The Lost Get-Back Boogie: A Novel

James Lee Burke

LSU Press, Sep 1, 2004 - Fiction - 264 pages

Before The Lost Get-Back Boogie appeared to wide acclaim in 1986, James Lee Burke had been out of print in cloth for thirteen years and his fifth novel had received a record 111 rejection letters. "LSU Press put me back in the game and turned my career around," Burke says. The novels and stories Burke had written during those years of rejection eventually became the stuff of the Dave Robicheaux series, which has earned him two Edgar Awards.Reviews of The Lost Get-Back Boogie now seem prescient. "This is the book that Burke was born to write—and you're grateful he did," wrote syndicated reviewer Nancy Pate. "It's the sort of novel that could win Burke a wider readership," said the Wichita Eagle-Beacon. And from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "The Lost Get-Back Boogie was my introduction to Burke, and it is a cherished one. Burke demonstrates a rare ability to write an extraordinarily propulsive tale that borders on genre fiction without ever being less than literature."
The novel's title is also the name of the song that Iry Paret—a honky-tonk musician, Korean vet, and ex-con—wants to write to hold his memories of a "more uncomplicated time," before the war, before prison. The book opens the day thirty-year-old Iry leaves Louisiana's Angola state penitentiary, after serving two years for manslaughter, and follows him to Montana, where he hopes to stay cool and out of trouble by working hard on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. Iry finds the fresh start he seeks, joins a weekend band, and even falls in love. But the Riordan family's problems deal Iry a new sort of trouble with some ultimately tragic consequences.
The Lost Get-Back Boogie is a novel about loyalty and friendship, betrayal and loss. It is about essentially good people and their attempts to define the value of their lives and to find their place in a changing, complicated world. And it is the work of James Lee Burke at the top of his form.

About the author

James Lee Burke is the author of forty novels and two collections of short stories. Three books, Heaven's Prisoners, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, and Two for Texas, were adapted as motion pictures. Over the years, he has also worked as a pipeliner, land surveyor, social worker, newspaper reporter, and creative writing teacher. Burke has won two Edgar Awards, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction, and the Louisiana Writer Award. A native of Houston, he grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He now resides in Missoula, Montana.

Foreword writer Christine Wiltz is the author of three mysteries featuring the Irish Channel detective Neal Rafferty. Wiltz is also the author of the novel Glass House and the nonfiction work The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld. She lives in New Orleans.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Lost Get-Back Boogie: A Novel
• Author: James Lee Burke
• Contributor: Christine Wiltz
• Publisher: LSU Press, 2004
• ISBN: 0807155721, 9780807155721
• Length: 264 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General