Literary Comet Returns : Books: James Lee Burke first flashed on the scene in 1965, burned out and glowed again in 1987 with 'The Neon Rain.'

By LYNN SIMROSS

Jan. 31, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

By his own description, novelist James Lee Burke’s quest for literary celebrity has been a rough roll of the dice: a lot of “deuces and treys and boxcars” came up before he made his point with a Cajun detective.

An unpretentious, soft-voiced man with a permanent squint like that of a cowboy who’s spent long years in the dust of cattle drives, Burke earned glowing reviews 30 years ago as a promising young Southern writer. Ten years later, he descended into uneasy obscurity and didn’t publish a hardcover book for more than a decade.

Until Louisianian Burke created Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux--a sensitive, recovering-alcoholic good guy--he’d managed to publish only a few short stories and one paperback. One book, in fact, was rejected by 52 New York publishing houses.

Now, many of those same publishers engage in intense bidding wars over Burke’s books and send him on unprecedented tours. And when critics review Burke’s mysteries today, they often invoke comparisons to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.

Burke, 54, has authored successful mystery novels in each of the last four years. For his 1989 novel, “Black Cherry Blues,” he won the prestigious Edgar Award for best mystery. His highly acclaimed latest book, “A Morning for Flamingos” (Little, Brown), will begin movie production later this year.

Burke and his wife, Pearl, recently completed an 18-city book tour for “Flamingos,” which was released in November. The unusual lengthy tour was a joint effort between Little, Brown and Avon, which is currently publishing “Blues” in paperback. In March, the Burkes will make a similar tour in England.

Because Burke doesn’t like to fly, he and his wife drove from their Missoula, Mont., home to tour for seven weeks--12,000 miles. “It was crazy,” he recalled. “I think we set some kind of a record, from San Diego to New York, Toronto to New Orleans.

Burke began writing short stories at Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Southwestern Louisiana) in the late 1950s. He gives a lot of credit to his freshman English teacher, Lyle Williams, for getting him on track as a writer.

“She gave me a D-minus on my first paper. She said, ‘Your penmanship is a challenge to the eye; your punctuation, a calamity. I did not flunk you because you write with such heart.’ Every Saturday morning I met her at her office and I would rewrite my weekly essay and she’d go over it. At the end of the semester, I got a B.”

Burke continued to write, “always competitive” with his cousin, Andre Dubus, who later became a well-known short-story writer.

Dubus, Burke explained, has recently returned to writing after suffering injuries in a 1986 accident near Boston: “He’ll be in a wheelchair all the rest of his life. But Andre’s real brave. He’s unstoppable.”

After several odd jobs, Burke studied writing at the University of Missouri, where he received a master’s degree.

By the time he was 24, he had finished his first novel, “Half of Paradise,” a book about a down-on-his-luck country singer who couldn’t remember the words to his own hit songs. It was published, to excellent reviews, by Houghton Mifflin in 1965.

Burke, who was born in Texas but considers himself a Louisianian, published two more novels by age 34, both well-received. “To the Bright and Shining Sun,” published in 1970, was based on his experience working with the Job Corps in Kentucky, one of the many jobs he took to support his wife and four children.

Published in 1971, Burke’s third successful novel, “Lay Down My Sword and Shield,” was based on Texas migrant workers he encountered during a pipeline job there.

“I had a lot of success when I was young,” he said. “Three hardback novels by age 34. The first review I got was a six-column banner in the New York Times. I thought this business was wonderful. I thought I was Halley’s comet.”

But, like Halley’s, his comet disappeared from sight. Even though some reviewers of his earlier work had compared him to Hemingway and Faulkner, Burke couldn’t sell a book.

“I don’t think male Southern writers were popular in the ‘70s,” he suggested. “Or maybe it was me. My view was pretty dark and too jaundiced.” Burke admitted he also drank heavily during those years, which took its toll on him.

“I was a practicing alcoholic for many years, a good 18,” said Burke, who has been sober now for 13 years. “It took me a long time to learn I wrote well in spite of drinking, not because of it. I reached such a level of misery I didn’t care what they did to me. They could have done a frontal lobotomy . . . . You don’t care if somebody takes your head off with a chain saw and mails it back to you.”

Because of Burke’s alcoholism and inability to publish his writings, the family struggled financially and “had lots of hard times.”

He briefly worked as a reporter for a paper in Lafayette, La., but says he was fired because of his union sympathies. He had a succession of jobs: surveyor on a gas pipeline in South Texas, U.S. Forest Service worker in Kentucky, social worker in Los Angeles, land surveyor in Colorado. He finally got a job teaching creative writing at Wichita State University in Kansas.

Of his Los Angeles stint in 1962-64, he remembered: “I worked on Fifth Street in Skid Row and in East Los Angeles for the Bureau of Public Assistance. It soured me on institutional solutions for all our problems. I had a big caseload of ex-cons, Skid Row alcoholics, migrant farm workers and mentally ill. Homeless people in those categories.

“But look at the homeless situation now. It’s terrible . . . . This happens when people of good will put their consciousness in abeyance.”

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that Burke’s literary career got back on a somewhat successful track. For almost 13 years, he’d continued writing because “I just can’t imagine being anything else but a writer. Writing is real hard. You have to do it all the time. It’s not a casual commitment.”

Burke submitted a collection of his short stories, “The Convict,” to Louisiana State University Press, which published them in hardback and paperback in 1985. Then LSU Press published one of Burke’s old novels, “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” the same one that had been turned down 52 times in New York. It got excellent reviews.

After those successes, Burke was casting about trying to decide what kind of novel to try next. His friend, Charles Willeford, author of “Miami Blues,” suggested he try writing mysteries.

“He said ‘Why don’t you try writing a crime book,’ Burke remembered. ‘You’ve written everything else.’ ”

The result was 1987’s “The Neon Rain,” the beginning of a mystery trilogy featuring Dave Robicheaux. Robicheaux, who exhibits sensitivities similar to those of his creator, became a cop in New Iberia, La., the Gulf Coast town where Burke grew up. In 1988, Burke followed “The Neon Rain” with “Heaven’s Prisoners.”

When asked about the similarities between his detective hero and himself, Burke said: “I didn’t create Dave. He created me. I believe Dave is a far better person than I. He represents the qualities we admire in most people. He also has certain frailties others have--those frailties of vision that give us our integrity and humanity. But he’s a more human hero than the conventional hero in the archetypal sense.”

He added: “I used to be a cynic. But it takes no intelligence, no class to be negative.”

Currently, Burke is finishing his next Robicheaux mystery, which will concern “child abuse and Louisiana politics.” He has just completed the treatment for the screenplay of “Flamingos” for Orion Pictures. The movie, produced by Hildy Gottlieb and starring Alec Baldwin, will be Burke’s first screenplay.

Burke worked on his next Robicheaux book--he uses an old Royal typewriter, not a computer--during his book tour and is now “three chapters from the end.”

He said he prefers not looking back on the bad times:

“I don’t try to figure out the past. I don’t run a garden rake through it. You can’t win on the game you pitched last Saturday, but you don’t have to lose because of it. You always deal with today. Life is a series of moments. You control this moment. The one we’ve just passed through is gone.”