Southern literature highlights the tension between past and present as well as between appearance and reality. Hardboiled literature generally emphasizes the latter as well, debunking the idea that any order exists in the world other than what humanity creates and enforces. These tensions appear in The Neon Rain in what Burke seems to see as the essential conflict between the need to act honorably and to accept responsibility for actions versus the equally important need to let go of those things beyond individual control in order to cope with a random world. Robicheaux thus seems driven to mete out justice to combat the arbitrary manner with which people otherwise seem to meet their fates, but retreats in the end to the rural parish in which he grew up, finding, at least temporarily, redemption in his own past.

1. Southern literature often describes the antebellum South romantically; Burke...