Veteran novelist James Sallis has a knack for pairing the laconic with the metaphysical, the cozily quotidian with the surreal. His eighth, just-published tale, "Ghost of a Flea," draws the reader into a strange and richly populated universe. In twists and turns of bizarre incident and poignant human encounters, the story traverses the alleys and gator-tail joints, bars and hospital wards of one man's New Orleans—a city ragged with the violence that proceeds from poverty and entrenched inequality, populated by homeless loners who fight back with whimsy, madness and wit.

"Across the street, someone dressed all in gray, as though wearing the tatters of the night itself, hove into view. He carried an old-fashioned red kerosene lantern, swinging it back and forth and shouting what well might have been ... All aboard! ... [Or] Bring out your dead, or searching for an honest man, or just seeking warmth.

"Surprising how we subtropical folk got used to the cold. ... An adaptable lot. I stood now, blanketless, chill, watching the plume of my breath stream out ..."

As viewed through 50-something Lew Griffin's eyes, this New Orleans bears scant kinship to the hokey Disneyland tourists in busloads come hoping to find.

Griffin is a former college teacher, a black man with roots in rural Arkansas, a collector and lover of classic jazz and poetry from Blake to Apollinaire to Whitman, and an inveterate quoter of the same, a man with a weakness for strong beautiful women and, less felicitously, strong whiskey. Like his creator, Griffin has been a novelist and social chronicler of his city—although (evidently quite unlike his creator) all his books are out of print and his life has been weighed down for years by a massive, melancholy writer's block.

Sallis (also a poet, biographer, translator and critic) plays openly with this alter-ego relationship—smitten characters lavishly praise the fictional writer's books, while Griffin riffs to us, his audience, on the consumerization of art, on the lineage of black writing in America ("distress signals in code"), on the way a novel, once finished, blurs in the writer's mind. He describes in detail (a mirror effect for this reader) his laborious approach to composing a book review. Sallis' and Griffin's agents even share the same first name.

Griffin happens also to be a former detective, which helps explain why certain folk in town still turn to him instinctively for help. In this, the fifth and purportedly final volume of a series, a number of disparate problems and puzzlers seem to converge on Griffin nearly simultaneously, ranging from an epidemic of fatal paralysis among park pigeons to a nameless, flayed and skinless corpse found in possession of Griffin's runaway son's wallet, to a series of anonymous, veiled threats against his adored goddaughter, who has just given birth.

For all their gravity, one senses that the troubles from outside afford Griffin some relief, some counterweight, to the long-festering troubles inside: the drinking, the depressive shadow connecting back to his mother and forward to his son, the gradual and triste dissolution of his current relationship, the pain of drifting: " ... condemned without pardon to our own lives and minds, those islands of self."

Does "Ghost of a Flea" boil down then to a first-rate genre novel, sub-category detective or suspense, as the jacket illustration of a bludgeoned lovely, along with other nods to convention, suggests? Certainly, in the sense that "Crime and Punishment," "The Castle" or "Pale Fire" might also qualify.

On the other hand, Griffin (along with Sallis) would rest uneasily on the same shelf as Ross MacDonald or even Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith (both alluded to in these pages, the latter misspelled "Patrician" in a shameless, good-humored nudge). The poet Sallis betrays himself on every page with an inordinate desire to capture a nuance of light, essence of cat or waver of a farewell. His prose style is witty, elliptical and heady with image and allusion; his bedrock underlying purpose is nothing less than an exploration of meaning and identity.

No mistaking: Regardless of labels, "Ghost of a Flea" bears the marks of a fierce and original writer working at full power. Though the journey with Griffin can be jolting and leave one longing for maps, there is the pleasure of his warm heart and irrepressibly playful mind—not to mention stops for some wonderful New Orleans cooking along the way.

And just as you near the end of Griffin's story and are preparing, reluctantly, to step off, the penultimate chapter explodes on the page, extending strands of light that tie together previously unconnected elements with stunning clarity. And still it's not over, for there is one more short chapter to go, only the length of an afterthought, and yet, with the power to rotate this whole fictional universe, leave it suspended upside-down long enough for the reader to race back to the beginning of the story and ride it again.

Questions flew back and forth on the Internet about Sallis' racial background, with some replies asserting that he was at least partly African-American. It wasn't until the author disclosed in interviews that he was white - or, if one prefers, "nonblack" - that such speculation was put to rest.

