A Few Last Words About Sallis

His publisher, Soho Press, shared the news last evening that James Sallis, Arkansas-born author of the Lew Griffin private-eye series and popular standalone novels such as 2005’s Drive (later made into a movie of the same name), died on January 27 at age 81:

In many ways Jim was the platonic ideal of what a writer can be, though he probably would not like it put thus. As an artist the work was everything to Jim, and he worked without boundaries or careerism. Perhaps best known for his existentialist crime fiction and neo-noirs ..., Jim was also a poet, musicologist, literary historian, critic, editor and teacher.

His career began writing science fiction for publications edited by the likes of Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison, who was an ardent fan of Sallis and championed his work in the 1960s and ’70s. At this time Jim helped edit the influential New Worlds publication under the direction of Michael Moorcock.

As a reader and appreciator of culture, Jim was as curious and uninhibited as he was as a writer. It was a joy to talk about art in all forms with him, but his grand view of literature matched his personal approach to craft. To Jim it didn’t matter where or how good work came into existence, or how it was shelved. His groundbreaking collection of short biographical work on Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes, collected as Difficult Lives Hitching Rides [originally published in 1993], had no critical precedent and helped usher in a new era of appraisal for now legendary writers who at the time were nearly or totally out of print. He collected and played with alacrity an impressive number of string instruments and his love of the blues and jazz was lifelong.

Sallis’ first novel starring New Orleans’ Lew Griffin, a Black “professor, poet, novelist, and occasional private eye” was The Long-Legged Fly, which saw print in 1992. It was followed by what Kevin Burton Smith, of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, calls “six dark, defiantly literate novels that brought author James Sallis instant comparisons to Walter Mosely, Chester Himes and James Lee Burke. But for once the comparisons are apt. Lew’s obsession with missing children—and his quest to find them—may permeate the series, but the real thrust seems to be the art of writing itself.” The final Griffin tale, Ghost of a Flea, was released back in 2000. Sallis was presented with Bouchercon’s Lifetime Achievement award in 2007, and received the Hammett Prize for his 2011 novel, The Killer Is Dying.

Beyond those works, Sallis penned a trilogy of novels about a different gumshoe, Tennessee’s John Turner, beginning with Cypress Grove (2003). Among his other books are Death Will Have Your Eyes (1997), Others of My Kind (2013), and Sarah Jane (2019). He remembered, too, for his biography Chester Himes: A Life, published in 2001.

Soho Press reports that “No funeral is planned. If you feel moved to donate in [Sallis’] memory, the family suggests the ACLU or the Humane Society as worthy charities that Jim valued. He was preceded in death by his parents, his brother (the philosopher John Sallis), and his son, Dylan. He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Karyn.”

World’s Edge, Sallis’ “mosaic novel” comprising five linked science-fiction stories, is still due out out from Soho Press next month. And the James Sallis Web site says it will continue to “be maintained as Jim’s work continues to be published, shared, and appreciated.”

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

READ MORE: “James Sallis, 1944–2026,” by Elizabeth Foxwell (The Bunburyist); “James Sallis—1944-2026: Blues No More,” by John Harvey (Some Days You Do …); “James Sallis: A Remembrance,” by Adrian McKinty (CrimeReads); “James Sallis, 81, Dies; Novelist Whose ‘Drive’ Became a Hit Movie,” by Alex Traub (The New York Times).

Worthy of Notice

Having just finished work on another piece for CrimeReads, I have time to highlight a few genre-related stories I’ve seen lately.

• There’s big news from U.S. publisher Soho Crime. In a press release, it declares it’ll release a brand-new novel by James Sallis this coming October: Sarah Jane, about “a good cop with a complicated past,” whose “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.” No less exciting is word that, beginning this fall, Soho will reissue Sallis’ six novels starring Lew Griffin, a sometime private eye in New Orleans with a particular interest in locating lost children. The first of those short books, The Long-Legged Fly (1992), should reach stores in mid-September, with the last, Ghost of a Flea, going on sale in early December.

• London’s Goldsboro Books has announced its 2019 longlist of nominees for the Glass Bell Award, given “annually to an outstanding work of contemporary fiction, rewarding quality storytelling in any genre.” The dozen contenders include several plucked from the crime/mystery shelf: Our House, by Louise Candlish; Memo from Turner, by Tim Willocks; The Puppet Show, by M.W. Craven; The Poison Bed, by Elizabeth Fremantle; Snap, by Belinda Bauer; and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Shelf Awareness says, “The shortlist, judged by Goldsboro Books founder and managing director David Headley and his team, will be announced on August 1, and the winner named September 16.”

• This comes from the Los Angeles Times:

Publisher Harper Collins will release a novel by filmmaker Michael Mann featuring the characters from his iconic 1995 film “Heat” next year, the director revealed on Twitter.

