James Sallis: An Overview

James Sallis' 1992 The Long-Legged Fly is the first in a series of highly original private eye novels featuring African-American New Orleans freelancer Lew Griffin. With a poet's heart, Sallis' investigator deploys his knowledge of these meaningful streets to become not only a debt collector and private eye, but, fluent in Louisiana French, a part-time university lecturer in French literature, and, finally, a writer of detective fiction. Far-fetched, perhaps, but Sallis, a former science fiction writer from Helena, Arkansas (RIP Sonny Boy Williamson), portrays Griffin's transformation and multi-faceted existence with skill and subtlety.

True to Sallis' aesthetics, a chance meeting or thought might result in a previously unforeseen narrative diversion. The Long-Legged Fly begins in 1964, with Griffin's infamous crime, moves to 1970 and 1984 before ending in 1990 with the disappearance of Griffin's son. It's only in Eye of the Cricket, three novels later, that his son's disappearance is resolved. Playing with the ambiguity existing between author and protagonist, Sallis, in the latter novel, places Lew in hospital where he must identify a young man, apparently homeless, whose sole possession is a well worn, notated copy of one of Griffin's out-of-print novels bearing an inscription from the author to his son. When the young man comes to, he claims to be Lew Griffin, and, in a notebook, says he has begun work on a new novel. Griffin, suffering from writer's block, can only kick-start his next book, which may or may not be the one the young man has claimed as his own, and reacquaint himself with his son, after visiting a host of displaced souls who inhabit the outer limits of a dog-eat-dog culture.

Seeking to subvert the expectations of genre fiction, Sallis will invariably set out, in the opening pages, the shell of his novel, only for it to open up to reveal other narrative possibilities. For here fiction, as a form, can create as much as replicate reality. Nevertheless, things can get complicated. A white man writing about a black protagonist, Sallis intentionally crosses cultures and blurs boundaries. He ends The Long-Legged Fly with Lew Griffin, suffering from a concussion and cracked ribs, having written his first novel, Skull Meat, about a Cajun detective, and is eighty pages into his second novel, The Severed Hand. The reader now knows nothing in a Sallis novel can be taken at face value. Griffin has even written a novel called The Long-Legged Fly, which ends with the author forsaking his Cajun investigator for another fictional private eye, named Lew Griffin. While Sallis' next novel is Moth, Griffin, in The Long-Legged Fly, insists his next novel will be Black Hornet, which, in reality, will be Sallis' third novel. Establishing the artifice of the narrative, Sallis' Moth begins with the same sentences with which Griffin ends The Long-Legged Fly: "It is midnight. It is not raining." Suddenly, it's apparent that Lew Griffin has made up the entire narrative. Then again, perhaps he hasn't.

By the publication of Black Hornet, Griffin has become, like Sallis, an established writer of detective fiction. Delving into the world of African-American politics, Griffin recalls meeting Chester Himes, whose spirit permeates the book. Here Griffin explains the direction of his fiction: "Every day you head out in a dozen different directions, become a dozen different people; some of them make it back home that night, others don't."

Caught between entertaining readers and conveying the notion that they are involved in a literary act, Sallis, well-versed in the history of pulp literature and the author of a study of Goodis, Thompson and Himes, must, if his novels are to work, distance himself from the novel-as-literary-product, yet sustain the narrative by maintaining its element of suspense. Not an easy task in a genre known for its structural demands. Nevertheless, Sallis remains true to his investigatory techniques. One can only admire his seriousness as much as his playfulness, as he alters the genre, stretching its boundaries as few have done.

by Woody Haut