New York Times Article

After 6 Novels in 12 Years, a Character Just Moves On
James Sallis
December 31, 2001

Some years back, when I took my seat on the bus, this guy sat down beside me and started talking.

The trip was unplanned. I thought I was writing a short story. Now here it is 12 years and six novels later, Karyn and I have hauled boxes and lives from Texas to New Orleans to Phoenix to Brooklyn and back, and that voice has been in my ear the whole time.

Now the voice is fading. "Ghost of a Flea," the final novel of six, comes out next month. Through the bus's rear window as it pulls away I watch my friend. He lifts a hand in farewell.

I recall those last days. Endlessly revising, throwing out pages, feinting and dodging and second-guessing my way into books, I always write slowly at first. Then, as time goes on, momentum develops; with each novel there's a point I can never quite grasp, when the story takes over and I find myself stumbling along behind, trying to keep up.

I had told Karyn that I expected to finish "Flea" in a couple of weeks, but those last chapters came, as they do so often, in a tumble. On a Tuesday evening, tears streaming down my face, I met her at the door when she got home from work. She took one look and said, "You finished it." I had, moments before. We sat on the porch with glasses of wine looking across at palm trees as day let go its hold and bands of bright ribbon blew out on the sky.

Twelve years past, in a garage apartment in Texas, I had written:

"And now I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose.

"I can't imagine what it should be. . . .

"And so, another book. But not about my Cajun this time. About someone I've named Lew Griffin, a man I know both very well and not at all. And I had only to end it now by writing: I went back into the house and wrote.

"It is midnight. The rain beats at the windows.

"It is not midnight. It is not raining."

Another book.

The way I've measured out my life.

That was "The Long-Legged Fly," "what might have resulted if Raymond Chandler and Samuel Beckett had collaborated on a detective novel," I remarked in one interview - completed in a single amazing month that saw as well half a dozen new short stories, a brace of poems, six or eight book reviews and the beginnings of my novel "Renderings." Each morning I'd stumble from makeshift bed to makeshift desk and draw the Selectric close to begin writing. Cup after cup of tea steamed alongside as, across the street, cars delivered children to day care. Mothers pulled away applying makeup in rear-view mirrors. I'd still be there writing at the end of the day, apart and looking on, when they returned.

That summer Lew Griffin set up camp in my imagination - took his seat on the bus beside me - as a failed private detective, failed husband and father, a black man trying to live in the white man's world where rules keep changing and the rug always gets pulled out from under. Together we recalled his boyhood in rural Arkansas, his enrapture by books, his first days in the great gumbo city that's New Orleans. By the second novel, "Moth," he'd moved up from camping in my imagination to renting out a front room. I went through beatings and a hundred hangovers with him. I watched him become a writer, mourned with him the disappearance of his son, was there beside him through the loss of the many women who loved him.

In "Black Hornet," 60's ferment becomes real for Lew when a white woman he meets at a black club, a journalist, falls to a sniper's bullet as they leave.

In "Bluebottle" - a mirror image of "Black Hornet," dealing with white supremacy in much the same manner as the earlier book did black-power movements - Lew himself falls to sniper's fire, loses a year of his life and tries to piece together the lost year from his own halting memory and what friends are able to tell him of it, dumping in shovelfuls of imagination as landfill. The very novel you are reading is that reconstruction, that cobbling together.

Why Lew?

Why does a white Southerner choose to write about a black man in American society? Why does he think he can get away with that?

Why, for that matter, mysteries, after years upon years of publishing literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, poetry, personal essays, musicology, translations?

Complex questions. The facile response is that I didn't choose to write about Lew, that he chose me. I'd been reading a lot of Chester Himes, his novels, his autobiographies, and began writing "The Long-Legged Fly" from a single persistent image, lowering myself Archimedes-like into the story, looking to see what might be in there. When the Eureka! came, 40 or so pages along, I knew my protagonist was African-American. I knew, too, that I'd been given the perfect window to write about American society in the late 20th century.

I went back to work.

Mysteries?

What better crucible in which to fire up the reagents of contemporary urban life? Crime novels give access to every level of society, taking on the city in its entirety. The privileged, the impoverished, the invisible. When in the 80's I began writing in the field, it seemed to me that much of the most interesting work was being done in the crime novel. A whole army of writers, people like Jim Burke, Stephen Greenleaf and Daniel Woodrell, had decamped from "literary" fiction and set up down by the river. They wanted to write serious novels, and they wanted people to read them, and they didn't feel those two desires had to be exclusive.

I dropped my knapsack and unrolled my sleeping bag beside them.

From the first, I knew that Lew's story could only take place in New Orleans. In its unique history and collage of cultures, New Orleans is at once the most and least American of our great cities. "We've moved to the third world," Karyn said a week or so after our relocation there. It was her first time, my fifth, and New Orleans is the closest thing I have to a home. I'd gone there, at 17, to attend Tulane, keep circling back to this brutal, graceful, ugly, beautiful, sophisticated, crude city.

And finally, why end the series? I could easily, as a friend pointed out, go on writing books set in Lew's world year in and year out. But the novels, more or less as predicated in "The Long-Legged Fly" with its four sections set in four decades, form an arc, a concerted movement toward something, in many ways a single long story, and with "Ghost of a Flea" the story's completely told. As musician friends would say, I played the melody, jammed my way through five more books and came back home.

Time to put down the horn and say goodbye to Lew.