Review: "Flags on the Bayou," James Lee Burke

By Paul Carrier

Award-winning author James Lee Burke is best known for his long-running mystery series starring detective Dave Robicheaux, which includes two dozen novels (to date) that were released from 1987 through 2024.

The fictional Robicheaux lives and works in Louisiana, which also serves as the setting for Burke’s 2023 novel Flags on the Bayou. But there the similarity ends.

Unlike the Robicheaux novels, which are contemporary, Flags on the Bayou takes place during the Civil War, at a time when the Union controlled the Mississippi River and parts of Louisiana, including New Orleans.

Flags on the Bayou ostensibly centers on the murder and mutilation of Minos Suarez, a plantation owner who rented a slave, Hannah Laveau, from Charles Lufkin of the nearby Lady of the Lake Plantation. Suarez brought Laveau to his home and raped her. Shortly thereafter, he turned up dead.

Did Laveau kill Suarez in retalaition, or is someone else the culprit?

As the search for Suarez’s murderer drags on, the novel unfolds along various fronts and in episodic fashion. In fact, identifying Suarez’s killer becomes secondary to exploring the perspectives of several characters regarding other events, with chapters told from alternating viewpoints. They include the narrative voices of Laveau; a constable named Pierre Cauchon; and Yankee abolitionist Florence Milton, who lives and teaches  in Louisiana.

And the list goes on. There’s Wade Lufkin, Charles Lufkin’s nephew and a former Confederate surgeon’s assistant who becomes smitten with Laveau; Darla Babineaux, a free black woman who may be in love with Cauchon; and Colonel Carleton Hayes, the sickly, probably deranged leader of a notorious band of rebel irregulars known, in part, for hanging abolitionists.

This disparate cast shares nothing as a group beyond the fact that everyone in Flags on the Bayou is, in one way or another, grievously wounded, physically, psychologically, or both.

Laveau is desperate to be reunited with her lost son, but she and Milton find themselves on the run, suspects in the killing of three slave catchers and two other men. Cauchon resents the ill treatment he receives from wealthy whites, pines for Babineaux, and longs to be with his late mother and his childhood friends.

Wade Lufkin, who kills a Union soldier in the opening pages of the novel, is addicted to laudanum and whiskey. He and Cauchon are plagued by bitter memories of their military service, while Hayes worries about an infection that has disfigured his face, as well as the accelerating decline of his mental faculties.

Flags on the Bayou does not focus on the great battles of the Civil War, with massive armies marching into the history books. Instead Burke pulls us into the waterlogged maelstrom of southern Louisiana in wartime. It's a world plagued by lunacy and violence yet blessed with grace and dignity as well.

Burke says in his acknowledgments that he considers Flags on the Bayou his best work. With intriguing characters and a driving plot the novel is undeniably memorable, not least because of its colorful dialogue. One character describes Union Gen. Benjamin Butler as “a malignant pile of whale sperm,” for example. Another says there’s no escaping the evil that men do because “the devil ain’t down in a fiery pit. He’s right here.”