding new fuel to ongoing conflicts and bringing stark punishment down on those close to her. Not that Bessie escapes; even when she flees to New York, violence will follow her. That she, like her father, is a survivor may owe something to the surprising reappearances of Mr. Slick. They certainly speak of her resilience, another Holland family trait and one linked through Burke’s vivid Southern Gothic-tinged prose to her hardscrabble upbringing and the unforgiving land.
“The world I came from … was feral and founded on murderous policies, not molded by god out of clay but cut from rock and slag and peopled by maniacal preachers and gunmen and helpless women whose babies were rope-dragged to death through cactus,” Bessie recalls, when she is recovering from an attack in New York. “I would not concede, nor reach out to corrupt men who governed a corrupt society. I would prevail, and no power on earth would stop me.”
Like Hammett – and like much of Burke’s better-known crime fiction – the violence here is unvarnished, even when offscreen. “I thought it [the screaming] would stop, as all pain was supposed to do. Instead, it was prolonged and grew worse and made me see images in my mind,” says Bessie, when a friend is raped nearby. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” she says after later crimes. “[I]t metastasizes.”
Against such a dark background, beauty and kindness shine brightly – especially when they are gone. “I missed our farm and the spiritual moments you share with farm animals.” Bessie, while in New York, recounts “the cold, grassy smell on their breaths when they’ve drunk from the stock tank in the early morning, the steam rising from their bodies.” After yet another crisis back home, “all our friends came to see us, carrying stuffed eggs and salads and fruit cakes like it was Thanksgiving or Christmas,” she says. “[O]r the way people do at a wake.”
This is the first time the celebrated author of such books as the masterful Flags Over the Bayou and the Dave Robicheau mysteries has written from a female point of view, but Bessie’s voice flows naturally and believably. In part, that’s because of the author’s great sense of place and time. In part, it’s because Bessie Holland shares many traits with Burke’s other protagonists (and, likely, the author), most notably a stubborn-to-the-point-of-self-destructive moral code that, paired with her nearly equal adherence to courtesy, give her a Quixotic gallantry. And if it seems odd that an 88-year-old male author is speaking through a 14-year-old female character, well, a line at the book’s conclusion as well as the dedication imply that Bessie is based on the author’s mother.
Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie is not without flaws. The ending of this ambitious book is a bit rushed, as Bessie recounts a series of ups and downs – including the discovery of oil on the Holland ranch and the founding and failure of a film studio – without much detail. In addition, the supporting characters don’t all get the resolutions they deserve. Granted, to do so would probably push this book past 400 pages, but fans of Mr. Slick in particular deserve more.
As in many of Burke’s works, there is also a bit of recycling. Recurring memories of place pop up, increasingly as the book winds down, with Hackberry’s memories of gunfights as well as images of Confederate soldiers rising out of the (electric) mist. This is an observation more than a complaint. Over the decades, Burke has built up a distinctive and glorious body of work, and Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie is a notable addition to the canon and possibly his most comprehensive. This is James Lee Burke’s world, after all, hell and heaven included.
Clea Simon is the Somerville-based author most recently of the novel The Butterfly Trap.