James Sallis

Over the past five years, James Sallis has created three of the most acclaimed mysteries published in America, each of them featuring the complex John Turner_former cop, therapist, and ex-con, trying to escape his past, yet ever involved in the small community somewhere near Memphis where he has sought refuge. What You Have Left_concise, elegiac, memorable_collects these three classics in one paperback volume.

A los dieciséis años, Sarah Jane Pullman huyó de su hogar familiar antes de que, literalmente, se viniera abajo. Inició entonces una odisea hacia ninguna parte que le llevó a ser soldado tras una condena del juez, esposa desafortunada y cocinera en locales de dudosa categoria. Hasta que un dia, casi sin pretenderlo, se convierte en miembro del cuerpo de policia de Farr, un pequeño pueblo perdido en la inmensidad del sur estadounidense. No mucho despues, su jefe desaparece misteriosamente y es ella quien tiene que ponerse al frente de la comisaria e investigar lo que le ha sucedido. James Sallis tiene un modus operandi: no desperdiciar nunca una palabra. Su prosa es tan penetrante como la sal en la lengua de un bebedor de tequila. JEFF NOON James Sallis esta en todo lo alto, es uno de los mejores. Es muy posible que no exagere si hablo de Sallis del mismo modo que lo hago de Poe y Dostoievski. HARLAN ELLISON

Es medianoche. Está lloviendo. Una de las pocas luces del pasado oscuro y violento de Lew Griffin se ha extinguido. LaVerne Adams, su amante y amiga, ha muerto y la hija de su matrimonio con Horace Guidry, Aloutte, ha desaparecido en los sórdidos callejones de la droga, dejando atrás de sí un bebé adicto al crack y un misterio.

'Richly atmospheric, haunting, utterly compelling, the Lew Griffin novels are magnificent. James Sallis is an outstanding crime writer - an outstanding writer period' - Frances McDormand Latest volume in the hugely acclaimed Lew Griffin series.

James Sallis collection of five novellas.James Sallis is a superb writer - TimesJames SallisWorlds Edge presents five masterful novellasDayenu, Carriers, Settlers, Allotments, and Reconstructionexploring fractured societies, human resilience, and the fragile intersections of morality and survival. Salliss prose, as sharp as it is evocative, captures the nuances of his dystopian and near-future settings, resonating with themes of dislocation and identity. Widely regarded as a pivotal voice in contemporary US fiction, Salliss work aligns with literary giants such as Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, weaving the poetic bleakness of the former with the incisive character studies of the latter. These stories draw readers into a world both intimate and unyielding, where existential questions lurk beneath stark, elegant narratives.

WHAT YOU WERE FIGHTING FOR is a wonderful collection of short stories that provokes the mind with its weird and intriguing tales. We catch glimpses of worlds that are similar to our own, but always different enough to make you wonder and sit at the edge of your seat. Reading this collection you often have to work out what is truly happening as Sallis weaves his imaginative portrayals of idiosyncratic characters with all the subtlety of the mind that spawned the Lew Griffin novels, Willnot, Sarah Jane, and Drive.

In Cypress Grove, James Sallis introduced his compelling new protagonist - Turner. Susannah Yager of The Telegraph said: "Salliss deceptively easy style disguises the skill with which he has produced a satisfyingly complete portrait of a mans life" - Now Turner is back in Cripple Creek, a novel as atmospheric and eventful as anything Sallis has written.A year or so has passed since the events of Cypress Grove. Ex-policeman, ex-con, former therapist, Turner has become Deputy Sheriff in the small town within driving distance of Memphis, Tennessee, to which he had migrated in hopes of escaping his past. His life is mending as he and Val Bjorn grow closer. And then a young man, arrested on a routine traffic stop with more than $200,000 in his trunk, is forcibly sprung from jail after Sheriff Don Lee is brutally assaulted. Throwing caution aside, Turner goes in pursuit to Memphis, unleashing ghosts he thought he had left behind, and endangering all that matters to him now.

One of the very few lights from Lew Griffins dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, La Verne Adams is dead - and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers... leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery.Abandoning his former career for the safe respectability of teaching, Lew Griffin now spends his time in an old house in the garden district - determined to keep his distance from the lowlife temptations of the New Orleans night. But an inescapable obligation to an old friend is drawing the tormented black ex-p.i. to danger like a moth to a flame. And there will be no turning back when his history comes calling and the dying begins again.

In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Dr. Lamar Hale, the towns all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon and town conscience.At the same time, Bobby Lowndes - his military records missing, and followed by the FBI - mysteriously reappears in his hometown, at Hales door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the inexplicable vagaries of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hales world is truly upended.In his inimitable spare style, James Sallis conjures indelible characters and scenes that resonate long after they appear. You live with someone year after year, you think youve heard all the stories, Lamar observes, but you never have.

No.4 in the Lew Griffin SeriesLew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. And he is a man subject to all of the frailties to which we are heir. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son...and himself in the process.Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lews novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.Somewhere in the underbelly of the Crescent City, there are answers and more questions; there are threats and the promise of salvation; and there is a dangerous descent into the alcoholic haze that marked Griffins younger days as well as the possibility of rising from it, redeemed. Lew Griffins investigation is the heros journey, mythic and strengthening and thoroughly satisfying.

The third part of James Sallis sequence of novels featuring Lew GriffinIn a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer - by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooters sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffins side. The victim was white, Griffin is black - a reluctant young p.i. whose poets heart has already been hardened by amoral injustice and heavy drink. And though he had only just met his unfortunate companion, Griffin knows its up to him to find her killer - before a madman puts the final match to a volatile urban tinderbox.

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fictionOriginally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines.Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books.Were pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.

At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captors bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the worlds good people.One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatized.Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected interchange with the president herself.As brilliantly spare and compact as are all of James Salliss novels, Others of My Kind stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down.

No.5 in the Lew Griffin SeriesAs Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he has just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes to, Griffin discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the sniper? Somewhere in the Crescent City - and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it - theres an answer to the questions left by that shot that echoed through the night. But to get to it, Griffin is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid.