A few years back, I tackled a reading project I’d long been contemplating: James Sallis’s six Lew Griffin novels (The Long-Legged Fly, Moth, Black Hornet, Eye of the Cricket, Bluebottle, Ghost of a Flea), published between 1992 and 2001. For those who don’t know Griffin—a private investigator in New Orleans—or, for that matter, his creator, who died in Arizona on January 27 at the age of 81, there is no other way to put it: These books are among the grand achievements of contemporary American literature. If initially they appear to conform to the rules of crime fiction, Sallis has more than crime or fiction up his sleeve. Rather, he is interested in the way time and memory swirl and spiral inside us. As William Faulkner once insisted, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
What Faulkner was articulating was a moral vision, in which we not only carry our sins without any hope of expiation but also pass them down to the ensuing generations. A similar sensibility sits at the heart of Sallis’s work. Over the course of a career spanning nearly 60 years, he wrote about characters reckoning with situations not necessarily of their own making—although they remain complicit all the same. I think of the narrator of his 2005 novel, Drive, a stuntman turned getaway car driver so distanced—or is it alienated?—that we never learn his name. “I drive,” he reports. “That’s all I do.… I don’t take part, I don’t know anyone, I don’t carry weapons. I drive.” (Ryan Gosling played him with a moody diffidence in the 2011 film.) If this sounds like someone staking out an existential position, that’s entirely the point.
Sallis, after all, was nothing if not an existentialist. It was the only philosophical perspective that made sense. On this, he and I are in complete agreement: that in a universe of chaos, there is no meaning but that which we create. Such an endeavor may be necessary, although that doesn’t make it consoling or universal. If there are truths, they are small and temporary. And yet, the tenuousness is what makes truths beautiful. Here, we see the rigor of a certain kind of crime literature, in which, as Sallis once observed of the French thriller writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, “novels [are] far more than simple entertainment; they [are] a means of facing society’s failures head on.”
The posture is as political as it is aesthetic. That’s the reason for his fascination with Manchette, who developed a new form of noir called the neo-polar, which brought an activist social vision to hard-boiled fiction. It also explains his devotion to Albert Camus, whose novel The Stranger becomes a touchstone in many of Sallis’s books. What he is framing is a context or a heritage; what he is staking out is a place to stand. Camus, in that regard, becomes an almost perfect signifier—a writer, like Sallis, of short novels, sharp and striking, unbound or unwilling to operate according to the strictures assigned by critics, intent instead in letting language take the lead.
For Camus, such an approach extended to the making of essays, philosophy, and journalism as well as fiction. It included editing the French Resistance newspaper Combat during World War II. For Sallis, it began with poetry and speculative writing. In the late 1960s, he worked with Michael Moorcock on the British science fiction journal New Worlds before beginning to publish stories of his own. Eventually, he would write Difficult Lives (1993), a group portrait of Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes. Seven years later, he’d follow that with a biography of Himes alone. Through it all, he never lost sight of the rigors of living, of the way the years mark us with grief and loss. In 2008, when I was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, I worked with him on an appreciation for his old friend Thomas M. Disch, the science fiction writer, who had died by suicide. “Endings are seldom pretty,” Sallis wrote. “Tom knew that. He knew that not very much is pretty, in fact, once you scrape the patina off.”
And yet, Sallis’s body of work demanded: What are we supposed to do? Among the most essential acts a writer can undertake is that of witness; this is as true in poetry or fiction as in nonfiction or journalism. For Sallis, it was an article of faith, as was his belief that genre doesn’t matter.
As he explained in a 2016 interview with Literary Hub: “I write crime novels, so yes, of course I think of myself as a crime writer; how could I not? I also write poetry, and think of myself as a poet. And as a literary writer. A musicologist. A biographer.… Only a fool would work within a tradition—any tradition, be it science fiction, the coming-of-age novel, the sonnet—without knowing and honoring that tradition, without having it coursing in his or her blood and breath.”
This, or something like it, has become a model for how I think of my own work: as standing somehow outside of, or in conversation with, genre. There is no hierarchy of forms, in other words, just the urgency of expression on the page.
For Sallis, both writer and reader must swim together in a sea of words and sentences, relying on these tools to situate themselves. Even the Lew Griffin novels—which, as they progress, become increasingly interior, reframing prior scenes and incidents, casting their own narrative authority into doubt—are not merely meta but also full of uncertainties that keep us guessing. This makes them exhilarating: challenging and exciting. It also makes them a hell of a lot of fun to read.
Sallis kept publishing to the end; Bright Segments, an 800-plus-page compendium gathering all 154 of his short stories, appeared in November 2024, while World’s Edge: A Mosaic Novel, his most recent—I suppose I should say final—book will come out next week. Each in its own way represents a return to the author’s speculative roots. Still, that’s the thing about Sallis: There is no particular returning because nothing has been used up. His writing exists as a voice in an ongoing conversation, but it’s also clear-eyed, staring down the world in all its sorrow and rendering it plain.•