Some could use this disclosure to scold Sallis for indulging in literary minstrelsy. You won't hear any gripes from me. I wouldn't have misperceived Sallis' racial background in the first place if I hadn't found Lew Griffin such a persuasive rendering of an intellectually supple, physically tough and emotionally wounded black man struggling to negotiate security and self-respect for himself in late 20th century New Orleans. Throughout the series of books that began in 1992 with "The Long-Legged Fly," I recognized and often shared Griffin's resentments accumulated from a lifetime of being misjudged, ignored, abused or devalued because of his color. And color was only one of the things that separated Griffin from life's mainstream. There was also his propensity for hair-trigger violence, his inviolable generosity to life's losers, his cultivated enthusiasms for food, music and French literature. And, more than anything, there was his tendency to dive deep into a bottle of whiskey and not come up for air for months, even years.

You don't necessarily have to be a person of color in America to create, much less empathize with, such an anomalous, desperately marginalized person as Griffin. And Sallis, who imposed his own Arkansas upbringing, eclectic tastes and academic credentials onto the grid of Griffin's background, is one of those people who burns brightly along the margins. His prodigious literary output includes science fiction, poetry, a translation of a Raymond Queneau novel, a history of jazz guitar and a biography of Chester Himes. He is a romantic pluralist whose prose style is a lyrical dreamscape. He thinks widely and deeply, perhaps too deeply for aficionados of genre fiction. And it won't matter to the status buffoons who patrol the nation's literary hierarchy that Sallis has so conscientiously worked to stretch the philosophical and linguistic capacities of genre fiction. As far as the mandarins are concerned, genres are ghettos, and if that's how you're being marketed, then, just as generations of black people have been told, you stay in your place and don't complain when your head whacks the glass ceiling.

Besides, even minor confusion by readers over Sallis' identity is an appropriate by-product of novels in which the very nature of Identity is being scrutinized in a world where who and what you are can too often be taken for the same thing. From "Fly" through "Moth" (1993), "Black Hornet" (1996), "Eye of the Cricket" (1997) and "Bluebottle" (1999), the books make up an informal autobiography of Griffin, starting from his days as a skip tracer, bodyguard and freelance avenging angel in the 1960s through his failed love affairs with strong, sexy women, struggles with various forms of addiction and his self-reinvention as a cult writer and literary oracle. Murders, felonies and missing persons tumble through the books like loose items in a trunk. But these books weren't for fans of the well-made mystery novel. They were stalking bigger game, evoking more profound expressions of loss and recovery, implying that there were mysteries far more shattering and revealing than who did what to whom.

With "Ghost of a Flea," the sixth and last Griffin novel, Sallis brings things to closure and, with a stunning flourish, transfigures everything that came before into an ingenious, resonant whole. This is a boon and a blessing for those who have read any or all of the previous books. But for those who haven't, it may be less than satisfying unless they're inspired to read all the novels from the start. Which wouldn't be a bad way to fill anyone's empty hours.

"Flea" more or less picks things up from "Eye of the Cricket" (to my mind, the richest and darkest book in the cycle). Griffin, now in his 50s, has once again hit the wall, this time with a harsher thud. The good news is that Alouette, the drug-addicted daughter of a former love, has cleaned herself up and is working as a social worker. The bad news is that she's being stalked and threatened by someone she can't see in the shadows. And the news gets worse. Don Walsh, Griffin's best friend with the New Orleans police, has been shot while interrupting a robbery. And Griffin's son David, an elusive, almost phantom presence throughout the series, has disappeared again from Lew's life. Another girlfriend is drifting away. And, if all that weren't enough, Griffin has suffered a stroke that, while not entirely debilitating, makes Death seem close enough to breathe its chilly breath on Griffin's back.

Some of these shattering events are resolved, not all of them neatly enough for readers wishing for the rigor of old-fashioned hard-boiled detective fiction. But as the climax proves, this isn't playing by the traditional rules. Think Paul Auster more than Elmore Leonard, Charles Johnson more than Walter Mosley, Don DeLillo more than Carl Hiassen.

No more clues, no more hints, except that there's much to savor here, as with the other books, in the wiry, elliptical and stylishly allusive Sallis style, weaving references from Pascal, Joyce, Dylan, Himes, Whitman, Robert Johnson and other spirits into the sultry mix. The joys and sorrows of the examined life are present and accounted for. All right, one hint to send you on your way: an adage from Griffin that runs like a riff figure in all the books: "Memory is a poet, not a reporter."