Books by James Sallis
Moth (A Lew Griffin Mystery)
by James Sallis
Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. Following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets-- not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago-- to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know that his friend had. Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son. Moth is expansive, bursting with marvelous scenes and unforgettable characters, filled at once with the matter-of-fact violence of daily life and with redeeming human compassion.
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Ghost of a Flea (A Lew Griffin Mystery)
by James Sallis
The mystery of Lew Griffin is revealed in the concluding novel of an honored series. In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone...or almost. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart, his son, David, has disappeared again, leaving a note that sounds final. His friend Don Walsh, who is leaving the police department, is shot interrupting a robbery. And Lew is directionless: he hasn't written anything in years; he no longer teaches...there's nothing to fill his days. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost.
Through five previous novels, James Sallis has enthralled and challenged readers as he has told the story of Lew Griffin, private detective, teacher, writer, poet, and a black man moving through time in a white man's world. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn't speak, doesn't think about what happened, somehow things will be all right again. He thinks about his own life, about the other's, about how the two of them came to be here....
In a story as much about identity as it is about crime, Sallis has held a mirror up to society and culture, while at the same time setting Lew Griffin the task of discovering who he is. As the detective stands in that dark room, the answers begin to come clear and the highly acclaimed series builds to a brilliantly constructed climax that will resonate in readers' minds long after the story is finished.
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Black Hornet (A Lew Griffin Mystery)
by James Sallis
A sniper appears in 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. Five people have been fatally shot. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. He's black and she's white, and though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading black journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and bail bondsman Frankie DeNoux. Yet it is the character of Lew Griffin that takes center stage, as in each of Sallis's highly praised books. He is by now, well on the way to becoming what he will be; violent, kind, contradictory, alcoholic. Both naïve and wise, he is a man cursed by unspeakable demons. Nonetheless, he is seemingly encircled by redemptive angels, awaiting an opening.
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The Long-Legged Fly (A Lew Griffin Mystery)
by James Sallis
Take a little James Lee Burke, a touch of Ross Macdonald, and a dash of Raymond Chandler, the conventions of the classic American detective story and the fine, thoughtful writing of an original new talent - and you still don't quite have The Long-Legged Fly. This is a smart, tough novel teeming with life and always on the verge of igniting from its own energy. In steamy modern-day New Orleans, black private detective Lew Griffin has once again taken on a seemingly hopeless missing persons case. The trail takes him through the underbelly of the French Quarter with its bar girls, pimps, and tourist attractions. As his search leads to one violent dead end, and then another, Griffin is confronted with the prospect that his own life has come to resemble those he is attempting to find; he is becoming as lost as the frail identities he tries to recover. Waking in a hospital after an alcoholic binge, Griffin finds another chance in a nurse who comes to love him, but again he reverts to his old life in the mean streets among the predators and their prey. When his son vanishes, Griffin searches back through the tangles and tatters of his life, knowing that he must solve his personal mysteries before he can venture after the whereabouts of others. The Long-Legged Fly is exciting, visceral entertainment that takes the reader into a corner of society where life is fought for as much as it is lived. James Sallis has written a compelling novel that succeeds both as detective fiction and worthy literature.
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Cripple Creek: A Novel (John Turner Series)
by James Sallis
A year or so has passed since the events of Cypress Grove. Ex-policeman, ex-con, former therapist Turner has become deputy sheriff in the small town within driving distance of Memphis, Tennessee, to which he had migrated in hopes of escaping his past and finding a measure of peace. His life is mending as he and Val Bjorn grow closer. And then a young man, arrested on a routine traffic stop with more than $200,000 in his trunk, is forcibly sprung from jail after Sheriff Don Lee is brutally assaulted. Throwing caution aside, Turner goes in pursuit to Memphis, unleashing ghosts he thought he had left behind, and endangering all that matters to him now.--From publisher description.Struggling to come to terms with his past, Turner, a burnt-out Memphis cop turned rural deputy sheriff, goes on the rampage when the local sheriff is seriously wounded during a jail break, following the perpetrators' trail back to Memphis, where he findshimself taking on the mob and confronting his own past.
