AN APPRECIATION OF
JAMES SALLIS
by Walter Satterthwait
 
It was on the advice of Bill Crider, the American mystery writer, that I read Jim Sallis. "You should take a look at The Long-Legged Fly," he said. "The guy is different." So I took a look at The Long-Legged Fly and the guy was different. Within the first few pages, his narrator and ostensible hero, Lew Griffin, for reasons that we do not understand, has brutally gutted a man. Over the course of the book, and the course of several years, Lew wanders, sometimes sober, more often not, through the city of New Orleans and through his own private hell, a hell compounded of rage and loss and bitter memory, of alcoholic blackouts and of endless, sleepless nights. There is violence in this dark world, and failure, and death; but there is also love, usually unspoken; and there is kindness, always unsought and always unexpected; and, rarely, but all the more potent for its rarity, there is redemption. It is a redemption, however, that is tentative and qualified: a redemption inevitably trembling with the possibility, perhaps even the certainty, of its own dissolution and collapse. A dark world indeed. But throughout the book, and throughout the subsequent books in the series, Lew Griffin suggests to us that it is a fictive world as well - that "Lew Griffin", the black man, the sometime debt collector and private detective, the sometime novelist and teacher, may not exist at all, that he may be only a construct, an artifice.