Novelist Plays Private Eye in His Ragged New Orleans

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.

Kai Maristead, L.A. Times

The rather strange title fits in with all the other bug-related titles in Sallis's Lew Griffin series: we have had hornets, moths, crickets, long-legged flies and bluebottles. The last one, Bluebottle, was my only other foray into Griffin’s world and in that review I mentioned that it was a little difficult to quite get a fix on the black, New Orleans-based private detective / crime writer. Flea is more than likely the last in the series, and like the previous novel it takes a bit of the new reader’s energy to figure out who is who. One presumes Sallis wrote Flea believing that people don’t usually buy books out of sequence - and they don’t if they know it is a sequence, which is not clear here. A Griffin virgin therefore, picking up this book, has a bit of an uphill struggle – I did, and I’ve read one - but the end result is well worth the effort as this is a superb book: beautiful, lyrical, moving and oh-so-sad that I actually had tears in my eyes.

Somewhere Griffin’s lost the plot. He doesn’t detect any more and he doesn’t write any more and he barely raises a finger when a long-term lover walks out on him. Those thirsting for a puzzle or blazing guns and buckets of blood had best look elsewhere because the biggest mysteries here involve who is sending Lew’s goddaughter odd letters and e-mails and why all the pigeons in the park are dying. Then there is the body in the bed in the opening chapter that sends "the narrator" into the story (to say any more would be a spoiler). The true quest here is identity, an understanding of ‘self’: a theme that wove through Bluebottle and one presumes the other Griffin books. Lew seems incapable of understanding himself but has no trouble understanding others. For this reason he has loving, dedicated friends – even the ex-wife wants to declare peace – and shows kindness and consideration everywhere he goes; but can this smother some? Or is it his inability to come to terms with himself that drives loved ones, like his son, away? He is only in his fifties but acts like someone twenty years older who has given up. The answer may be in his alcoholic past or it just may well be that he is too darn well read. His life and thoughts seem driven by authors, by quotes, by books, begging the question, does Lew Griffin have an original emotional thought of his own? Flea becomes a roll call of writers, mostly well known but also the occasional forgotten one, such as Walter De La Mare.

Yes, even with some warm humour and witty dialogue, it is fairly depressing and maybe some under-thirties will think it sucks. To them I offer a grim warning: with thousands of baby-boomer authors heading for old age, books along the lines of Flea are going to be common. Hell, the BBs gave us a surfeit of coming-of-age nonsense, then the misery of hitting thirty/forty stuff, so expect a plethora of one-foot-in the grave tales (coming-of-grave, anyone?). If this is the case, Ghost of a Flea sets an impressive yardstick, I must say, and will certainly satisfy fans, but new readers may want to pick up one, two or even all of the Griffin novels to get the full benefit. M.G.S.

MGS, barcelona review

With this sixth Lew Griffin novel, Sallis brings to an end one of the genre's least conventional series (Bluebottle, 1999, etc.). Teacher, writer, boozer, lover, never more than part-time shamus. Griffin is first and foremost a philosopher, albeit a two-fisted one. Given sufficient provocation-often only an eyedropper's worth-he can level a bad guy as effectively as Spade, Marlowe, or hammer. But his real métier is thinking, thinking, relentlessly thinking, as opposed to Sherlockian sleuthing. This time out, for instance, the central crime is the poisoning of pigeons in a neighborhood park. Griffin, a black man trying to find a place in the white man's society, finds that his life has become by now a case of "too many lost battles." He's been beaten by cops, jailed , and banished to the streets, until melancholy suffuses his speech like a Louisiana miasma. "Everything got worse," he says. "Always. The world's single immutable law." The traditional mystery plot receives but a lick and a promise here: Griffin finds his long-lost son, loses him again, breaks up with still another woman, lumbers around the seamy side of New Orleans and, through day-trips back and forth in time, investigates himself-for the most part, as things turn out, unrewardingly.

The reader makes out a lot better. Though despair eventually triumphs, it does so over luminously evocative prose and a protagonist of great charm whose wit flashes defiantly, and whose refusal to surrender is as gallant as it is heartbreaking.

Kirkus Reviews

[Ghost of a Flea] so stretches the boundaries of the genre that it deserves its own literary subcategory - maybe something ungainly like "the philosophic-poetic mystery." James Sallis's Lew Griffin has distinguished itself by the moodiness of the New Orleans atmosphere, the jagged elegance of its narrative style and the expansiveness of its anti-hero's literary citations. Who else in crime fiction quotes such relatively dim luminaries as George Gissing and Ambrose Bierce? And who else in crime fiction voices such epiphanies as this: "I seem never to learn that standing still doesn't work. There you are with a smile on your face, they won't notice me, and all the while the things you fear keep moving towards you, their smiles a violent travesty of your own."

Lew Griffin has been, by turns, a policeman, teacher and novelist; in Ghost of A Flea, the fifth and decidedly final novel of the series, he's just a worn-out older man, baffled by the erratic behavior of his adult son, as well as lesser mysteries like the threatening letters received by a friend and a violent assault on a policeman colleague. Dead men don't tell tales, or so the saying goes. But the tale told by this one is extraordinary.

The Washington Post

"Drop by drop at the heart, the pain of the pain remembered comes again," wrote Aeschylus. In a story loosely based on "Agamemnon," James Sallis searches the streets of New Orleans as he brings his noir series about Lew Griffin, African-American, small-time private investigator in search of his identity, to a close in Ghost of A Flea, the sixth novel in a journey that began with The Long-Legged Fly in 1992. The books are set in just-historical time, beginning in 1964, and they move episodically, almost shambolic in their apparent lack of organization, with great cunning and remarkable imagery, to an ending: not a conclusion but a place to stop. Sallis has written a biography of the black American writer Chester Himes, short stories, poems, and much else, and reviewers have compared him to Raymond Chandler, James Lee Burke, and Paul Auster, though only the Auster comparison stands up. Sallis's publisher, has reissued The Long Legged Fly in paperback together with Ghost of a Flea, and read together, even without the four novels between, they are mesmerizing. Sallis has found a way to do what many genre authors who have tied themselves to a series figure have been unable to do: bring it all to an end.

Boston Globe

I was three and a half books into James Sallis' extraordinary sextet of novels featuring African-American detective-novelist-scholar Lew Griffin before I found out that Sallis wasn't - as I'd assumed all along - Black Like Me. Apparently I wasn't alone in this misapprehension.

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."

Gene Seymour, newsday.com