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Cripple Creek: A Novel (John Turner Series)
by James Sallis
Struggling to come to terms with his past, Turner, a burnt-out Memphis cop turned rural deputy sheriff, goes on the rampage when the local sheriff is seriously wounded during a jail break, following the perpetrators' trail back to Memphis, where he finds himself taking on the mob and confronting his own past, in the sequel to Cyprus Grove. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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Cypress Grove (John Turner Series)
by James Sallis
As he has shown so often in previous novels, James Sallis is one of our great stylists and storytellers, whose deep interest in human nature is expressed in the powerful stories of men too often at odds with themselves as well as the world around them. His new novel, Cypress Grove, continues in that highly praised tradition.
The small town where Turner has moved is one of America's lost places, halfway between Memphis and forever. That makes it a perfect hideaway: a place where a man can bury the past and escape the pain of human contact, where you are left alone unless you want company, where conversation only happens when there's something to say, where you can sit and watch an owl fly silently across the face of the moon. And where Turner hopes to forget that he has been a cop, a psychotherapist, and, always, an ex-con.
There is no major crime to speak of until Sheriff Lonnie Bates arrives on Turner's porch with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a problem: The body of a drifter has been found―brutally and ritualistically― murdered and Bates and his deputy need help from someone with big-city experience who appreciates the delicacy of investigating people in a small town. Thrust back into the middle of what he left behind, Turner slowly becomes reacquainted not only with the darkness he had fled, but with the unsuspected kindness of others.
Brilliantly balancing Turner's past and present lives, Cypress Grove is lyrical, moving, and filled with the sense of place and character that only our finest writers can achieve. It is proof positive that the acclaim James Sallis has enjoyed for years is richly deserved.
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Eye of the Cricket
by James Sallis
Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son...and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.
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Willnot
by James Sallis
In his celebrated career, James Sallis has created some of the most finely drawn protagonists in crime fiction, all of them thoughtful observers of the human condition: Lew Griffin, the black New Orleans private investigator; retired detective John Turner; the unnamed wheelman in Drive. Dr. Lamar Hale will now join the ranks of Sallis's finest characters.
In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have suddenly been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Hale, the town's all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon, and town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes--his military records disappeared, being followed by the FBI--mysteriously reappears in his hometown, at Hale's door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the inexplicable vagaries of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hale's world is truly upended.
In his inimitably spare style, James Sallis conjures indelible characters and scenes that resonate long after they appear. "You live with someone year after year, you think you've heard all the stories," Lamar observes, "but you never have."
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Bright Segments: The Complete Short Fiction
by James Sallis
For the first time ever, the complete short fiction of literary legend James Sallis is collected in one gorgeous volume—a must-have holiday gift for the crime, mystery, or speculative fiction fan in your life.
Published over the six decades of Sallis's storied career, the complete collection contains 154 stories, 12 of which are exclusive to this volume.
James Sallis is a writer in the classic sense, moving with ease among genres and modes: novels, stories, poetry, criticism, musicology, biography, translation. Best known perhaps as a crime writer—author of Drive and the six Lew Griffin novels along with others—his first acclaim came in the 1960s from groundbreaking short stories in science fiction
publications like Mike Moorcock’s New Worlds, for which he served for a time as editor, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies.
In years since, he’s published eighteen novels, numerous collections of essays, six volumes of poetry, a landmark biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin, while writing widely about books for The New York Times, LA Times, and The Washington Post, and for The Boston Globe, where he served as books
columnist. He’s received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
Through it all, his interest in the short story has remained strong, work appearing regularly in venues ranging from The Georgia Review to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Herein you’ll find science fiction, comedy low and high, fantasy, crime stories, stories of everyday life: the realist, arealist, and surreal all together in a jumble, enjambed. Literature, Jim insists, is not a cabinet with labeled drawers, it’s a banquet table. Stroll around, pick what you want from it all. What you need. Enjoy.
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$35.00
Sarah Jane
by James Sallis
A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive.
Sarah Jane Pullman is a cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she’s filling—and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends. This kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail—a virtuoso work by a master of both and the tender aspects of human nature.
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Sarah Jane
by James Sallis
A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive.
