No Exit Press - The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis

The American crime writer James Sallis has been earmarked for some mainstream attention this year, courtesy of the Hollywood adaptation of his novel Drive (2005), much applauded at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Coinciding with the release of the film this month comes The Killer is Dying, a sparse, noir tale of a slowly dying hitman.

Set in Phoenix, Arizona, Sallis’s latest novel focuses on three very different characters. Christian, a Vietnam war veteran turned hit man, fighting illness to pull of one last hit; a middle-aged homicide detective, Dale Sayles, whose wife is slowly dying of cancer; and Jimmie Kostof, a teenager abandoned by his parents to a drab life of survival in his suburban home.

Seemingly unconnected, the characters’ lives chaotically intersect. Someone tries to murder Christian’s target – an innocuous accountant – sending him of on a search for the interloper. Sayles and his partner Graves are investigating the attempted killing, which brings them into contact with both the hit man and his rival. Stranger and less effective is the Jimmie connection: as the drama slowly unfolds, it emerges that he dreams the killer’s dreams. Resolutions are implied, the plot propelled by spare prose more suggestive than revelatory. We learn that the three characters have in common the essential human bond of loss. ‘People leave us’, Jimmie tells himself. ‘All our lives are a going-away.’

Death, decay, alienation – Sallis’s minimalist meditations find an echo in the city of Phoenix, an alien place in inhospitable territory. Far removed from the classic crime novels of Raymond Chandler or Chester Himes – whose influence Sallis has written about – The Killer is Dying is less crime-solving than existential musing. While carefully crafted, restrained and eloquent, Sallis’s latest is more hallucinatory than suspenseful, driven by the realization of loss rather than the fulfilment of closure habitual to the genre.

Jacques Testard, Times Literary Supplement

James Sallis is without doubt the most underrated novelist currently working in America. His new novel is a masterclass in writing. It's a tale of three individuals who never meet but spend the whole book chasing each other's tails.Sepuchral prose and deep empathetic nuance mark this one out as a classic. It's a novel about dying and suffering and the grace we manage to wring out of life's failures.

Catholic Herald

Sallis’s literate, intelligent crime novel provides a dark picture of life. It follows three haracters who are inextricably linked by the murder of a nondescript man. Christian was hired to kill the man, but, before he can, another killer steps in and shoots him. As Christian tries to find the killer, a burnt-out detective, Sayles, is searching for Christian while also trying to come to terms with his wife’s fatal illness. Meanwhile, a young boy abandoned by his parents is living alone and attempting to make sense of his strange dreams. Taut and evocative, this beautifully written story is slow to unfold but haunting in its effect.

Jeff Popple, Sunday Canberra Times

THE KILLER IS DYING
(No Exit Press, £7.99)

At various times he’s been a poet, a translator, a musician and a respiratory therapist. Perhaps most notably, though, over the past 20 years James Sallis has turned crime writing into a high art. With the much feted film version of his novel 'Drive' currently in cinemas and his profile riding high, Sallis releases 'The Killer Is Dying' – a dazzling, haunting work that intertwines the tales of three characters who never actually meet, but who are nevertheless inextricably linked.

Was the complex structure of The Killer Is Dying an attempt to give yourself a new challenge, to keep yourself interested?

Among the many perils of creative work is the ease with which one may become, after a time, professionalised. One knows how to do things. Among the delights is that, if you’re really working at it, you never get where you wish to be: you’re forever reaching. Each page I write, each sentence, is in the effort to keep myself – and the reader! – interested, to pose new challenges. Writing is problem solving. Writing is pattern making. If you don’t create new problems for yourself, where’s the fun?

Has the making of the Drive film proved to be a distraction – or even an inspiration – to you while you were writing 'The Killer Is Dying'?

It’s only as the film neared release that its world began to impinge upon mine, with requests for interviews and the like. Up to that point the entire affair was in the hands of plucky chance and of Marc Platt Productions. I’d built the diving board everyone jumped off – that was all.

Do you think that your interests in poetry and music feed into the rhythms of your writing?

Absolutely. Words have a sensuous surface, a physical presence, they sing in certain ways when turned into the wind. And our apprehension of language is mightily influenced by the cadences in which that language is delivered, the slowly paced, headlong rushes, silences. Language is about information – but there are all kinds of information, and much of it, in writing as in life, is subtle. We reach for that.

You’re based in Arizona, but you lived in London during the late 1960s and you’ve suggested that you regret not moving back at a later date. Can you still imagine living in the UK?

I was there helping edit New Worlds magazine with Mike Moorcock – formative years for me. I can imagine living anywhere, that tree house I built when I was ten, for instance, because that’s what I do, I imagine myself into other lives. But these days, it’s difficult to get me out of the house, or some days even out of this room – just ask my wife, Karyn. Or Grace the hungry cat.

You’ve said that you were attracted to crime writing back in the 1980s because it was so very vibrant at the time. Do you think that’s still the case now?

Hmmm. James Lee Burke, Danny Woodrell, Craig McDonald, Ken Bruen, John Harvey, Dennis Lehane, Jonathan Lethem, Ian Rankin, George Pelecanos… How much space do we have? Yes.

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