Interview with James Sallis

Over the past fifty years, while "mostly wandering about the house," James Sallis has published fifteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, poems and essays, three books of musicology, reams of criticism, a classic biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. Onetime editor of the London-based magazine New Worlds, Jim worked for many years as a reviewer for periodicals including the New York Times, L.A. Times and Washington Post; served for three years as books columnist for the Boston Globe; and maintains a books column at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He teaches advanced novel-writing at Phoenix College and plays out often with his band Three-Legged Dog, as sideman for other musicians, or solo. His novels include Drive, from which Nic Refn's award-winning film derived, the six Lew Griffin novels, Death Will Have Your Eyes, and The Killer Is Dying. Jim has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière.

Jonathan Lowe) You have wide interests, a cosmopolitan noir writer/musician with published poetry, fiction, essays, scripts, translations. Genres, too. Mystery, science fiction? Have you also had an array of odd jobs along the way?
James Sallis) No colorful author’s bio here, I’m afraid. Aside from teaching, off and on for twenty-five years or more, when necessary – when markets for writing faded away -- I worked as a critical-care respiratory therapist, mostly specializing in the care of newborns, some of them as little as a pound or so at birth.
JL) That’s not odd, it’s unexpectedly befitting in a way. Of course most writers write what they like, or they sidle up to producing the required novel every year in the same genre and formula, which keeps fans happy but can seem limiting, even boring. Medicine, liquor, or soda pop. What’s your preferred poison for fictional characters?
JS) I don’t seem to have a lot of choice.  Something begins it all, an image, a voice in my head, then before long the story and characters take over. I follow as best I can. Watch, pay attention, try to keep them in sight as they take sudden turns.
JL) Harlan Ellison once said science fiction is great because of its reach and range, although pop scifi is about blaster battles, the least interesting to me. You?
JS) Mimetic fiction strives to describe the world about us, this place of corners, tabletops and shadow, as seen by writer, narrator, characters. Arealist fiction – which may be fantasy, magic realism, surrealism, science fiction – steps back, shows mankind and existence from outside the frame, in far larger contexts.
JL) Where did Lew Griffin come from—experience? And what do you think of Lew Archer? 
JS) From years of reading classic American detective fiction – but especially from Chester Himes, imagining how again and again he reconfigured his life into his novels. As, in quite another manner, did Ross Macdonald. The Long-Legged Fly was intended as a stand-alone, a fairly standard detective story, but even then it had begun to shape-change into something else, and with each of the six novels took on greater substance and depth. It may be the only six-volume series with a surprise ending. The entire series, by the way, will soon be republished in uniform paperback by my new publishers, Soho Press.
JL) Have a friend in New Orleans, lived there a while. What makes the city attractive to you besides the jazz?
JS) It’s at once the least and most American of cities. Tradition, diversity, a pervasive sense of history, an equally pervasive sense of America’s double consciousness. The original gumbo city – parts of everything we are, the worst and best, forever on open display. 
JL) The father of VR, Jaron Lanier, plays a lot of instruments most people have never encountered. Why the attraction, and do you play jazz, fusion, or classical on guitar?
JS) Mostly I play old-time music: mountain music, string-band music from the 30s, blues, Cajun, vintage country. Traditional American musics, on banjo, mandolin, guitar, Dobro, Hawaiian guitar, fiddle, Weissenborn, steel guitar, harmonica. As with literature, I’m naturally drawn to music from the marginalized, the pushed-aside. 
JL) Do you like the word “stylish” as a description of you? How would you describe your writing?
JS) I’m working to get as much of the world as I possibly can in every word, sentence, phrase, scene and page, swimming upstream of cliche all the way, denying the gravity of narrative – of making everything fit -- that can pull one down.  I want my worlds messy, like the reflected, real one, and my language as stubbornly precise an evocation of that world as possible. 
JL) Loved Willnot, while narrator Kevin Kenerly on audio captures the character of Hale perfectly, and with all the allusions weaved in, too. Tone is perfect. Does your personal philosophy get filtered into the text, and do you prefer stand-alone novels, serials, or sequels? 
JS) I prefer novels that are self-contained and short, almost like short stories with lots of breathing room, things like L’Etranger, Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood, McGuane’s Panama, A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, surprise packages containing so much more than they seem to.
JL) Am thinking Last Night at the Lobster by Stuart O’Nan, now. Loved Drive, and sequel, and also the Ryan Gosling movie, which simply fired on all cylinders. People need characters like that, to mix things up. Complex and surprising, with an unknown history. What do you like about the movie, and did you see Spielberg’s first film Duel? 
JS) I think it’s a great movie, a brilliant reimagination of the novel in cinematic terms. As for Duel, I do recall seeing it many years ago – from a Richard Matheson story, by the way, and from his script.  Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” is one of the first stories I remember reading.
JL) Anyone you wish would play Lew Griffin? And what’s next for you?
JS) I can think of many fine actors out there now. There’s always been interest, and for several years options were held on the books, but thus far they wander the world alone. As I mentioned earlier, all six Lew Griffin novels—the “bug books”—are coming out in new editions from Soho, as is my new novel, Sarah Jane. A new, greatly expanded version of my book on original-paperback novels, Difficult Lives, is out from No Exit in the UK and due from Syndicate Books here in the US. This go-round, it’s coupled with another group of pieces on crime writers under the title Hitching Rides. New poetry and story collections.