The Stylish Subversive

In case you missed it, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review this last weekend published an admiring, even hagiographic profile of James Sallis, a born Southerner and legendary prose stylist, whose latest novel is Cripple Creek. Written by fellow author Judith Freeman, the piece muses on what being classified as a crime fictionist might have cost Sallis, in terms of popularity; but concludes with a comparison to Raymond Chandler that encourages Sallis to appreciate his classification for all its worth:

Reading Sallis, we can’t help but be aware of the intelligence behind the work, as well as how much reading he has done in his life. He’s an erudite man, and this informs the work at the deepest level. For him, reading is the most subversive activity in life: “Open any true book,” he has written, “and you begin to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. Nothing is more redeeming than that, or more dangerous.”

Mystery is not a subgenre to him, but rather a finely shaped container to be filled with all the tender morsels of his imagination--those fine literary foods of which he speaks. Like [Walter] Mosley, whose most engaging novels are still the Easy Rawlins books, Sallis is most successful when telling stories about cops and crooks. Yet who can blame him for wanting to flex different literary muscles? The amazing thing about Sallis is the way he continues to mine a genre for all its possibilities.

He seems to have adopted an attitude toward mysteries very much like the one Chandler eventually did. Early on, Chandler longed to write literary fiction, to try different forms and avoid getting stuck. In 1939, the year he published his first novel, The Big Sleep, he had his wife, Cissy, type into a notebook his plans for the future. He wanted to write a dramatic novel, as well as six or seven fantastic stories--an ironic tale, a spooky story, a farcical tale, even a pure fairy tale, as well as three more detective novels to be written over the next two years.

At the end of this list, Cissy added a comment, using her nickname for him. “Dear Raymio,” she wrote, “you’ll have fun looking at this maybe, and seeing what useless dreams you had. Or perhaps it will not be fun.” Chandler responded to her comment several times over the next few years. “It was not,” he wrote a year later. A few months after that, he reaffirmed this feeling with one word: “Check.” In another nine months, he wrote, “Double Check,” and three years later, “God help us.”

But by the time he made his last notation, dated almost five years later, he had changed his mind. “Yes it was [fun],” he wrote, “because I had now achieved it, although not with these stories.” He put his trust in the mystery novel, and to the end of his life it served him very well. It appears to be doing the same for Sallis, who is one of our finest existential novelists. In a world beset by violence, he reminds us of what it is to be a human being.