Sarah Jane Pullman is a cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she’s filling—and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends. This kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail—a virtuoso work by a master of both and the tender aspects of human nature.
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Moth (A Lew Griffin Novel)
by James Sallis
Lew Griffin, now fifty years old, has abandoned his former career as a New Orleans private investigator for the safety of teaching. But his old life draws him back.
One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, LaVerne Adams, is dead—and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers, leaving behind a critically fragile premature infant daughter. Griffin is determined to keep his distance from the dangers of the New Orleans night. But his inescapable obligation to an old friend keeps bringing him back like a moth to a flame.
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The Long-Legged Fly (A Lew Griffin Novel)
by James Sallis
As much a classic detective story as it is a literary masterpiece, The Long-Legged Fly introduces us to Lew Griffin: tough, smart, and living in a corner of society where life is fought for as much as it is lived.
In steamy New Orleans, black private detective Lew Griffin has taken on a seemingly hopeless missing-person case. The trail takes him through the underbelly of the French Quarter with its bar girls, pimps, and tourist attractions. As his search leads to one violent dead end and then another, Griffin is confronted by the realization that his own life has come to resemble those of the people he is attempting to find.
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Black Hornet (A Lew Griffin Novel)
by James Sallis
With this flashback novel to Lew Griffin’s past, James Sallis takes readers to 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists.
A sniper has fatally shot five people. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. Though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and a bail bondsman.
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Difficult Lives Hitching Rides
by James Sallis
James Sallis's (Drive) seminal biographical essays on crime fiction pioneers Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes restored to print and joined by a handpicked collection of essays, reviews, and introductory writings on noir fiction.
At the time of its original publication by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was a pioneering work of literary investigation. Sallis's subjects of Himes, Goodis, and Thompson were as enigmatic as they were out-of-print, and literary scholarship on the subject of their lives and works scant. As the title of the collection indicates, the three men led difficult lives, and although they forever changed the history of crime writing, they all passed in relative isolation.
The literary detective work Sallis did then has been built upon since but rarely with the same poetry and authorial sympathy. Despite there now existing several works of academic and popular biography on each writer Sallis's novella-length biographies retain the sense of the newly uncovered.
Those three pieces, "Jim Thompson: Dime-store Dosteoevski," "David Goodis: Life in Black and White," and "Chester Himes: America's Black Heartland" are prefigured by a new introduction by the author as well as the original introduction, "Portable Worlds: The First Paperback Novel." Following Difficult Lives is collection of reviews, essays and introductions, selected by Sallis, covering a wide range of crime fiction's most legendary authors and books: Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Boris Vian, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Paco Taibo, Shirley Jackson, and more.
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$15.99
Drive: A Novel
by James Sallis
"A PERFECT PIECE OF NOIR FICTION" NEW YORK TIMES * NAMED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST & ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
"Drive is full of sly humor, poetic details and plenty of rude violence...The novel is a terrific ride." Los Angeles Times
I drive. That's what I do. All I do.
Originally written in 2005, Drive by James Sallis is the inspiration for the iconic 2011 film starring Ryan Gosling in the role of the man known only as 'Driver', a Hollywood stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night.
The gritty back streets of Los Angeles are the backdrop for what the New York Times calls "a perfect piece of noir fiction" in which the Driver is double-crossed in a burglary gone horribly wrong.
This beautiful new edition introduces a noir classic to a new generation of readers, featuring added materials, including a reading group guide and author Q&A.
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Eye of the Cricket (A Lew Griffin Novel)
by James Sallis
Finding people is what former private investigator Lew Griffin excels at. The terrible irony is that the exception is his own missing son. Dreams, memories, and reality run together to form his own darkest night.
Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans—a teacher, a writer, and an ex-detective. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son—and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and toting a copy of one of Lew’s novels. Learning the truth is a quest that will take Griffin into his own past as he tries to deal with the present: a search for three missing young men.
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Bluebottle
by James Sallis
Weaving Griffin's search for identity-one of the recurring themes in this magnificent series of novels-with a sensuous portrait of the people and places the define New Orleans, James Sallis continues not only to unravel Griffin's past but to map his future . . . and our own.
