From the Bookshelf of Play Book Tag…
Find A Copy At
Group Discussions About This Book
No group discussions for this book yet.
What Members Thought
“Life is cruel, old friend, n’est-ce pas?”
“And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.”
“ Rien. ”
At the intersection of Gumshoe Avenue and Tin Pan Alley sits elderly detective Lew Griffin, drowning his despair in a glass of non-alcoholic beer while he listens to Son House singing Dead Letter Blues
He has just received news that his only son is dead.
The man has a right to sing the blues, if anyone can. His own life is slipping out of his grasp, all his friends and lovers are just “Life is cruel, old friend, n’est-ce pas?”
“And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.”
“ Rien. ”
At the intersection of Gumshoe Avenue and Tin Pan Alley sits elderly detective Lew Griffin, drowning his despair in a glass of non-alcoholic beer while he listens to Son House singing Dead Letter Blues
He has just received news that his only son is dead.
The man has a right to sing the blues, if anyone can. His own life is slipping out of his grasp, all his friends and lovers are just memories, he is alone in an old and decrepit house and wonders what’s the point of it all?
Gone away as had David, my own son. Into the darkness that surrounds us all.
But Lew Griffin is something more than just a guy with a talent for finding missing people. He is, like his creator James Sallis, a teacher of literature, a cartographer of the decay of civilization, a musician, a poet and a published author of crime novels.
He is even familiar with the name Enrique Anderson Imbert, whom I never heard of despite being a huge fan of the South American literary scene. Imbert provides the epigraph and the title of this latest in the Lew Griffin series:
Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in the eyes of the cricket ...
Lewis is pulled back into the missing persons game, more or less against his will, and he eventually finds himself working three cases at the same time, plus a request from his neighborhood watch to help stop a wave of street muggings and theft by a gang of teenagers on bicycles. The first case also brings one of the most hilarious pieces of black humour in this novel that starts with such a heavy dose of anxiety:
He whistled a few notes and said, “You’re an unreconstructed cynic, Griffin.”
“I try.”
“A sad and unhappy man.”
“Indisputably.”
“Okay, so I’m afraid I have further bad news for you,” Richard said. “You ready for it?”
“I have a choice?”
“You’re missing.”
“I’m what?”
So Lew Griffin must find himself. How is this for an ironic twist on the classic noir opening gambit and for an existential metafiction challenge?
There is an explanation here, and it’s a doozy: a homeless man is brought to the emergency room after a savage beating that leaves him bleeding and unconscious. He only carries in his pocket a heavily annotated and well-thumbed copy of a long out of print first novel. When he eventually wakes up, the tramp claims he is the author, a guy named Lew Griffin.
Do you want to go deeper down this metafictional rabbit hole? Later in the novel, a penpal of Lew is unexpectedly released from a life prison sentence and comes to visit. One thing leading to another, this Zeke, who used to publish his prison newsletter, decides to write a novel and asks his host:
Calling the guy in my book lew griffin for now. That okay?
Just who is writing the damn novel? Can anybody point him out to me? Will the real Slim Shady Lew Griffin stand up and raise his hand?
>>><<<>>><<<
“Lew, you ever gonna learn to say no?”
“No.”
The second case comes knocking on Lewis’ door in the form of a black teenager, the sole provider for his impoverished family, who needs to find his missing younger brother, who might have got involved with some really dangerous people. There’s no money in the case, but Griffin is moved by the teenager’s pain. This boy is called Sam Delany and you don’t have to be a literary SF geek like me to spot the homage to another master storyteller.
The third case is personal. A quest to find out the whereabouts of his missing son David, whose absence might be self-imposed and whose death might have been misreported. David disappeared twenty years ago after giving up a good job in France. Lew believes he is the person who called twice on the telephone without saying any word and that David is finally trying to find his way back home.
>>><<<>>><<<
The city is New Orleans, for those readers who are unfamiliar with the series. You don’t need to be familiar with the previous books. Sallis uses an unconventional and unique approach to time that can be understood by paying a little attention to the lectures his MC gives at the university of Louisiana: Lew Griffin is well acquainted with all the classics of the noir genre, quoting extensively from Chandler and Hammett, but in his author and critic persona he is the most French of American auteurs, probably understandable for a native of New Orleans who holds courses on Queneau, Camus, Maurois et all.
