Like the other novels in the Robicheaux series, Burke's Purple Cane Road includes fundamentals of both Southern and detective literary traditions. Edgar Allen Poe, himself a southerner, invented the detective story with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), even if other early detective fiction, like Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1899), seems more characteristically Southern than Poe's tales of French ratiocinator Auguste Dupin. Burke has been called "the Faulkner of crime fiction," and he represents a legitimate heir to William Faulkner's tradition of detective fiction including Intruder in the Dust (1948).

Practically any novel involving Louisiana political figures requires comparison to Robert Perm Warren's All the King's Men (1946), but in this case the similarities between the two works are numerous and manifest. Governor Belmont Pugh shares not only Willie Stark's overindulgence in women and alcohol, but also his histrionic public speaking style, his rather ersatz iconoclastic appeal to the...