Book Review - Cane unable

Readers often want to be completists in working their way through mystery series, so their marketing advantages cannot be denied. But writing about the same characters or settings for book after book can be a creative hindrance, leading writers to redundancy.

Such has been the case with James Lee Burke's initially brilliant Dave Robicheaux series of bloody crime novels set in New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou country. Burke pens some of the best descriptive prose in the genre today, with the label "the William Faulkner of crime fiction" proving only a little hyperbolic. And while "edgy" detectives are a nearly exhausted cliché, Burke's Robicheaux has a soul that's credibly scarred by alcoholism, the Vietnam war and his own capacity for violence.

Burke's books have grown repetitious of late, but his 11th Robicheaux novel, Purple Cane Road, gives some fresh jolts to the series. A seedy hood claims that Robicheaux's late, long-lost mother was murdered while working as a whore, sending the detective on a search to verify both sordid assertions. An extended flashback to his mother's last days provides some of the most suspenseful and vivid writing Burke has ever done and affirms the message of Ross MacDonald's own mysteries, in which the crimes of past generations never stay buried.

But the mechanics of Purple's plot labor wearily, involving a woman on death row with a long, tangled connection to a corrupt Louisiana attorney general, not to mention plenty of bent cops and conflicted politicians. An insane young hitman who views Robicheaux as a father figure provides some interesting wrinkles, but not enough to keep the novel from feeling aimless.

And "series syndrome" continues to afflict Burke, who will once again inform us what Robicheaux eats for breakfast (Grape Nuts), or describe sidekick Clete Purcell's arms like ham hocks and loyal fisherman Batiste's head like a cannonball. Burke's earliest mysteries, The Neon Rain and Heaven's Prisoners, remain powerful and affecting, and Purple Cane Road has compelling passages, but increasingly the Robicheaux books convey the sensation that if you've read one, you've read them all.

''By Michael J. Nelson__
HarperCollins, $15, 288 pages

t's been just over a year since "Mystery Science Theater 3000," the hippest TV series of the 1990s, left the airwaves. No longer subjecting "cheesy" movies to mercilessly witty heckling, the show's band of actors, writers and puppeteers has branched out. Some have found shelter in TV shows like "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch" and the short-lived "Freaks and Geeks," while others have banded together for a wry humor website, TimmyBigHands.

Michael J. Nelson, host for five years and head writer for 10, has milked his association with the show by writing about big, bad Hollywood films, as opposed to the no-budget oddities from "MST3K's" vault. His collection Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese, though sporadically amusing, doesn't quite recapture the joyousness of the show's savvy put-downs.

Megacheese's chapters, divided into topics like "Chik Flix" and "Science Friction," draws partially from columns in Home Theatre and Enter -tainment@Home magazines. He reserves special disdain for easy targets like Lost in Space and the Batman & Robin feature ("the single worst thing that we as human beings have ever produced in recorded history"), but frequently the entries are so short that he never really engages with his subject.

Nelson doesn't have the same fascination with film flops that energizes, say, John Waters writing about Boom! or Hail Mary. At times he repeats himself, twice referring to William Baldwin as "a lesser Baldwin ... kind of an ur-Baldwin." And too often he'll proffer well-duh observations like, "Varsity Blues has many flaws, among them the fact that it's not very good."

But at times he finds the right combination of naivete and archness that appealed to "Misties" for years, as when he remarks that Demi Moore's The Scarlet Letter" might just as well have been based on the obscure 1978 hydraulic manual The Movement and Storage of Viscous Industrial Fluids." Some times he sneaks in "MST3K" in-jokes, like references to Patrick Swayze's Road House or using words like "womany" and "hotdish."

And he ends the book on a magnanimous note by reviewing the show's own big-screen venture, concluding that, "It's funny enough, if you like that sort of thing," but that the five flicks in the Puppet Master series are probably better.

-- Curt Holman

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