Imagine a blend of James Joyce and Marcel Proust walking down the mean streets of night time Old Quarter and considering the nature of memory and existence. There are of course some pitfalls that the named authors didn’t have to deal with, like having the shit kicked out of you by three young thugs who didn’t like Lew’s face and his questions.
... this sort of thing never happened to Proust, never sullied his remembrances. Give me a madeleine any day.
Maybe the things that happen to us are things we make happen, things we somehow attract.
Maybe all failures are failures of will.
Maybe I ought to stop getting my butt kicked.
That’s the second good laugh I got from this novel’s unconventional approach. It put me in a much better mood when it came to switch from the hard-boiled Lew to his teacher and commentator persona:
The sadness, the dark, in Dublin late at night, Joyce wrote, is swingeing. People who do not want to go home, who will never go home, who have not got a home, lurch and stagger in the gloom, moths without a candle.
These are the images that remain with me: an anxious cricket, a moth without a candle, wet umbrellas drying in a stand like firearms at rest or like trees growing upside down - the metaphor where I expected a fistfight, the poem where I expected the wisecrack.
All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory’s always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.
It doesn’t get much better than this for me. I have been reading crime novels for about five decades by now and I still think that literary critics are wrong to label them escapism or commercial entertainment. In the right hands, these stories transcend artificial genre restrictions and explore human nature with as much sharpness and insight as many a so-called high-brow literary prize winner. James Sallis belongs in the same category with names like Pynchon, Simenon, de Lillo, Eco, Greene – authors who ignored artificial borders and restrictions in order to freely explore all the possibilities and implications of their chosen theme.
“If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.”
The quote is used by Lew Griffin in a class about James Joyce, it is attributed to critic and biographer Richard Ellman, and is one of the keys we are offered here to unlock the purpose and style of the story. Which brings me to the second part of my review, the one that I enjoyed even more than the actual details of the three investigations. Here is Lew Griffin in internal monologue mode, stream-of-conscience confessional mode and writing journal mode, describing how his character is actually writing the novel we hold in our hands:
That’s how life happens: angles, sharp turns, snags. Never what we expect. Never the stories we tell ourselves ahead of time. So we’re always having to make up new ones.
We live metaphorically, striving always to match our lives to images we’ve accepted or imagined for them – family man, middle American, true believer, gangster – contriving these containers, a succession of them, that preserve us, define us, that keep us from spilling out and give us shape, but rarely fit.
Expand the concept of containers to literary genres and you begin to understand the author’s need to break free of constraints:
I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing – memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn’t care.
If indeed there’s something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.
All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when finally we peel off all the masks there’s nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves and others.
We are all fiction. We rewrite ourselves every day, just as Lew Griffin does, hopefully experiencing less kicks in the face or personal loss. Hopefully we learn something from the exercise of self examination and we become better human beings.
Individually, collectively, we struggle to rise out of the slough of ourselves, strive upwards (like a man trapped in water beneath ice, swimming up to the air pocket just under, where at least he can breathe) towards something better, something more, then we truly are. That’s the meaning of grace given us. But few of us individually, and seldom does the collective, manage it.
For me, this is a reminder of Melville [ “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” ]
For James Sallis, it is an excuse to revisit Dylan Thomas and break our hearts all over again:
Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fisherman lost on the land.
He stands alone at the door of his home,
With the long-legged heart in his hand.
Loneliness and grief are his constant companions. Sleep refuses to offer its solace, and when it comes it throws a literary man life Griffin right into a suprarealist nightmare:
We turn to one another. His black mask above a white tuxedo. My own white mask over a dress of black silk. Beneath these unearthly buzzing streetlights. Lewis’s lips move without sound. I cannot make out what he is saying. I reach for him, my hand huge as a sky. His face recedes from me, like a train pulling slowly away.