As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he has just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes to, he discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the shooter? Somewhere in the Crescent City—and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it—there's an answer. But to get to it, he is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid.
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Ghost of a Flea (A Lew Griffin Novel)
by James Sallis
The mystery of private investigator Lew Griffin is revealed in the conclusion of this critically acclaimed, groundbreaking series.
In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Instead of speaking, he reflects on his life—his failing relationship, his missing son, the fact that he hasn’t written in years—and how the two of them ended up there.
In a novel as much about identity as about crime, the answers to Lew’s personal mysteries begin to become clear in the series’ brilliantly constructed climax.
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Black is the Night Stories inspired by Cornell Woolrich
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Maxim Jakubowski, James Sallis, Bill Pronzini, Joe R. Lansdale, James Grady, David Quantick, Charles Ardai, Kim Newman, Donna Moore, Brandon Barrows, A.K. Benedict, Joseph S. Walker, Ana Teresa Pereira, Joel Lane
A gritty and thrilling anthology of 30 new short stories in tribute to pulp noir master, Cornell Woolrich, author of 'Rear Window' that inspired Alfred Hitchock's classic film.
Featuring Kim Newman, James Sallis, A.K. Benedict, USA Today-bestseller Samantha Lee Howe, Joe R. Lansdale and many more.
This anthology of exclusive new short stories offers tribute to the master of the pulp era – Cornell Woolrich, who stands with Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett as a legend in the genre.
Enter a world of vengeful brides and black widows, where cold-blooded killers watch from every window and every sin shall be paid for, no matter how deep you bury them. See the chilling fate of a young woman, and the darkness in every family, in Joe R. Lansdale’s “Missing Sister”, the cold, calculating mind of an ambitious wife and her cheating husband in Samantha Lee Howe’s “Trophy Wife”, a reunion dinner ripped apart by conspiracies and violence in Susi Holliday’s “The Invitation”, and the tight-knit family of a New York dive bar explode into violence in William Boyle’s “New York Blues Redux”.
Hope that the long, dark night will keep your sins and secrets.
FEATURING
CHARLES ARDAI
BRANDON BARROWS
A. K. BENEDICT
WILLIAM BOYLE
M. W. CRAVEN
MASON CROSS
MAX DÉCHARNÉ
O’NEIL DE NOUX
MARTIN EDWARDS
PAUL DI FILIPPO
JAMES GRADY
SUSI HOLLIDAY
SAMANTHA LEE HOWE
MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI
VASEEM KHAN
JOEL LANE
JOE R. LANSDALE
BARRY N. MALZBERG
NICK MAMATAS
WARREN MOORE
DONNA MOORE
TARA MOSS
KIM NEWMAN
ANA TERESA PEREIRA
BILL PRONZINI
DAVID QUANTICK
KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH
JAMES SALLIS
LAVIE TIDHAR
JOSEPH S. WALKER
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Ink and Daggers
by Neil Gaiman, John Lawton, Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Christopher Fowler, James Sallis, Max Allan Collins, Mickey Spillane, Conrad Williams, Stuart Neville, Ann Cleeves, Lavie Tidhar, Simon Brett, Christine Poulson
An enthralling anthology of 20 CWA Dagger Award-shortlisted gripping and thrilling stories for the most hardened crime fan.
Featuring bestselling authors such as Ann Cleeves, Christopher Fowler and Val McDermid.
NINETEEN CWA DAGGER AWARD-WINNING SHORT STORIES FROM THE BEST OF THE BEST IN CRIME FICTION
Legendary editor, Maxim Jakubowski, delivers another chilling anthology collecting stories of cold-blooded murder, revenge and crimes-gone-wrong from the best of the best in crime fiction. Spine-chilling and gripping, these tales will grip you with their devious narrators and crafty twists.
FEATURING:
Ann Cleeves
Christopher Fowler
Val McDermid
Lavie Tidhar
Chris Simms
Christine Poulson
James Sallis
Victoria Selman
Conrad Williams
Stuart Neville
George Pelecanos
Simon Brett
John Lawton
Ken Bruen
Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins
Peter Robinson
Martyn Waites
and
Kevin Wignall
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$28.95