"Harbor Lights" by James Lee Burke

An audio book. Short stories.

• Harbor lights - It's 1942. The narrator, Aaron, is in a fishing boat with his father in the Gulf of Mexico. There are 4 bodies in the water. His father radios that an oil tanker has gone down. He tells his son that a U-boat did it, but that the government will suppress the news. His father, an ex-soldier, had wanted to be a writer. He came from a principled family, his father sacrificing his court career for principles. He drinks. Agents threaten to blackmail him (he has a cultured mistress, Florence). He tells the papers about the ship going down. Florence is imprisoned as a suspected spy. A week later she hangs herself. Years later he witnesses an electric chair execution.
• Going across Jordan - 2 young drifters go from job to job. One, Buddy, is a union man (a "communist"), the other, Arbee, is an escaped convict. Their current job is breaking in horses for a minor movie star, Clint. Clint lets Buddy borrow his car so he can bring his black girlfriend Bernadette back and Clint can rape her. Agents talk to the drifters. They leave town. Buddy gives Bernadette the money to follow them. She does. Arbee realises that she and Buddy are intellectually better suited together than he and she are. Buddy tries to get Clint in trouble as revenge. They have to leave town again. Buddy sacrifices himself so that Arbee and Bernadette can settle down happily together.
• Big midnight spend - 1943. Aaron's in a prison with Lifers. He treasures his guitar. There's an electric chair. People tell him he shouldn't be such a purist (i.e. he should be pragmatic). Jodie, the prisoner with power, wants him to submit.
• Deportees - His mother is frigid and depressed. She's had ECT. Mr Watts touches him. She challenges Mr Watts. He gets 2 Mexicans deported. Her father tries to take revenge. Perhaps she does.
• The assault - A prof's 17 y.o. daughter is involved with an assault. She was drunk. She may have suffered some brain damage - she starts having fits. The prof asks the police, (Carter) then talks to the assailants - trailer trash who say that the girl behaved badly. The prof wasn't innocent in the past. He hit a cop. He and his wife were both lecturers. One night, after an argument his daughter overheard, he suggested she should leave. She drove off drunk and died in an accident. He befriends Tina, a black colleague who does Minority Studies. He pressurises Carter to follow up his daughter's case (Tina's been threatened by the people who attacked his daughter). At a lake they're intimidated by 3 men. Tina gets out a gun and shoots their tires. The police find out about the gun incident and his past. Carter's partner gives the prof info. One of the assaillants - a woman, apologises to the prof's daughter. The 3 men assault her. He kills the 3 men.
• The Wild Side of Life - He's an oil explorer. When he was abroad, colleagues had gratuitously bombed natives. He's in a bar when Loreen talks to him. Her husband batters her. He warned that she's married and dangerous. He sleeps with her and finds out that her husband was the bomb-dropping colleague. He thinks about taking revenge but a storm starts and he sees more dead bodies than he saw in the war.
• Strange Cargo - He's a widower - a teacher with a half-oriental boy. His car's broken down in a small, remote place. In the war he tried to save a native boy. While his car's being mended by a man he doesn't trust, a woman befriends him and his son. There's racism. The woman claims to be the wife of a confederate leader and goes back in time to save the boy he failed to save in the war. He sees his friend who died in battle. The place is full of ghosts, he realises, some hoping to go elsewhere. They take his son. A ghost of his ancestor arrives.
• A distant war - a old writer, Aaaron, has money and wants to build an animal sanctuary, but the sheriff's against it. The sheriff seems racist and homophobic. He defends himself by pointing out that he's promoted a black female colleague. The writer's daughter, Fanny May, died from drink and drugs, visiting him often as a ghost. He blames himself for her death having taking her to bars. He and his daughter need each other to stay in touch with their other worlds. His gay doctor tells him he might have cancer. He doesn't want further tests. He thinks a fatal car accident may have been caused by a black but should he report this to the racist policeman? He gives jobs to 3 petty criminals. He sees white men torture a black man. Next day he thinks the sheriff might have been one of them. He sees the doctor killing alligators - revenge, the doctor says, for the alligator killing an escaped slave. The doctor is brutally murdered. Fanny says she's having to go and he's in danger. The black policewoman warns him about his workers and the sheriff. He visits her. She kills someone in supposed self-defence.

Police are usually corrupt. Corrupt male police have female colleagues who (off the record) disagree with them. Revenge, both by police and public, may have to be unofficial. White liberal male teachers/lecturers are attacked by poor whites as much for their class as their views.

Other reviews

• Diane Lechleitner (While some stories in the collection share characters from the same families, others are stand-alones and this causes a lack of cohesiveness. However, the themes of prison, violence, memories of war, despair, morality, survival, and the underbelly of society are consistently woven throughout Harbor Lights.)
• Kirkus reviews (The best stories are the most sharply focused: “Harbor Lights” ... “The Assault” ... “A Distant War” ... Burke’s not a polisher bent on perfecting every word but a bard who can’t help returning to each story over and over again. )