James Sallis
This is the first Lew Griffin novel I've read and I really enjoyed it, It's nothing like Chandler or Hammett any other of the crime writer names dropped in blurbs to entice readers.
Instead it's a mood piece in four parts, that looks at souls lost and found within a man's life.
I highly recommend it for anyone interested in something different in a private eye novel, I got to know Jim Sallis fairly well can anyone truly know another person and became friendly with him several years ago.
He generously blurbed my first novel, for which I'm grateful, Reading this book now, finally, was a pleasure, I'm looking forward to the other novels in the Lew Griffin series,
My first James Sallis book, and it qualifies as a 'discovery' of a major talent that goes beyond genre borders to write a detective story that is an existentialist meditation on race and relationships, a prose poem dedicated to the city of New Orleans and its exhilarating mix of beauty and darkness, a blues album coming straight from the soul of a man repeatedly knocked down Robert Johnson's hellhound was nipping at my heels .
I've been thinking about the title, and I guess it refers to 'how fragile we are', how innocents are broken to pieces in the big city vice machine, how lovers and friends and happiness is transitory and fly away the moment you try to grasp them.
The structure of the book is unusual for a P, I. noir, as the focus is on character study more than the actual criminal investigations, We follow sleuth Lew Griffin for almost thirty years of his irregular career on the streets of New Orleans, each section of the book dealing with a different investigation:
: Lew as a tough guy , a justiciary who takes the law in his own hands, a name to instill fear in the denizens of the underworld.
He's the classic lone wolf, hard drinking and hard hitting,
with an enstranged wife and kid and a talent for wisecracks I woke up feeling like the inside of someone's shoe.
. He gets hired to find a succesful and popular black woman who disappeared from the plane coming from New York to New Orleans.
You may think it sounds a little like Devil In a Blue Dress , but Sallis goes his own way, introspective rather than angry, cerebral and methodical instead of impulsive.
He is anchored firmly in the black culture and its human rights struggle, but he makes it personal rather than political.
I wondered then : what was it that started a person sinking Was that long fall in him or her from the start, in us all perhaps or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living.
It seemed as though I should know, I'd been there more than once and would probably be there again,
Instead of answers, he prefers to raise the questions and provoke the reader to think and to take a stand.
: Lew has picked the threads of his life together and got moderately successful, Once again he is put on the trail of a missing girl who ran away from a poor home in the country and got lost in the big city.
Again this is mostly a pretext for the author to explore the barriers in communication between generations and the corrupting influence of the big city lifestyle.
I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents' faces in the mirror.
We also find out more about Lew Griffin, the man who loves reading and listening to Jazz and Blues music, whose best friends are a call girl and a disillusioned cop:
Put on Bessie Smith and bobbed about for a while on the promise of her voice, on her empty bed blues, her nineday crawl, her haunted house, on her thirst and her hunger.
Every note and word was like something pulled with great difficulty from deep within myself,
His internal monologues and conversations are rich in literary references, like a map of his evolution from a youth dreaming of a better world Thoreau, Gandhi, Twain to a more cynical and realistic adult who has seen most of his dreams turn to dust: Tolstoy, Faulkner, Chekhov.
I have not marked down, but Lew's reading list includes social and economical tomes The more power one had, the more power it took to maintain that power Hobbes.
Sallis probably put more than a little of his own experiences in this book, so poetry couldn' be absent from duty.
My favorite is a quote Lew picks from W H Auden:
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
: The years have not been kind to Lew, he has not learned detachment from the fate of the victims of the system, and he is now a pennyless alcoholic, closed up to the world in an internal struggle with his own hellhounds.
The friendly cop puts him in rehab, where he gets a second chance at love and at making a relationship work.
The third case is again a missing person, another innocent who disappeared from the streets, But at least Lew starts to believe in the possibility of redemption of putting Humpty Dumpty together again:
But was she really in control Or driven
Finally, I guess, it wasn't much different from the way we all make up our lives by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we've known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life.
: Lew has climbed back up the socail ladder and found some level of comfort.
He's become a writer of noir novels and a college professor, He's still lonely, but in a great scene with his on/off call girl we start to understand he is actually the one who drives people off.
He believes he's put his investigative years behind, but another missing person brings him back, This time it is personal:
It's never ideas, but simple things, that break our hearts: a falling leaf that plunges us into our own irredeemable past, the memory of a young woman's ankle, a single smile among unknown faces, a madeleine, a piece of toast.
The major qualities of the novel the elegant, minimalistic prose, the keen observation of human behaviour, the understated but powerful emotional intensity would justify a five star review, but as a genre noir novel the pacing is rather slow, the actual cases are lacking in suspense and the actual action scenes are scarce.
But I look forward to reading the next Sallis novel, I might even appreciate it more, now that I know what to expect.
.
is an odd book, but I liked it, It is not so much a privateeye novel as a privateeye symphony in four movements, each tied to a particular year,,,, that show us four cases in the life of investigator Lew Griffin and how heand the city he loves, New Orleansflow through a quarter century into the fullness of time.
Its title comes from a line in a poem of Yeats “Like a longlegged fly upon the stream/His mind moves upon silence”, and the book is narrated by Griffin, a man much like Yeats longlegged fly, who discovers himself both in his love and in his privacies, but particularly in the quiet lonely places of the night.
It is Lews narrative voice that is the books memorable feature: spare, clear, poetic, allusive, but never pretentious.
Here is one of my favorite passages, about a storm:
That night, sudden and sunseen in the embracing dark, as though the city, like alice, had tombled into some primordial hole and through to another world, a storm broke.I've read a few of Sallis's "noir" stories and novels, and many of his early avant garde science fiction stories from the's and's, when he was known as a poet.
