James Lee Burke

Burke's "The Lost Get Back Bookie" was rejected 111 times over 9 years before being published by LSU Press.

After publication, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

James Lee Burke (born December 5, 1936) is an American author, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won Edgar Awards for Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Cimarron Rose (1998), and has also been presented with the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin (Heaven's Prisoners) and then Tommy Lee Jones (In the Electric Mist).

Wirt Williams, reviewing Burke's first novel, Half of Paradise (1965), in the New York Times, compared his writing to Jean Paul Satre and Ernest Hemingway, but concluded "Mr. Burkes literary forebear is Thomas Hardy."

Burke's 1982 novel, Two for Texas, was made into a 1998 TV movie of the same name. Burke has also written five miscellaneous crime novels (including Two for Texas), two short story collections, four books starring protagonist Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, four books starring Billy Bob's cousin Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland, and two books starring Weldon Avery Holland, grandson of legendary Texas lawman Hackberry Holland.

Burke was born in Houston, Texas, but spent most of his childhood on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA in English Literature from the latter.

He worked in a variety of jobs over the years while books he had written were rejected, and books he had published went out of print. At various times he worked as a truck driver for the U.S. Forest Service, as a newspaper reporter, as a social worker on Skid Row, Los Angeles, as a land surveyor in Colorado, in the Louisiana State unemployment system, and in the Job Corps in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Eastern Kentucky.

He taught at five different colleges before getting on the tenure track teaching creative writing at Wichita State University during the 1980s.[citation needed]

Burke and his wife, Pearl (née Pai Chu, own a home in Lolo, Montana. The couple have four children, including Alafair Burke, a law professor and best-selling crime writer.