“In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you,”
Before any kind of resolution, before he finds his three missing persons, Lew Griffin must once again descend all the nine circles of hell and lose himself in order to be found in his turn. It’s a harrowing experience that comes very close to ending the whole series in either madness or the death of the main character. But maybe this is the only way to let go of the ghosts of the past and start the whole miserable journey anew.
As always we go on living our lives forward, attempting to understand them backwards.
Somehow we go on being given new chances.
This is a detective novel, a letter to an old friend, an existentialist essay, a social study, a slightly soiled poem to a city and its people, a humanist manifesto, an autobiography and more ... and all of it comes in under 200 pages. What other writer you know who can pull such a magic rabbit out of his hat?
What I did here, in this extraordinary thing sitting beside me, is this: I quit trying. Quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures of my life into fiction. To tuck people I’ve loved safely away in the corners of novels. Quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.
This extraordinary thing is my biography.
And I’ve no idea what to do with it, no idea at all.
We grow old, we often lose the people that are important in our lives and our sense of purpose. Still this is no reason to give up. Lew Griffin, like the Terminator, will be back.
I sip the tea. Supposed to stay off caffeine. Supposed to stay off damn near everything. As though I’d had enough of it. I haven’t. Haven’t had enough of anything yet, however long and hard the siege had been. Some nights I sit on the bench outside and I’m rendered mute, absolutely mute, by the touch of the wind on my face, by lights inside the house, how beautiful the world can be.
>>><<<>>><<<
I left out of my comments Lew Griffin the editorialist, social activist campaigner and racial struggle chronicler. He wrote the next passage in 1997 or so, but his words are still painfully accurate for 2025:
I thought again how, because of poverty, polarity and crime, we’ve become a nation without real cities – one, instead, of fenced villages shoved up against one another – and how because we have no cities, because increasingly we’re afraid to venture out and engage the world and have in our playpens toys like TVs and on-line computers that we believe connect us but instead render us ever more apart, ever more distracted and discrete, we’ve become a nation without culture.
I suspect, of course, in my liberal heart of hearts, that it’s all intimately connected. That losing sense of community and culture irrevocably erodes the soul. ...more
“And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.”
“ Rien. ”
At the intersection of Gumshoe Avenue and Tin Pan Alley sits elderly detective Lew Griffin, drowning his despair in a glass of non-alcoholic beer while he listens to Son House singing Dead Letter Blues
He has just received news that his only son is dead.
The man has a right to sing the blues, if anyone can. His own life is slipping out of his grasp, all his friends and lovers are just “Life is cruel, old friend, n’est-ce pas?”
“And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.”
“ Rien. ”
At the intersection of Gumshoe Avenue and Tin Pan Alley sits elderly detective Lew Griffin, drowning his despair in a glass of non-alcoholic beer while he listens to Son House singing Dead Letter Blues
He has just received news that his only son is dead.
The man has a right to sing the blues, if anyone can. His own life is slipping out of his grasp, all his friends and lovers are just memories, he is alone in an old and decrepit house and wonders what’s the point of it all?
Gone away as had David, my own son. Into the darkness that surrounds us all.
But Lew Griffin is something more than just a guy with a talent for finding missing people. He is, like his creator James Sallis, a teacher of literature, a cartographer of the decay of civilization, a musician, a poet and a published author of crime novels.
He is even familiar with the name Enrique Anderson Imbert, whom I never heard of despite being a huge fan of the South American literary scene. Imbert provides the epigraph and the title of this latest in the Lew Griffin series:
Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in the eyes of the cricket ...
Lewis is pulled back into the missing persons game, more or less against his will, and he eventually finds himself working three cases at the same time, plus a request from his neighborhood watch to help stop a wave of street muggings and theft by a gang of teenagers on bicycles. The first case also brings one of the most hilarious pieces of black humour in this novel that starts with such a heavy dose of anxiety:
He whistled a few notes and said, “You’re an unreconstructed cynic, Griffin.”
“I try.”
“A sad and unhappy man.”
“Indisputably.”
