Ever wonder about Clete?

Since acclaimed crime fiction author James Lee Burke started writing about his best-known character, Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux — that was in “The Neon Rain” back in 1987 — Dave has almost always had Cletus Purcel at his side.

In their early days as New Orleans police officers, Dave and Clete were known as the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Their professional paths diverged, but their friendship has remained a deep bond.

To Dave’s passionate knight errant, Clete plays the sidekick, the guy who has his back, sometimes the holy fool. He’s a man of large size, large appetites and large heart, with a soft spot for strays of every description. Much of the mordant humor in the Robicheaux books comes out of Clete’s mouth. He’s also the source of some of the tragedy — Clete has anger issues, and substance abuse issues to go with them, and his most frequent victim is himself.

The 24th book in the Robicheaux series (and Burke’s 45th book total) is titled “Clete.” The man himself is the first-person narrator, and it is one wild ride.

Dave is a character in this one, too, and it’s interesting to see him from Clete’s point of view.

“Clete” kicks off sometime in the late 1990s in New Orleans. Clete, who always drives a distinctive vehicle, tells us he got “a real deal on a 1959 lavender-pink Eldorado with a starched top, one that had a few holes in it. I repaired the dings and repainted the body and bought a second-hand top that I turned into a starched-white beauty, and then I installed a stereo and loaded up my glovebox with jazz and R&B and rock and roll tapes, and I left it at a car wash called Eddy’s across the river in Algiers.”

That was his first mistake. Two days after he picks up the Caddy from the car wash, he awakens in his French Quarter home to a clanging sound. It’s not the cathedral bells.

It’s a trio of goons down in his courtyard, dismantling the car. The one Clete really reacts to is the guy wearing a T-shirt that says “6 Million Are Not Enough.”

Clete, in case you have not met him before, carries in his wallet a photo torn from a magazine of a Jewish woman with her three children walking into the showers at Auschwitz. “I have never gotten free of this photo,” he tells us. “I don’t think anyone can until we purge the earth of those who were responsible for the fate of this woman and her children.”

The goons threaten him, and they’re not the last. Pursuing the unlikely possibility his car might have been confused with one driven by a drug mule, Clete runs into major hostility. It’s soon clear he may be poking a bear bigger than the average drug dealer.

He also meets a woman who wants to hire him as an investigator, a baby-faced beauty named Clara Bow. (She changed her name to emphasize her resemblance to the silent-movie siren.) Her motives are as confusing as her on-again, off-again relationship to her wealthy, corrupt ex-husband, Lauren Bow.

Oh, and he’s having conversations with Joan of Arc. Joan appears to Clete big as life in different guises — armor, peasant garb, even a shell of flames — to warn him, to goad him or just to chat.

Clete knows it’s crazy and does not question it, and that pretty much sums up the Clete we get to know in this book. Going inside his mind, we learn that within the formidable ass-kicker is a man battered at every turn.

“Clete” is a hell of a ride./Tribune News Service

“CLETE”

By James Lee Burke, Atlantic Monthly Press, $28

Grade: A