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:- 1964 : 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.- 1970 : 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 nine-day 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 nightWho have never been happy or good. - 1984 : 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. - 1990 : 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.
This is a difficult book to review and rate. The book has some good things to it, but there’s also some glaring weaknesses that ultimately made it more than a little frustrating to me. Unfortunately, I had high expectations from the beginning, so the disappointment was particularly acute. The cover blurb quotes several glowing reviews from The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and The Washington Post Book World. The Times quote states “An extraordinary first novel….justly compared to James Lee Burke and Raymond Chandler.” They had me at Burke and Chandler. I’ve read all of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels and have loved them all and Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe is THE iconic fictional private investigator. The setting of New Orleans was another selling point. Burke’s novels, with his rich and vibrant depiction of the swamps, bayous, and the French Quarter, have put visiting New Orleans on my bucket list . It’s a setting that lends itself well to noir and I was looking forward to another writer’s depiction of the area.The main character is an African-American private detective named Lew Griffin and the book consists of 4 separate missing persons cases he investigates and a brief prologue at the start of the novel. Spanning 26 years, the cases occur in 1964, 1970, 1984, and 1990 and each one of them is a standalone story with no connection with each other. I use the word “investigate” loosely and that’s one of the weaknesses of the novel. Each case consists of Griffin making a few phone calls, talking to a few people, and getting a magical lead that leads him to the missing person. There’s little, if any, plot to the stories and, if anything, they tend to be more anticlimactic than suspenseful. This is more a character study than a mystery or thriller. Character studies are fine, but the cases themselves are perfunctory enough to be almost bare outlines. Plot holes are huge, things end abruptly, and interesting plots and themes are abandoned before they are fully explored. One missing person case involves a female African American activist who disappears and is later found passing as white. This could have been a chance to examine race in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, but there’s no in depth analysis of her actions. The only explanation given is that she had a “breakdown” and that’s just lazy writing.The character of Griffin is interesting and initially appears to be following the noir genre convention of the hard drinking and self-destructive PI (like Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor or Burke’s early Robicheaux novels) and there’s some good, hard boiled scenes and dialogue sprinkled throughout the book:“There was a half filled glass of bourbon and an almost empty bottle on the desk. A fly floated in what was left in the glass. I thought about it, fished the fly out with a letter-opener, drank, poured in the rest of the bottle”Griffin’s drinking eventually gets so out of control that he ends up being committed to a detox clinic and it becomes apparent that the most important missing person in the book is himself:“I started out again, then came back and sat at the desk, staring out the window. I felt as though I’d lost something, lost it forever, and I didn’t even know what it was, had no name for it. Those are the worst losses we ever sustain”Griffin is also well read and quotes poetry, literature, and philosophy throughout the book. Salis has made him interesting enough that I do plan to read another book in the series just to see what he does with the character and if he can structure an interesting story next time. Sallis is also a poet and, perfunctory plotting aside, his writing is exceptional. He’s able to infuse a dose of poetry into noir conventions:“I hung up, turned off the light and sat staring out into the darkness. Somewhere in that darkness, sheltered or concealed by it, maybe lost in it, was David; and somewhere too, Vicky, Verne and others I’d loved.In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you.The only help you’ll get is a few hard drinks and morning”
What do You think about The Long-Legged Fly (2001)?
I was somewhat disappointed by this. The writing style was sufficiently gritty but the story skipped around too much for me to settle into the story. There was an intriguing books withing books meme, though when Lew started writing detective novels. At one point he said something along the lines of "Reviewers were even mentioning, Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald and Himes when discussing my books. They shouldn't have." The last sentence was true enough. Bottom line; the prose is good but the story was choppy and didn't flow. One unexpected treat for those listening to the audio recording is the blues guitar riffs at the beginning and end. They are either actual recordings of Blind Willie Johnson's music or a damn good imitation.
—Tom Mathews
There are rare writers of mysteries who succeed beyond the trappings of the genre. James Sallis is one of the best. What makes a great mystery? A focus on place. While a mystery deals typically with crime, the crime/event takes place in time and place. Within "The Long-Legged Fly" you can smell, feel, and taste New Orleans. A focus on character. One doesn't have to like the protagonist and here Lew Griffin is full of warts, an acerbic sometimes recovering drunk who is prone to letting people down. But Lew is nothing if not complex and is drawn by Sallis with compassion, ambiguity and great depth.Something more than just a plot. If all a mystery is a "who-dunn-it?" it has failed. Sallis strays from strict plot lines, something that I think frustrates some readers. The point is often not even the crime/event. It is a tool to build something bigger, in Sallis' case a musing on the human condition.I cannot more highly recommend James Sallis and the Lew Griffin series. He takes the mystery genre into the realm of "real" literature where it must be taken with the respect it deserves.
—Chrisbeacham
It's meta-noir. The drinking and the looking for lost people, the sex and the violence are there, but are not the point. The main drive of the book is the sense of loss (of losing something, or of being lost) that is at the heart of so much noir fiction. Curiously, blurbs on the back are from Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison. Sallis (not to be confused with James Salter) did work with Michael Moorcock in the British Sc-fi renaissance. Sallis hero is Chester Himes, apparently. Time to read him, I guess.
—Stas