“Okay, so I’m afraid I have further bad news for you,” Richard said. “You ready for it?”
“I have a choice?”
“You’re missing.”
“I’m what?”
So Lew Griffin must find himself. How is this for an ironic twist on the classic noir opening gambit and for an existential metafiction challenge?
There is an explanation here, and it’s a doozy: a homeless man is brought to the emergency room after a savage beating that leaves him bleeding and unconscious. He only carries in his pocket a heavily annotated and well-thumbed copy of a long out of print first novel. When he eventually wakes up, the tramp claims he is the author, a guy named Lew Griffin.
Do you want to go deeper down this metafictional rabbit hole? Later in the novel, a penpal of Lew is unexpectedly released from a life prison sentence and comes to visit. One thing leading to another, this Zeke, who used to publish his prison newsletter, decides to write a novel and asks his host:
Calling the guy in my book lew griffin for now. That okay?
Just who is writing the damn novel? Can anybody point him out to me? Will the real
>>><<<>>><<<
“Lew, you ever gonna learn to say no?”
“No.”
The second case comes knocking on Lewis’ door in the form of a black teenager, the sole provider for his impoverished family, who needs to find his missing younger brother, who might have got involved with some really dangerous people. There’s no money in the case, but Griffin is moved by the teenager’s pain. This boy is called Sam Delany and you don’t have to be a literary SF geek like me to spot the homage to another master storyteller.
The third case is personal. A quest to find out the whereabouts of his missing son David, whose absence might be self-imposed and whose death might have been misreported. David disappeared twenty years ago after giving up a good job in France. Lew believes he is the person who called twice on the telephone without saying any word and that David is finally trying to find his way back home.
>>><<<>>><<<
The city is New Orleans, for those readers who are unfamiliar with the series. You don’t need to be familiar with the previous books. Sallis uses an unconventional and unique approach to time that can be understood by paying a little attention to the lectures his MC gives at the university of Louisiana: Lew Griffin is well acquainted with all the classics of the noir genre, quoting extensively from Chandler and Hammett, but in his author and critic persona he is the most French of American auteurs, probably understandable for a native of New Orleans who holds courses on Queneau, Camus, Maurois et all.
Imagine a blend of James Joyce and Marcel Proust walking down the mean streets of night time Old Quarter and considering the nature of memory and existence. There are of course some pitfalls that the named authors didn’t have to deal with, like having the shit kicked out of you by three young thugs who didn’t like Lew’s face and his questions.
... this sort of thing never happened to Proust, never sullied his remembrances. Give me a madeleine any day.
Maybe the things that happen to us are things we make happen, things we somehow attract.
Maybe all failures are failures of will.
Maybe I ought to stop getting my butt kicked.
That’s the second good laugh I got from this novel’s unconventional approach. It put me in a much better mood when it came to switch from the hard-boiled Lew to his teacher and commentator persona:
The sadness, the dark, in Dublin late at night, Joyce wrote, is swingeing. People who do not want to go home, who will never go home, who have not got a home, lurch and stagger in the gloom, moths without a candle.
These are the images that remain with me: an anxious cricket, a moth without a candle, wet umbrellas drying in a stand like firearms at rest or like trees growing upside down - the metaphor where I expected a fistfight, the poem where I expected the wisecrack.
All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory’s always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.
It doesn’t get much better than this for me. I have been reading crime novels for about five decades by now and I still think that literary critics are wrong to label them escapism or commercial entertainment. In the right hands, these stories transcend artificial genre restrictions and explore human nature with as much sharpness and insight as many a so-called high-brow literary prize winner. James Sallis belongs in the same category with names like Pynchon, Simenon, de Lillo, Eco, Greene – authors who ignored artificial borders and restrictions in order to freely explore all the possibilities and implications of their chosen theme.
“If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.”
The quote is used by Lew Griffin in a class about James Joyce, it is attributed to critic and biographer Richard Ellman, and is one of the keys we are offered here to unlock the purpose and style of the story. Which brings me to the second part of my review, the one that I enjoyed even more than the actual details of the three investigations. Here is Lew Griffin in internal monologue mode, stream-of-conscience confessional mode and writing journal mode, describing how his character is actually writing the novel we hold in our hands:
That’s how life happens: angles, sharp turns, snags. Never what we expect. Never the stories we tell ourselves ahead of time. So we’re always having to make up new ones.