The novel, which has been in the works for years, is being co-written with Reed Farrel Coleman, the crime author best known for his series of novels featuring Moe Prager, an ex-police officer turned private eye.

“Heat,” written and directed by Mann, gained critical acclaim upon its release and remains one of the best-known films of the 1990s. The movie follows a Los Angeles police detective, played by Al Pacino, on the trail of a crew of robbers led by a longtime thief, played by Robert De Niro.

The Times goes on to explain that “Mann first indicated his interest in writing a novel inspired by ‘Heat’ in 2016, when Harper Collins announced that the director would be getting his own imprint with the publisher. Deadline reported that the planned novel would be a prequel, covering ‘the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters ...’” No title or release date has yet been set for Mann’s novel.

• In Reference to Murder reports that “The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association has scheduled a July 21 walking tour of areas in South Berkeley, California, that are associated with mystery/sci fi author, editor, and critic Anthony Boucher (aka William Anthony Parker White). The walk will be guided by Randal Brandt, a librarian who curates the California Detective Fiction Collection at the University of Southern California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. The tour will also cover sites associated with Boucher’s fellow mystery writer Mary Collins, the California Writer’s Club, pioneering film critic Pauline Kael, and others.” If only I lived in the Bay Area …

• I have to admire Tom Simon’s ambition. Not only does he write the excellent Paperback Warrior blog, focused on 1950s-1990s soft-cover novels, but this week he launched a companion podcast. In the premiere episode, he and a colleague “discuss the goldmine of paperback treasure, the famed Chamblin’s Book Mine in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as two novels—Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block, and Penetrator #14, by Chet Cunningham.” When I finally get around to adding a list of podcasts to The Rap Sheet’s already lengthy blogroll, I’ll definitely have to include this new one.

• With Season 4 of Grantchester set to debut this coming Sunday night, July 14, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup, The Killing Times has posted a list of what it contends are “the most dangerous villages in British crime drama.” Grantchester, of course, makes the cut, as do Kembleford (Father Brown), Carsley (Agatha Raisin), and St. Mary Mead (Miss Marple).

• By the way, if you’ve forgotten, this season of Grantchester will be star James Norton’s last. His “charismatic, jazz-loving clergyman Sidney Chambers” will be eased out during the coming half-dozen episodes to make way for the Reverend Will Davenport, played by Tom Brittney. Click here to watch the official series trailer.

• Speaking of Masterpiece Mystery!, I was sorry to bid adieu last Sunday to Series 6 of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam. This season comprised only four episodes—two fewer than last year. And as Chris Sullivan points out in his excellent Morse Universe blog, scenes were either eliminated or truncated in the U.S. broadcasts of those latest eps. Here are the links to Sullivan’s posts featuring the material cut from individual Season 6 installments of the series: “Pylon” (see here and here), “Apollo,” “Confection,” and “Degüello.” I have to say, “Degüello” would have been even more satisfying than it already was had the scene Sullivan embeds last in his post—showing Fred Thursday and Reginald Bright talking about how they met their wives—remained intact.

• Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review blog chooses what it claims are the five “best mysteries and thrillers of 2019 so far.” Interestingly, I’ve read only one of them. So far.

• I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken with people impressed by their own collections of electronic books on one device or another. But the Microsoft Store’s recent decision to close its books department—in the process “disappearing every single e-book from every one of its customers” —should cause them to consider the transient nature of such libraries. NPR has more on the story.

• Finally, keep in mind that Dead Good, the British crime-fiction Web site, is still asking for assistance in choosing the winners of its 2019 Reader Awards. Click here to take part in this competition. Polls will remain open through Wednesday, July 17, with winners set to be announced on Friday, July 19, at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

Hammett Up, Folks

Omnimystery News brings word today that author James Sallis has won the 2011 Hammett Prize for his novel The Killer Is Dying (Walker & Company). The Hammett Prize is given out annually by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.

The four other contenders for that commendation were: Feast Day of Fools, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster); Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart/Canada; Knopf/U.S.); and The Informant, by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Otto Penzler).

Sallis received his bronze trophy during a special ceremony at this weekend’s Bloody Words Conference in Toronto, Ontario.

Eclectic ... and Lovin’ It

First, it was George Pelecanos. Now, the great James Sallis (Cripple Creek, Drive) has been cornered by interviewer John Kenyon at Things I’d Rather Be Doing. There are plenty of interesting moments in their back-and-forth, but I couldn’t help laughing at Sallis’ response to this question:

You will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at Bouchercon 2007, recognizing your mystery writing. Any qualms about receiving notice for that part of your work as you try to keep your pen dipped in many different inkwells?

For many years, while being nominated again and again, I’ve successfully evaded receiving any major award. Fast footwork is everything. Now those feisty people at Bouchercon have spoiled a perfect record. Qualms? Well, it’s a lifetime achievement award, which might give one pause--what my friend Larry Block calls the “Look, he’s still alive!” award.

The full interview is available here.

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.