I woke, at three or four, to the sound of tree limbs whipping back and forth against the side of the house.
Power had summarily failed, and there were no lights, was no light, anywhere, Wind heaved in great tidal waves out there in the dark somewhere, Rain hissed and beat its fists against the roof.
Yet looking out I could see nothing of what I sensed,
It went on another hour, perhaps more, the edge, as we learned the next day, of hurricanes that touched down in Galveston, extracting individual buildings like teeth, and blew themselves out on the way up the channel toward Mobile.
The morning we learned this, weather was mild, air exceptionally clear, sun bright and cool in the sky.
Worms had come out onto sidewalks and lay there uncurled in the steam rising lazily from them.
In every street, cars maneuvered around the fallen limbs of ageold trees, And shipwrecked on the neautral ground, crisscrossing trolly tracks, lay uprooted palmsfully a third of the citys ancient, timeless crop.
This is the first Lew Griffin novel I've read and I really enjoyed it, It's nothing like Chandler or Hammett any other of the crime writer names dropped in blurbs to entice readers.
Instead it's a mood piece in four parts, that looks at souls lost and found within a man's life.
I highly recommend it for anyone interested in something different in a private eye novel, I got to know Jim Sallis fairly well can anyone truly know another person and became friendly with him several years ago.
He generously blurbed my first novel, for which I'm grateful, Reading this book now, finally, was a pleasure, I'm looking forward to the other novels in the Lew Griffin series,
My first James Sallis book, and it qualifies as a 'discovery' of a major talent that goes beyond genre borders to write a detective story that is an existentialist meditation on race and relationships, a prose poem dedicated to the city of New Orleans and its exhilarating mix of beauty and darkness, a blues album coming straight from the soul of a man repeatedly knocked down Robert Johnson's hellhound was nipping at my heels .
I've been thinking about the title, and I guess it refers to 'how fragile we are', how innocents are broken to pieces in the big city vice machine, how lovers and friends and happiness is transitory and fly away the moment you try to grasp them.
The structure of the book is unusual for a P, I. noir, as the focus is on character study more than the actual criminal investigations, We follow sleuth Lew Griffin for almost thirty years of his irregular career on the streets of New Orleans, each section of the book dealing with a different investigation:
: Lew as a tough guy , a justiciary who takes the law in his own hands, a name to instill fear in the denizens of the underworld.
He's the classic lone wolf, hard drinking and hard hitting,
with an enstranged wife and kid and a talent for wisecracks I woke up feeling like the inside of someone's shoe.
. He gets hired to find a succesful and popular black woman who disappeared from the plane coming from New York to New Orleans.
You may think it sounds a little like Devil In a Blue Dress , but Sallis goes his own way, introspective rather than angry, cerebral and methodical instead of impulsive.
He is anchored firmly in the black culture and its human rights struggle, but he makes it personal rather than political.
I wondered then : what was it that started a person sinking Was that long fall in him or her from the start, in us all perhaps or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living.
It seemed as though I should know, I'd been there more than once and would probably be there again,
Instead of answers, he prefers to raise the questions and provoke the reader to think and to take a stand.
: Lew has picked the threads of his life together and got moderately successful, Once again he is put on the trail of a missing girl who ran away from a poor home in the country and got lost in the big city.
Again this is mostly a pretext for the author to explore the barriers in communication between generations and the corrupting influence of the big city lifestyle.
I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents' faces in the mirror.
We also find out more about Lew Griffin, the man who loves reading and listening to Jazz and Blues music, whose best friends are a call girl and a disillusioned cop:
Put on Bessie Smith and bobbed about for a while on the promise of her voice, on her empty bed blues, her nineday crawl, her haunted house, on her thirst and her hunger.
Every note and word was like something pulled with great difficulty from deep within myself,
His internal monologues and conversations are rich in literary references, like a map of his evolution from a youth dreaming of a better world Thoreau, Gandhi, Twain to a more cynical and realistic adult who has seen most of his dreams turn to dust: Tolstoy, Faulkner, Chekhov.
I have not marked down, but Lew's reading list includes social and economical tomes The more power one had, the more power it took to maintain that power Hobbes.
Sallis probably put more than a little of his own experiences in this book, so poetry couldn' be absent from duty.
My favorite is a quote Lew picks from W H Auden:
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
: The years have not been kind to Lew, he has not learned detachment from the fate of the victims of the system, and he is now a pennyless alcoholic, closed up to the world in an internal struggle with his own hellhounds.
The friendly cop puts him in rehab, where he gets a second chance at love and at making a relationship work.
The third case is again a missing person, another innocent who disappeared from the streets, But at least Lew starts to believe in the possibility of redemption of putting Humpty Dumpty together again:
But was she really in control Or driven
Finally, I guess, it wasn't much different from the way we all make up our lives by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we've known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life.
: Lew has climbed back up the socail ladder and found some level of comfort.
He's become a writer of noir novels and a college professor, He's still lonely, but in a great scene with his on/off call girl we start to understand he is actually the one who drives people off.
He believes he's put his investigative years behind, but another missing person brings him back, This time it is personal:
It's never ideas, but simple things, that break our hearts: a falling leaf that plunges us into our own irredeemable past, the memory of a young woman's ankle, a single smile among unknown faces, a madeleine, a piece of toast.
The major qualities of the novel the elegant, minimalistic prose, the keen observation of human behaviour, the understated but powerful emotional intensity would justify a five star review, but as a genre noir novel the pacing is rather slow, the actual cases are lacking in suspense and the actual action scenes are scarce.
But I look forward to reading the next Sallis novel, I might even appreciate it more, now that I know what to expect.
.