We live metaphorically, striving always to match our lives to images we’ve accepted or imagined for them – family man, middle American, true believer, gangster – contriving these containers, a succession of them, that preserve us, define us, that keep us from spilling out and give us shape, but rarely fit.
Expand the concept of containers to literary genres and you begin to understand the author’s need to break free of constraints:
I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing – memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn’t care.
If indeed there’s something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.
All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when finally we peel off all the masks there’s nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves and others.
We are all fiction. We rewrite ourselves every day, just as Lew Griffin does, hopefully experiencing less kicks in the face or personal loss. Hopefully we learn something from the exercise of self examination and we become better human beings.
Individually, collectively, we struggle to rise out of the slough of ourselves, strive upwards (like a man trapped in water beneath ice, swimming up to the air pocket just under, where at least he can breathe) towards something better, something more, then we truly are. That’s the meaning of grace given us. But few of us individually, and seldom does the collective, manage it.
For me, this is a reminder of Melville [ “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” ]
For James Sallis, it is an excuse to revisit Dylan Thomas and break our hearts all over again:
Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fisherman lost on the land.
He stands alone at the door of his home,
With the long-legged heart in his hand.
Loneliness and grief are his constant companions. Sleep refuses to offer its solace, and when it comes it throws a literary man life Griffin right into a suprarealist nightmare:
We turn to one another. His black mask above a white tuxedo. My own white mask over a dress of black silk. Beneath these unearthly buzzing streetlights. Lewis’s lips move without sound. I cannot make out what he is saying. I reach for him, my hand huge as a sky. His face recedes from me, like a train pulling slowly away.
“In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you,”
Before any kind of resolution, before he finds his three missing persons, Lew Griffin must once again descend all the nine circles of hell and lose himself in order to be found in his turn. It’s a harrowing experience that comes very close to ending the whole series in either madness or the death of the main character. But maybe this is the only way to let go of the ghosts of the past and start the whole miserable journey anew.
As always we go on living our lives forward, attempting to understand them backwards.
Somehow we go on being given new chances.
This is a detective novel, a letter to an old friend, an existentialist essay, a social study, a slightly soiled poem to a city and its people, a humanist manifesto, an autobiography and more ... and all of it comes in under 200 pages. What other writer you know who can pull such a magic rabbit out of his hat?
What I did here, in this extraordinary thing sitting beside me, is this: I quit trying. Quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures of my life into fiction. To tuck people I’ve loved safely away in the corners of novels. Quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.
This extraordinary thing is my biography.
And I’ve no idea what to do with it, no idea at all.
We grow old, we often lose the people that are important in our lives and our sense of purpose. Still this is no reason to give up. Lew Griffin, like the Terminator, will be back.
I sip the tea. Supposed to stay off caffeine. Supposed to stay off damn near everything. As though I’d had enough of it. I haven’t. Haven’t had enough of anything yet, however long and hard the siege had been. Some nights I sit on the bench outside and I’m rendered mute, absolutely mute, by the touch of the wind on my face, by lights inside the house, how beautiful the world can be.
>>><<<>>><<<
I left out of my comments Lew Griffin the editorialist, social activist campaigner and racial struggle chronicler. He wrote the next passage in 1997 or so, but his words are still painfully accurate for 2025:
I thought again how, because of poverty, polarity and crime, we’ve become a nation without real cities – one, instead, of fenced villages shoved up against one another – and how because we have no cities, because increasingly we’re afraid to venture out and engage the world and have in our playpens toys like TVs and on-line computers that we believe connect us but instead render us ever more apart, ever more distracted and discrete, we’ve become a nation without culture.
I suspect, of course, in my liberal heart of hearts, that it’s all intimately connected. That losing sense of community and culture irrevocably erodes the soul. ...more
17 likes · Like
· see review
